Q: Many criticisms I read about Creationist or other Fundamentalist beliefs comes from Evangelicals. I can understand the World attacking us, but why do so many of the Evangelicals? Is it an intellectual attitude or an egotistical "I'll-straighten-out-the-Church-for-Christ"?

A. When we are attacked, it's very easy for anger to slip in, polarizing attitudes and creating enemies. The Evangelicals, even those attacking us, are beloved brothers in Christ. The first step in understanding is to get rid of emotionalism and avoid the construction of a straw man.

The Evangelicals attacking us sincerely believe Creationism is unintellectual, a blind leap of faith, and an embarrassment to Christ. Walls of misunderstanding have been built by both sides.

The truth is we all "see through a glass darkly." A characteristic of human nature, verified by many scientific experiments, is that, when given an out-of-focus picture, our minds fill in the missing or indistinct details. Then, when presented with the full truth, our minds tenaciously hang onto the incorrect details we have created, in spite of the truth before us! Now, none of us have been presented with the full truth yet, so we still have our own internally generated details fogging the picture. Because of such foggy thinking, if an Evangelical gets a slightly clearer perception of truth than I have, I would tend not to believe it. The one thing we can say about Evangelicals and Creationists is that we are both wrong in certain areas and will each be surprised when we get to heaven and find out how much more the other understood than we thought they did.

A straw man is a caricature of an opponent's position, which we construct in the absence of true understanding. The reason we construct this straw man is because it is then easy to say, "That's what my opponent is really like and this is why he's wrong!" Thus, without really engaging our opponent, we conduct a mock battle and defeat him! For more on this, see "How to Win an Argument" in Buyer's Market.

Reference for "See through a glass darkly"

If the whole truth would have difficulty percolating down into my perceptions, certainly the partial truth would, too.