re: #1072 haakondahl

I’ve trimmed your text:

I understand your argument, so please don’t explain it to me in greater detail—I think I summed it up fairly well by editing, no?

You are projecting your interpretation of others’ beliefs back onto those persons as limitations upon what else they might believe. People are more than capable of “holding” on one or more mental fronts to allow progress in others. Is it a particle or a wave? I don’t know, but I don’t have to resolve that in order to use implications from each model in understanding other things more clearly.
I use this example only as a specific incidence of the flexibility of human thought, and the absence of a need to absolutely resolve things before proceeding, and certainly not as any kind of physics/philosophy crossover, which I detest.
The account of Genesis certainly conflicts with other things, but it is possible to simply not resolve those conflicts, and carry on with other things. Like conducting research.
If the rigidity of thought and the well-developed logical sequences of beliefs you have implied were necessarily the way people think, then Christianity, indeed most religions, would be incompatible not only with evolution, but with science, democracy, and any form of decision making. Obviously, this is not the case. There is something which is incompatible with evolution, and that, for lack of a better term, we typically refer to a Young-Earth Creationism, and often just creationism for short.
Inherent in those labels are the understanding that we are discussing somebody who DOES see the Genesis conflict as irreconcilable, and therefore they move no further than that, except when perverting and corrupting other fields of inquiry to match that inflexible understanding.
But notice that nothing has been said of God here. Belief in God is compatible with just about everything, with I suppose the exception of the denial of God’s existence. Other factors which accompany faith, or which occur in the absence of faith; i.e., which have absolutely no relation to faith, are what make people unable to accept the straightforward arguments and clear evidence for evolution.
Ya got your YECs. Ya got your flat-earth Panspermians.
I suppose you’ll anger some of the faithful, because you are pigeonholing them, saying, “well, you can’t believe this and also believe this”, when clearly, they can and some do.

If you keep evolution in a compartmentalized section of your brain when you go to the church/synagogue/mosque/what have you, then I agree with all that you wrote.

I never said to not conduct research or not be a scientist. Please show me where I implied it, because I certainly never meant to imply it.

I met a brilliant neuroscientist who also happened to be a very religious Jew and an ID-er. But she was a brilliant neuroscientist and did not think about ID when she was at work.

People of course are more than capable of discarding certain thoughts in various situations. If we are honest with ourselves, that is what would lead to peace in the Middle East - for Muslims to simply discard the bad parts of the Koran, keep the good, and go on with their lives.

But if we are honest ourselves, we should acknowledge there is a conflict between science and classical concepts of religion. There is a conflict, but there doesn’t have to be battle in the classroom. The easiest way to resolve this conflict is for evolution to be taught in science class, and to have a seperate theology or ethics class to discuss various philosophies about the creation of Man. This way, science is not seen as battling religion, and vice versa.