{"id":702,"date":"2009-02-12T08:37:54","date_gmt":"2009-02-12T08:37:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/stevenwaldman\/2009\/02\/evolution-darwin-god-and-scien.html"},"modified":"2009-02-12T08:37:54","modified_gmt":"2009-02-12T08:37:54","slug":"evolution-darwin-god-and-scien","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/2009\/02\/evolution-darwin-god-and-scien.html","title":{"rendered":"Darwin&#8217;s Challenge Was Not to God, it Was to His Word"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image\"><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/stevenwaldman\/imgs\/darwins%20church.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"darwins church.jpg\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.beliefnet.com\/sites\/128\/import\/assets_c\/2009\/02\/darwins church-thumb-380x258-3275.jpg\" width=\"380\" height=\"258\" class=\"mt-image-left\" style=\"float: left;margin: 0 20px 20px 0\" \/><\/a><\/span>The Vatican embraces Charles Darwin&#8217;s theory of evolution as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/newstopics\/religion\/4588289\/The-Vatican-claims-Darwins-theory-of-evolution-is-compatible-with-Christianity.html\">fully compatible with Christianity.<\/a>  The Church of England <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cofe.anglican.org\/news\/pr6808.html\">honors its former member<\/a>. (His parish, in which he was active during his early life, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cofe.anglican.org\/darwin\/downe.html\">pictured above<\/a>)<br \/>\nAnd we are thus reminded that evolution is not really a challenge against God or Christianity even, it&#8217;s a challenge to Biblical Revelation. In doing research about the Founding Fathers&#8217; beliefs I ran across the same point: people like <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/stevenwaldman\/2008\/03\/thomas-jefferson-believer-in-i.html\">Jefferson<\/a> and Tom Paine were viewed as infidels even though they were theists.  What they challenged is Biblical literalism.<br \/>\nNow of course for many people, the absolute truth of the Bible <em>is<\/em> the heart of religion. Undermine one, and you&#8217;ve undermined the other.<br \/>\nBut not for everyone &#8212; including the Vatican.   The most interesting debate, then, would not be between an atheistic scientistic and clergyman. It would be between passionate Christians, one who puts a literal reading of the Bible at the heart of his faith, and one who doesn&#8217;t.   It would be between Pope Benedict XI and James Dobson.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Vatican embraces Charles Darwin&#8217;s theory of evolution as fully compatible with Christianity. The Church of England honors its former member. (His parish, in which he was active during his early life, pictured above) And we are thus reminded that evolution is not really a challenge against God or Christianity even, it&#8217;s a challenge to&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Darwin&#039;s Challenge Was Not to God, it Was to His Word - Steven Waldman<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/2009\/02\/evolution-darwin-god-and-scien.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Darwin&#039;s Challenge Was Not to God, it Was to His Word - Steven Waldman\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Vatican embraces Charles Darwin&#8217;s theory of evolution as fully compatible with Christianity. The Church of England honors its former member. (His parish, in which he was active during his early life, pictured above) And we are thus reminded that evolution is not really a challenge against God or Christianity even, it&#8217;s a challenge to&hellip;\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/2009\/02\/evolution-darwin-god-and-scien.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Steven Waldman\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2009-02-12T08:37:54+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"swaldman\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Darwin's Challenge Was Not to God, it Was to His Word - Steven Waldman","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/2009\/02\/evolution-darwin-god-and-scien.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Darwin's Challenge Was Not to God, it Was to His Word - Steven Waldman","og_description":"The Vatican embraces Charles Darwin&#8217;s theory of evolution as fully compatible with Christianity. 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He's also the author of the Founding Faith: Politics, Providence, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America, which has been published by Random House. Before co-founding Beliefnet in 1999, Waldman was a political journalist, serving as National Editor of U.S. News & World Report and National Correspondent for Newsweek. His writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Review, The Atlantic, Slate, and many others.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/author\/swaldman"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=702"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}