![\"The](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2016\/05\/800px-ESC_Eyring_Science_Center.jpg\")
<\/a>(A photo by Mark A. Philbrick of BYU; Wikimedia Commons)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Briefly, when I was a boy, there was a man in our southern California ward who had converted to Mormonism<\/a>. \u00a0(I seem to dimly recall that he was a former Catholic.) \u00a0I can still see his face in my mind, and I remember that he spoke quite ungrammatically, which suggested that, while he was a kind and pleasant\u00a0person, he wasn\u2019t a well educated one.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I don\u2019t recall his name, but I distinctly remember a talk that he once gave in sacrament meeting. \u00a0It was a very unusual sacrament talk, in my experience, and,\u00a0because it focused heavily on the errors of his previous denomination, a rather inappropriate one. \u00a0(His choice of approach, I\u2019m sure. \u00a0Not by command of the bishop. \u00a0I can\u2019t think of another such talk in my ward. \u00a0Ever.)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Anyway, he was speaking about the erroneous concept of God held by his former church, and he came to the concept of God as \u201cincomprehensible.\u201d \u00a0Now this idea, he declared, is the most ridiculous of\u00a0all<\/em>:\u00a0 \u201cHow can he be God if he doesn\u2019t\u00a0comprehend<\/em>\u00a0anything?\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The speaker must have sensed movement in the audience \u2014 we were all shifting about in uncomfortable embarrassment \u2014 and, presumably inspired by that reaction, he expounded on the silly idea of God\u2019s not comprehending anything for an unusually long time.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n It was . . . \u00a0awkward.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I\u2019ve found myself thinking about him and that talk lately as I\u2019ve read several items\u00a0on predominantly atheistic ex-Mormon\u00a0message board where a poster has taken to commenting frequently on my blog entries here. \u00a0He marvels almost daily at my stupendous scientific ignorance, my incompetence, and my irrationality. \u00a0In at least one recent post, he\u2019s also been struck by my brazen dishonesty.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The problem, though, is that he consistently and grossly misreads the intent of my entries and continuously attributes views and arguments to me that I do not hold and that have never previously entered my mind.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The stupidity and ignorance and disingenuousness that he claims to see (and probably, given his viewpoint, really does<\/em> see) in my posts is largely if not entirely an artifact generated by his own remarkably poor reading.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n For instance, he\u2019s responded to my recent spate of entries arguing for Joseph Smith\u2019s sincerity by pointing out that one can be (and that many people are) sincerely\u00a0wrong<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 as if I\u2019ve ever argued or even suggested otherwise.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n And, when I responded with a series of three posts to his demand for even a single example of an issue on which theologians were right while scientists were wrong \u2014 my responses can be read\u00a0here<\/a>,\u00a0here<\/a>, and\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 he reacted with triumphant cackling that my response proved that I couldn\u2019t do it. \u00a0After all, if I\u2019d had even a single example of such a case, I would have\u00a0provided<\/em>\u00a0it! \u00a0(When, as very small boys, we used to play \u201ccops and robbers,\u201d it was common for somebody who had been \u201cshot\u201d directly in the chest at point blank range to continue to play,\u00a0exclaiming\u00a0\u201cYou missed me!\u201d and, in support of that assertion, adding an argument that went somewhat along the lines of \u201cNeener neener neener!\u201d)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The late Abba Eban, onetime remarkably eloquent foreign minister of Israel (and, incidentally, a first-rate Cambridge-trained Arabist), once lamented the sad history of the Palestinians, who, he said, had \u201cnever missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.\u201d \u00a0My online critic seems, recently at least, never to miss an opportunity to completely miss the point \u2014 and then compounding his error by substituting transparently idiotic points of his own, but attributing them to me<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Recently, this zany fellow has\u00a0been laughing at my supposed belief that science hasn\u2019t progressed beyond the nineteenth century and at my putative assumption that quoting theologians from the late 1800s somehow refutes Darwinism. \u00a0Or something like that. \u00a0He derives this purported belief of mine from a recent blog entry titled\u00a0\u201cIs Darwinism necessarily atheistic?\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Oy veh.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Let me make the actual point that I was\u00a0establishing\u00a0unmistakably clear, in case there are any others out there who share this particular person\u2019s difficulty:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I was offering an answer to the question \u201cIs Darwinism necessarily atheistic?\u201d \u00a0I even provided a subtle clue to the fact that that was the question that I was answering, by explicitly putting the actual question in my title \u2014 which, to refresh memories, was \u201cIs Darwinism necessarily atheistic?\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n My answer, by the way, is No.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n In that part of my\u00a0response to the question, I cited \u00a0Frederick Temple (future archbishop of Canterbury), Charles Kingsley (chaplain to Queen Victoria and canon of Westminster), and the Harvard botanist Asa Gray \u2014 all of them devout Christians and all of them perfectly fine with (or even zealous advocates of) Darwinism. \u00a0I also cited Charles Darwin himself, who plainly didn\u2019t think that Darwinian evolution required or mandated atheism.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n All of these figures lived in the nineteenth century. \u00a0They\u00a0strongly suggest (and other, similar, evidence is available in abundance)\u00a0that the notion of an all-out war between nineteenth-century Christianity or theism, on the one hand, and nineteenth-century Darwinism, on the other \u2014 a war with clearly drawn, black and white battle lines \u2014 is untrue.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I never suggested in any way that evolutionary theory in particular or science in general ceased to develop after the nineteenth century, and I was making no effort to refute or redefine Darwinism.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n