Chair,
You really don't understand what I was saying? My persistent cold, caused no doubt by demons and the evil eye (I'm not going to get better until we burn a witch or two, I'm sure of it!) must be making me even more incoherently fanatic and rabid than usual... Let me wipe the froth from the screen and I'll try to explain.
Timmer attacks religious belief in general, and Christianity in particular as an impediment to knowledge and the understanding of scientific principles. For instance:
The authors go into extensive details about two cases: rampant teleology and mind-body dualism. Children tend to believe that every object has a specific purpose or function, which fits in nicely with the teleological view of life espoused by many forms of creationism, such as intelligent design. They also view the mind and brain as operating on different levels and performing distinct functions.
And yet for centuries, Christian teleology and the belief of the survival of the soul gave men a reason to pursue science and an assurance that there were answers to be found and that they were actually part of the grand design of things.
Now we have this bizzarre respinning of world history, that makes the same Christian worldview that gave birth to most of the scientific advances of the modern age from about 1500 on, an impediment to science and which makes atheistic materialism the only hope for mankind to be able to actually figure out anything.
The funny thing is, if I wrote the same kind of thing from the opposing view, and submitted it to a scientific magazine, you'd immediately tag it as "religious" and "unfounded opinion" and dismiss it. However, the fact is that Timmer's article is an example of dogma. He is simply stating the beliefs of secular humanism, which in addition to being the ruling atheology of the scientific academy, is rapidly becoming the established religion of the Western nations.
The scary thing is, this is a faith that is saying things like
"parents should not be able to teach their children any dogmas but ours" and
"certain jobs should not be available to people who disagree with us". Evangelicals like myself are watching as we are gradually being consigned to the intellectual and social ghetto, and looking at previous experience with what happens when states become expressly materialistic, we can only wonder how long before someone starts thinking about camps and compulsory reeducation or perhaps a more "final" solution to our "God delusion."
