Hopewit

  For many Christian believers, accepting the factuality of an evolutionary process   in the shaping of the human species has been “a bridge too far.” For them, too much depends on the creationist view of origins to allow for compromise on the Genesis account. They tend to say that if the Genesis creation account is untrustworthy, then how can the rest of the Old Testament/Bible be trusted?                A majority of Christians, I think, have settled on a kind of compromise: two accounts of the origins of living species, both with merit and both intriguing, but no urgency for them personally to pick one over the other. If this is you, you can probably sing with gusto, “This is my Father’s world, and to my listening ears, all nature sings and ‘round me rings the music of the spheres,” and then go back to work at carbon-dating and classifying fossils that pre-date Abrahamic religions’ creation accounts by ...

  Our balcony fig-leaf; just in case. In an essay I wrote once upon a time, I used an illustration meant to focus on the nature of believing as an act of choice … or as gift.                Two seven-year-olds are walking home from school when one, Devon, says to the other, Earl, “What is Santa going to bring you for Christmas?”                “I don’t believe in Santa Clause,” Earl says.                “Why not?”                “I can’t. We don’t have a chimney,” Earl replies, and leaves poor Devon to contemplate an existential question that lies well beyond his reach.                An adult equivalent might take place in a ...