Oh the shame! Sorry to have to report this to you good people, but yes indeed, Chuck the Atheist was handily dispatched this afternoon on my friend Gregory Dickow’s radio show, Ask the Pastor. Heard on the afternoon drive on Chicago’s WYLL AM 1160, Pastor Dickow fields questions of all sorts from all sorts of people, and most graciously welcomes atheist callers as well as the beloved of Jesus on his show. I believe that we hold each other in high regard; he’s a loving individual bent on helping save the world, and has called Chuck the Atheist a respectful friend to the show.
I never really try to engage him in any debate. It’s not what the show is really about, so says the Pastor. It’s his show, and I do my best to respect the boundaries that Dickow has set. I’ve listened to the show for a long time, and have felt his humanism demonstrated to some very screwed up people. The man does have saintly tendencies. I have to give him that. So if I’ve had any sort of strategy to engage this man it has been through reasonably worded questions that any atheist might ask. Sometimes I can get a subtle point across, I think, and perhaps sometimes not. The Pastor well uses our discussions as teachable points for his listeners, and certainly gets the last word in.
A good question that I’ve asked the Pastor is if Christians can still be Christians and maintain their salvation; yet accept the Theory of Evolution. He said that of course that’s possible. In the (true) Christian religion, if you accept the sacrifice of Christ as an atonement of your sins, it is that which saves you. It is not certain positions you have on abortion, or homosexuality, or acceptance of evolutionary theory. It was he that pointed out before I that many religious people, some scientists included accept evolution. So in that conversation, I felt that I had planted some good seeds in some Christians, who might not realize that at least they won’t be sliding to hell on a greased pole for accepting evolutionary theory…if they could just get beyond the manipulative, purposely deceitful rhetoric of the creationist literature and perhaps read the primary sources in the scientific literature.
But you also all probably know what creationists can be like. If evolution is true, god certainly would have let us know some way in the Bible. So today I didn’t fare too well; I think most of the listeners went away perhaps with the satisfaction that the Pastor got one over on good ole Chuck the Atheist. I originally called because I wanted to try to get him to concede that his comment to a previous caller that evolution is not a fact, but theory is a misconception of what is meant by scientists when they use this oft misunderstood language. Many of you know that theory has high status in science; it is not been yet disproved, often with multiple lines of evidence that presents a cohesive, complementary validation of itself. The Pastor wanted to shift the conversation from biological evolution to the credibility of Big Bang Theory. I didn’t have too much to say about that. I sort of stammered that it is what is accepted as the consensus of physicists, and really isn’t pertinent in to argument that Darwin himself put quite well, that there is a total lack of evidence for design in the natural world as explained by evolutionary theory. Dickow replied that it was more incredible to believe that something came from nothing like in the Big Bang. He felt that reasonable people should agree. As for evolution, he had the same argument from personal incredulity, that something as majestic as creation cab not be explained solely through naturalistic mechanisms. And of course he also cited the well-worn and tattered argument that you can’t accept evolution as scientific because there’s no way to wind back the clock and make observations of something that was purported to have happened millions, even billions of years ago. I got about one line in that evolution is an historical science, and the running narrative can be taken as a good explanation in spite of it not being along the strict lines of Popperian empiricism.
I have to give Dickow credit; he is an extremely good apologist for his faith. And although he may suspect that there is a bit more to evolutionary theory than which hard-line creationists give credit, he surely knows how to work over conversations with atheists into teachable moments for his listeners. He almost even convinced me of my own potential shame for my vacuous motivation to extol the veracity of atheism to a sick and hurting world. Paraphrasing Dickow:
“What good would the truth of evolution be to people? Even if there were millions of years between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, it still doesn’t get to the heart of the matter, that without Jesus, you are lost. I am all about helping people such that they might come to a realization that only through the belief of the sacrifice of Christ and his work of atonement for sins can they be saved. I don’t want anyone, including Chuck the Atheist to go to hell.”
But it’s all about planting seeds as the Pastor often says. Perhaps the one small concession that I was able to obtain today from Dickow was that one might possibly fit the theory of evolution between the inerrant lines of text in the Bible. He even said that he could meet me somewhere in the middle between the allegedly temporal adaptations that seem reasonable in man’s lineage and build more upon that if the evidence leads that way. He even said that he wouldn’t mind taking the time to be shown this. I’m not sure if he was really serious about that offer. I would definitely take him up on it, and could easily present enough compelling evidence that might take even a fundamentalist Christian a little further down the road of the acceptance of evolutionary theory.
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