# NCSE: Many Scientists See God's Hand in Evolution

**URL:** <https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/ncse-many-scientists-see-gods-hand-in-evolution/1188>\
**Category:** Side Conversation\
**Created:** [August 15, 2018, 11:02pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/ncse-many-scientists-see-gods-hand-in-evolution/1188 "2018-08-15T23:02:15Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 30

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**Author:** ![Eddie](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f07891/32.png) [@Eddie](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/Eddie)\
**Post date:** [August 28, 2018, 1:58pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/ncse-many-scientists-see-gods-hand-in-evolution/1188/30 "2018-08-28T13:58:51Z")

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Dear Faithdefender:

If you are new here, welcome!

I’ll pitch in my thoughts, since I was trained in a Religious Studies department and the definition of religion is a constant topic of discussion among religion scholars.

Scholars regularly dispute over the proper meaning of the term “religion.” The conventional, popular religious usage is that religious belief involves accepting God or gods, but for various reasons, many religion scholars find that definition too narrow. (For one thing, many Buddhists do not believe in God or gods, yet very few would deny to Buddhism the label of “religion”.) Some scholars, perhaps the majority, argue that “religion” should include all large, overarching views of reality that are used to decide what is real and unreal, true and false, and which provide a story or narrative giving purpose and meaning to individual human lives and to social and political life.

Under that broader definition, Marxism (in its full and original form) would count as a religion, since it offers a total view of reality, including a “theology of history” meant to replace the previous Western theology of history provided by Augustine. Atheism – at least in the aggressive form which states that one can know that God does not exist and that there is no meaning or purpose in the universe other than what human beings give to the universe by their personal and collective choices – would also count as a religion. (On the other hand, a merely agnostic atheism (e.g., “I don’t claim to have certainty that God doesn’t exist, but I see no evidence that he does, so I act as if he doesn’t”) which is simply a lack of belief in God and makes no grand pronouncements about the meaning of life, no endorsements of scientism or materialism, etc., would not count as a religion under this definition.)

I am not an expert on the legal history, but I am told by people who are that for at least some legal purposes, courts have ruled that atheism counts as a religion. This would mean that in the teaching of science, atheists must keep their personal atheistic views out of the lessons and textbooks, or they would be just as guilty of violating the constitution as creationist teachers of science would be. And I think that is a reasonable way of handling things.

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_[View the full topic](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/ncse-many-scientists-see-gods-hand-in-evolution/1188)._