Losing their religion

A hint as to why the pro-theocracy lobby fears the theory of natural selection:

E.O. Wilson (1929 – ) E.O. Wilson is an entomologist and biologist at Harvard University who is famous, among other things, for his work on sociobiology. Wilson was a born-again Christian in the Southern Baptist Church. His study of evolution changed that view, and in his 1978 book, On Human Nature, he wrote: “If humankind evolved by Darwinian natural selection, genetic chance and environmental necessity, not God, made the species.”

Michael Shermer (1954 – )
Michael Shermer is executive director of the Skeptics Society, founding publisher of its magazine, Skeptic, and a columnist for Scientific American.

Early in life he experienced his first conversion. “In my senior year of high school I accepted Jesus as my Savior and became a born-again Christian,” he wrote in The Science of Good and Evil. “I had found the One True Religion, and it was my duty — indeed it was my pleasure — to tell others about it, including my parents, brothers and sisters, friends and even total strangers.”

Less than a decade later, however, he had become an atheist after studying evolutionary biology in graduate school.

Coherent Christian belief is simply incompatible with the theory of natural selection. If species evolved the way Darwin discovered that they do, the book of Genesis is false, in the same way that the story of Santa Claus or The Lord of the Rings is false.

The only way to reconcile the religion and the obviously correct scientific theory is to make one's Christian belief self-contradictory--the Bible is the Inspired Word of God, and it is also wrong.