Wait, what’s my role in all of this again?
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This reads like the prose in a pompous review of a film or painting published in some arty New York magazine. That is, it reads like emotional B.S. rather than rational thought. And whenever you fly into one of these emotional responses, I know that you are unable to answer the challenge on the table, i.e., in this case, how any natural science could proceed without metaphysical presuppositions. But I don’t suppose that you are ever going to change your typical reading diet from Wikipedia articles to books by Collingwood or Feyerabend, so I don’t expect we will ever be able to have a rational discussion about that subject.
The deeper issue, however, is not your lack of depth in both science and philosophy, but your fundamental lack of respect for traditional Christian thought. You care only about bringing Christians around to accepting evolution, and your support for “Genealogical Adam” is motivated entirely by that goal. You don’t personally believe that Adam or Eve ever existed, and so your apparent “support” for a specially created Adam and Eve is in the deepest sense fraudulent. I have no problem with the logic of Patrick’s position: Christianity is false, and we should leave it behind. But your position – that Christianity is false, but these backwards Christians won’t let go of it, so we Unitarians and other enlightened people must come up with some way of interpreting it that will at least cause Christians to accept evolution – is insincere. Basically you are justifying a “noble lie” to bring evangelicals onside with evolution. I find this repugnant, both as a philosopher and as a Christian.
Lest I be misunderstood here, I stress that my objection to your endorsement of Genealogical Adam does not apply to others here – Joshua, Jon Garvey, etc. – who have also endorsed the notion. It applies only to non-Christians here who are endorsing the notion not because they believe it corresponds to reality, but because it strikes them as a useful tactical ploy to bring evangelicals onside with evolution.
Surely I can’t be singled out as the source of that particular revelation. Duh, in other words.
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