From a book by St. Augustine titled, The Literal Meaning of Genesis.

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although “they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.”

Augustine wrote this book in 415AD. More than 1500 years have passed and still the fight goes on.

Jesus came to free me from my sins, not my mind!

Make no mistake about it there are those who are looking to take the latter.

My faith does not ask me to check my brain and those senses that are God-given at the front door merely for the sake of agreeing with those whose insular way of looking at things would pit brother against brother and sister against sister.

An important and, I believe for Christians, indispensable book written by Patrick Glynn, titled God: The Evidence, deals with the topic of faith in a post-secular world. His argument is that the scientific and intellectual communities are having to come to grips with the possibility that far from being an accidental sea of chaos, the universe appears to be a finely tuned mechanism, whose every molecule and every physical law seems to have been designed from the very first nanosecond of the big bang to a single end - the creation of life. Most notably human life!

It is a riveting and uplifting book. Glynn is a scientist who used to be an athiest, and is now a believer. At no time does Glynn fall victim to the trap that many Christians fall into: that of having to ignore all that science has uncovered simply to mollify conservative elements within their own faith. In deed he rebukes such religious dogma.

But Glynn also hands it to his fellow scientists for their refusal to see the forest for the trees. He points to a paper written by a friend of Stephen Hawking in 1973, titled, Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology. The author was Brandon Carter and what the paper basically said was that the "myriad laws of physics were fine-tuned from the very beginning of the universe for the creation of man - that the universe we inhabit appeared to be expressly designed for the emergence of human beings."

This view was so widely at odds with prevailing theories that for the last 30 plus years the scientific community has been, in a sense, warring with eachother, between those factions that are stubbornly holding on to the belief that we are accidents and those who believe that there is some agency at work driving as it were the bus of evolution.

What does all of this have to do with Christianity? Simply this. For those who are insisting that Creationism be taught in school as a science, it is important to know that science itself is, I feel, slowly coming to the inalterable conclusion that man's place in the cosmos appears to have been predestined. My fear is that the creationists in their ignorance will do more harm than good and will create an environment where even the hint that the universe is billions of years old or that humans desended from other species will bring about the sort of circus we witnessed in Tennessee in 1925.

We need to heed the words of Augustine. We need common sense to prevail. Let's leave science to the scientists and matters of faith to those best suited. After all you wouldn't go to a mechanic if you had a back problem, anymore than you would consult the advice of a dry cleaner if your engine had a knock.