On Creationism

I am not atheist.  I am a cradle Episcopalian and while I waver in my faith from time to time, there is no doubt in my mind that God created the heavens and the earth.  I am thankful, among other things, to have been raised in a faith tradition that counts Reason as one of the pillars of faith; I know that my Catholic friends and other mainline Protestant friends most likely join me in my frustration with this new idea that religion and science cannot live together, particularly evolution.

I have heard it said of atheists that they cannot grasp anything larger than they, that somehow they have difficulty appreciating the wonder of the universe.

Bollocks.

Tell me, who has a more narrow understanding of the world and the universe it inhabits: the person who sees Earth was made so many years ago the average person finds it impossible to comprehend, and has, along with the species on it, changed minutely in uncountable ways over those incomprehensible years to become the way we know it today, who has seen and appreciated the complex mathematics that go into making the world what it is, who accepts that we are but one small dot in the center of incomprehensible other planets and stars, that species have been born on Earth and changed and died off and yet left clear evidence of their existence behind...

Or the people who see all of this beauty, all of this complexity, and reject it, saying "God made the earth a few thousand years ago, just as it is today, and dinosaur fossils are there to test our faith"?

Again, I am Christian.  And I will tell you that even from the standpoint of a Christian, young Earth creationism--or any literal form of Biblical creationism--simply doesn't make sense.  You cannot on the one hand say that God is all-knowing and all-powerful and then on the other claim that this omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being couldn't have or wouldn't have built the earth over the course of billions of years, that this loving God would not have had the patience to guide uncountable minute changes (or at the very least, set them in motion) of evolution.  That's not faith.  That's tying God down, bringing Him down to a human level, forcing Him to have worked with numbers that we can easily understand.

You get to do that.  You get to have a faulty understanding of the Bible and of God.  But for the love of Christ that you claim to have, keep the fuck out of science classrooms.  Have enough faith in your version of the world that you don't have to attempt to force other people to believe.  If your puny understanding of the world is true, we will come around to it in time.

Meanwhile, if you can't tell the difference between a hypothesis and a theory, kindly shut the fuck up and let the grown-ups run things.