Discourse is healthy. Lazy reporting is not.

Evolution is an established fact - see the fossil record, DNA, and other evidence mentioned by others. Natural Selection is a theory to explain the evidence.

Creationism is another.

The issue with today's creationism (under whatever name) is that it is insipid compared to that of the great naturalists of the nineteenth century. These were scientists willing to challenge the details of their theories with evidence from the natural world. Challenged their theories were - and Darwin won the arguments.

Today's creationists are dogmatists, not scientists. They invert the process and attempt to challenge the natural world by sculpting the details of their theories to fit. The Tortured Scablands must be evidence of Noah's flood, not of the Lake Missoula flood(s) of the recent ice age. Dinosaur bones represent creatures slaughtered as kine by the deity, not collateral damage from one of the deity's solar system shooters. Two miles of Antarctic ice either relentlessly grew two feet per year over 6,000 years - or drilling down we should soon reach ice personally created by God. It wasn't a gamma-ray burst that toasted the trilobytes, but rather Yahweh's passion for a bottomless shrimp salad.

The creationist's theories fail to survive cursory inspection to even enter the ring against Natural Selection's mibster.

Perhaps there is a designer. What the evidence can be taken to show is simply that the deity chose the excellent and handy tool of Natural Selection to sculpt the world. What other design process is envisaged? What are the use cases for the universe? What requirements did the deity discover?

Evolution is the ultimate of rapid prototyping, agile design, extreme programming, spiral development.

It is unremarkable when a liberal Democrat criticizes Republican policies. When Chuck Hegel does it, all sides pay attention.

What is remarkable about Haught's thoughts is that the only theologian to testify in Dover testified on the side of evolution.

Organized atheists are among the dreariest of true believers - how could this not be true when they are organized in support of the denial of a position? Being dreary doesn't make them wrong.

Bottom line? True believers are with us until the end. Our problems must be solved in coordination with those whose fundamental motivations are opposed to our own. The only way this will happen is if we make it a strength, not a weakness. The 21st century will see one unlikely partnership after another - ranchers with environmentalists, the faithful with atheists.

Think of it as philosophical plywood - the crossed biases strengthen the final product.

Motivations are one thing - goals another. We must seek coordinated solutions to common goals.

Fundamentalism is bookend religion - the absolute dogma of Genesis and Revelations, not the flexible philosophy of the Sermon on the Mount. A sermon is the center of gravity of any church service, just as it is of the Bible.

The trouble with dogma is that begs to be challenged. Genesis makes silly science. Revelations is poor public policy. On the other hand, an admonition to turn the other cheek - or to judge not lest ye be judged - or to consider the beam in thine own eye - or to avoid casting your pearls before swine - or to beware of false prophets - admits of no scientific falsifiability. Strait is the gate and narrow is the way whether saint or scientist trods it.

It strikes me that the debate often focuses on the question of miraculous happenings as a day to day occurrence. There is a vision of a meddlesome deity with time enough to redirect footballs in midair, but not the baby carriage from the path of the taxi. Millionaire sports celebrities afford better salvation, as with clothes and cars and posse. God as holy sycophant.

Absolutely nothing restricts the operation of retrospective miracles, however. Science extrapolates backward toward the big bang. Tight bounds of inference tell us of deep time - death dealing dinos themselves dying across the K-T boundary. And so? And so a single miracle of creation, whether six days or the first three minutes, suffices to make the cosmos.

God may or may not be able to make a stone too great to be lifted - but no scientific test can distinguish a universe 13 billion years old from another that was pulled from Jehovah's hat 6,000 years ago - already pre-aged by 12,999,994,000 years.

The morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.

Thanks to the reader who took exception to my last missive. Thanks for reading, but also thanks for quoting me and doubling the impact of the message :-)

The Uncertainty Principle most certainly has macroscopically observable effects - for example, the natural broadening of spectral lines (Lorentz profiles, not Gaussian) from astrophysical sources. Similarly, general relativity and other bizarre physical laws are truly everyday phenomena. Science doesn't skimp on miracles.