I’ve sometimes wondered how I might have turned out if I had been taught more theology rather that rote belief. I have far more interest in theology as an agnostic than I ever did before.
I will agree that you should pursue the path you feel is right, even if we disagree on our paths.
I think it depends on the individual. There are already a majority of Christians who accept science and their faith. They accept Creation (and possibly some form of ID) as a matter of faith, but do not conflate faith with science.
I don’t think abandoning evolution necessarily benefits belief in the gospel. We could discover that aliens seeded life on Earth and guided it’s progress, and I think many would still believe the gospel.
I do think that. It’s slow though. The scientific community is orders of magnitude larger than it used to be, though that may be offset by speed of communication, but human beings still change their minds about the same as they did in the days when the Copernican Revolution took over a century. To paraphrase Max Planck, over my dead body.
If they are going to try to make inroads they are going to have to do the science. Writing blog posts and books for the general public aren’t going to get it done. To use the previous example, Copernicus demonstrated how Heliocentrism would cause Mars to move backwards in the sky, and how Heliocentrism greatly simplified the math needed to model the orbits of planets. Copernicus did the science. We aren’t seeing that from ID/creationists.
This is a subjective judgement of course; thank you for your honest answer to a sincere question. My own assessment is opposite, however. From what I see, there is no movement at all on this within the scientific community, and to me it looks more like there isn’t so much antipathy as complete apathy towards ID, like the train left the station decades ago, the thing is settled, and the question is only of interest to dusty historians. ID is fixated on the insufficiency of natural explanation, but like a suitor that is not so much rejected as invisible, mainstream science does not reciprocate the attention. As far as that goes, scientists are more concerned about getting the data right for their papers than they are about the philosophical ramifications.
Also, I think there needs to be some objective yardstick of “making actual inroads to the mainstream”, otherwise we’re just relying on anecdotal evidence. Yes, given the internet it’s easier to find more proponents of ID (both inside science and outside) than it used to – but that does not necessarily mean that there are more of them.
