Dear Teleological Folks,
I posted the following over at UncommonDescent.com but it is undoubtedly long lost in the comments. I thought it might be of interest here. As some of you may know, I used to be a militant, Dawkins-style atheist. All that changed in 1994 after I bought my five-year-old daughter a cartoon video entitled The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Everything went downhill from there as I apostatized from my former religion of atheism. 🙂 (Yes, it is a religion!)
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The gap between humans and all other forms of life on the planet — in so many categories that one would have to write many books on the subject — is so profound that it represents the ultimate discontinuity in nature, which is characterized not by seamlessness, but by discontinuities. This is the antithesis of Darwinian philosophy.
As a former atheist, I would suggest that the great divide is not between Catholics and Protestants, but between materialists and those who recognize the uniqueness of humankind (this includes our great capacity for good, and our great capacity for evil). It is only by recognizing our divine origin — which seems increasingly difficult to deny, in my view — that we have any hope of cultivating the good and suppressing the evil. But this requires brutal self-honesty, which is antithetical to the fallen part of our nature referenced above.
These are ultimate issues, and are ultimately the only ones that really matter, because they affect and reflect upon all areas of our lives, which is why the (ID/Darwinism) debate is so heated.
