"Theistic evolution": Facing the facts as if facts mattered

In Are Religious Liberals Useful Idiots or Just Idiots?, Darwinists Debate, David Klinghoffer writes, at BeliefNet:

Today Daily Kos blogger Erratic Synapse lashes Discover Magazine blogger Chris Mooney and Barbara Forrest, author of Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design. Their offense? Calling for "civility" toward Darwin-believing religious moderates. Mooney had previously attacked biologist Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution Is True, who urges a No More Mr. Nice Guy stance. Writes Coyne: "Professional societies like the National Academy of Sciences...have concluded that to make evolution palatable to Americans, you must show that it is not only consistent with religion, but also no threat to it." Coyne is particularly annoyed by the folks at the Darwin-defending but religion-appeasing National Center for Science Education, for "compromising the very science they aspire to defend."

In the 2008 documentary Expelled, atheist Richard Dawkins scathingly makes a similar point about the NCSE and its ilk. "There's a kind of science defense lobby or an evolution defense lobby, in particular," Dawkins says. "They are mostly atheists, but they are wanting to -- desperately wanting -- to be friendly to mainstream, sensible religious people. And the way you do that is to tell them that there's no incompatibility between science and religion."

Of course, everyone knows this is true. Darwinism is basically about atheism; its frantic promotion is about providing atheism with a creation story, which any religious agenda must have.

I had not thought much about Darwinism until I started to research By Design or by Chance? in 2002, and then I was astonished to discover the number of people who had lost their contact with traditional religion explicitly on that account.

People deserve to know this, especially when Darwinism is fronted to the school system as "just another theory in science." It never has been and never will be, and the day it is, it will be quietly relegated to the shelf as just another theory about how life forms come to look like they do, along with neoteny and Lamarckism.

As for the religious liberals, it seems to me that they have just plain lost their way. There was a time when religious liberalism accommodated traditional religions to the facts of globalization, technical change, and so forth. But today, it seems primarily about accommodating to atheistic materialism in stages rather than all at once, which is why liberal church membership is tanking rapidly.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy: