Reply #29: No, don't misunderstand me -

[Selwynn]

Look I have no horse in this "evolution vs. creation" fight or whatever it is. And I'm not part of any organized religious institution, so those factors may bias me and cause me not to realize that there really IS a pretty big group of people who can be fairly well described with some general statements.

But when I get in conversations with people about the origins of life or the universe, I've never personally noticed a very consistent pattern of beliefs. I've met some people who believed God created the world and had views very much like what you described. But I'd met others who believed in the theory of evolution yet believed in God, and I've met others who also thought the world was created in some divine way with much different views - not all of them were pitting their opinions as a confrontation with science or evolutionary theory.

Even among people who are very strict biblical creation story believers I'm not always sure how much of their motives are deliberately malicious and how much are just ignorant. Anyway - I'm sure that if you have kind of "lived in the trenches" in a big war with the kind of people you describe with the term "creationists" - then you probably have a much different perspective on all of that.

So as far as I'm concerned - Burt, Trotsky, Az - I can stipulate that the term "creationists" means "as so defined by Burt" when you guys say it. :)

Cheers,
Sel