Had an enjoyable discussion with David Rosevear (6-day creationist) and Michael Reiss (eminent education professor and Anglican priest) in front of an audience of about 80 at the SEARCH museum in Portsmouth as part of their Darwin celebrations the other night. As each speaker only had five minutes I decided to just make the point that science and religion/faith are two different ways of looking at the same thing so anyone who uses science to argue against a faith position is missing the point. I figured this was a good critique of both scientific atheism and young earth (6-day) creationism. I also decided to leave any more detailed discussion to the audience questions.
The audience were less partisan than I feared although did contain a couple vocal (and slightly unstable) extremists from both the atheist and the young earth camps. As usual the extremist views were relatively easy to answer. I generally disagreed with David Rosevear on all points and agreed with Michael Reiss although felt that Michael was being a bit more generous than I was comfortable with.
I made a point of arguing robustly for a view of science that stayed accurate to the research (ie I argued that creationism had no place in science classes in school) but at the same time respected the world-views of people (ie saying that the discussion of atheism vs Christianity/other faiths is important in RE/philosophy). I also repeatedly pointed out the incompatibility of 6-day creationism with the two forms of ID which I think surprised a number of people who tried to challenge from a creationist position. There were the usual questions on probability, mind-brain, mutations, status of scripture etc.
Although it is always hard to judge the results of such events, I went away feeling extremely positive because it seemed that many (if not most) of the audience understood the point that both atheism and young earth creationism are extremist views and thus sensible dialogue needs to sit somewhere in between. I was also surprised by quite how weak David Rosevear's arguments were and felt that most of the audience recognised this.
