hovered over the surface of the waters

Note below in bold text...something was pointed out to me by a reader.

Random thought (I watched the BBC's very well-animated Walking with Dinosaurs series last night and yesterday):

The "creationists" in the US who are fighting the teaching of evolution in schools are totally missing the point. They're making the same bloody mistake as hardline anti-religion evolutionists like Dawkins: mistaking evolution for an ideology.

It's a fantastic tool, both for figuring out how life got to be the way it is, understanding how it works, and possibly even for developing software and other technologies. But no more. Very few would accept it as a system for telling us how we should live in relation to one another and to our inner selves (social Darwinism = strength is power = fascism), therefore it is not an ideology. By treating it as one in their fight, creationists are giving it more power than it deserves and more credibility to the anti-religion groups who use it as a tool to "disprove" God.

(EDIT: It has been pointed out to me that I mis-phrased part of the preceding paragraph in a way that could be read as saying that Dawkins et al. are fascists. I didn't mean that, and the person who pointed it out (you know who you are...fanboy) says that Darwin's Rottweiler "says that if you want to build a kinder, gentler society, you have to know that biology's against you." My point was that even the vast majority of people who are trying to use evolution as an ideological pillar recognize that it's far from being a comprehensive one, and on some points downright viscerally unacceptable.)

Another point they're missing is that our mission on earth is not to insist upon the literal truth of the first chapter of Genesis (just because I don't think it's to be taken literally doesn't mean I don't think it's a beautiful illustration of how God creates and sustains the world, btw). Our mission is to "go and make disciples of all nations...teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you."

Not to "go and make fools of yourself" by ignoring decades and centuries of careful research and thought. Fighting the wrong enemy creates an atmosphere of fear and antagonism that totally goes against the idea that we follow a God of love. Part of this story was really disturbing. (Not available online to non-subscribers...dang.) The lady* who made the front-page discovery of soft tissue in a T. rex bone a while ago happens to be a Christian. As a result, she came under attack by creationists for not using the discovery to support the idea that the Earth is only a few thousand years old. She wisely told them that if their attacks had been the only thing she knew about Christianity, she'd run away.

There is so much more work out there that Christians should be doing yet there's people wasting time, money, and most importantly, faith, on this. So frus.

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I think the "intelligent design" movement, although based on erroneous ideas, is somewhat encouraging in that it represents a shift of the hardcore religious "conservatives"** away from insisting on the model of God making the world as if out of Plasticine.

(Francis Bacon on the subject:

"And as for the conceit that too much knowledge should incline a man to atheism, and that the ignorance of second causes should make a more devout dependence upon God, which is the first cause; first, it is good to ask the question which Job asked of his friends: "Will you lie for God, as one man will lie for another, to gratify him?" For certain it is that God worketh nothing in Nature but by second causes; and if they would have it otherwise believed, it is mere imposture, as it were in favour towards God, and nothing else but to offer to the Author of truth the unclean sacrifice of a
lie."

Here's the book it came from.)

I think that from this point, they'll move to a further compromise position of saying that yes, life arose and developed by natural selection, but the selection process was supernaturally manipulated at points. And eventually moving from there, even the most rigid will eventually be able to accept the description of life as written by science.

And then maybe we'll finally be able to appreciate all the wonders of life on earth. In the middle ages, monks wrote bestiaries of fantastic animals, making allegories of theological concepts with them. They were frequently mistaken - for instance, the pelican was supposed to represent Jesus because it stabbed itself in the breast to feed its young with the blood - although creative and beautifully illustrated. But I think that this is one important thing that the religion vs. science conflict has taken away from us is the ability to see the natural and the supernatural worlds as reflections of each other. It's all there - birth, death, friendship, deception, love, conflict, war and peace, cruelty, mercy, sacrifice.

*She's also the one who discovered what looked like medullary bone - stores calcium for eggshells - in a T. rex leg, thus providing a potential way to tell mummy dino from daddy dino.
**Note I'm placing all American terminology in quotation marks because I find it annoying that these things have become political buzzwords to the point that they don't mean the dictionary definition any more so you can't use them sensibly.