On that famous old debate

If you're the type of person who enjoys bludgeoning other people with your theories, there's a great dicussion for you to join at Canadian Comment. It's already a couple of days old (and springs from an interesting essay written by Fred at Fred Columns), but it's still alive and kicking. The question, of course, is whether or not evolution is true. My own feeling is that Christians have been screwing themselves in this debate ever since William Jennings Bryan's Fundamentalist crusade against the teaching of evolution in American schools in 1925. Over the years, it's been more of a struggle for power than an honest pursuit of the truth, and Christians today would do well to check their egos (and their extreme opinions) at the door whenever they enter into this debate. On the same token, atheistic evolutionists need to stop confusing this debate over the one about whether or not there is a God. Intelligent design still works even if evolution is true. I 'm getting sick of hearing people saying that "evolution disproves God" or even "evolution disproves the Bible". The cosmology presented in the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament) is not meant to be taken literally, but rather, as a poem signifying the most basic precepts of Hebrew, Muslim and Christian faith - that God created the world (which is, therefore, a separate and lesser entity), and that He gave special status to humankind in this creation. The whole six-day thing simply offers a helpful structure to the poem (you'll notice that day 1 corresponds nicely to day 4, and day 2 to day 5, and day 3 to day 6), in the same way that one uses a 5-7-5 scheme when writing a haiku. As everyone knows, the purpose of poetry is not to instruct with random facts, but to convey deep truths that lie somewhere beneath the literal words.