See here for a more extended discussion on how we talk about evolution in Christian circles by T Keller.

http://www.biologos.org/uploads/projects/Keller_white_paper.pdf

I agree with his point that we need to learn to make a distinction between evolution as EBP vs. GTE. Read the article above if you want to know what I mean.

I think that i was once in camp 4, but then it seemed to me that, continuing your analogy, other camp ‘grounds’ – where the tents of those who do not believe in God interact with each other as the Christians in this campground do – were not so far away. Maybe even just the next campground over. And the people here in their tents looked equally divided in their passions and opinions. And at this point, I tell myself that I have found the fullest view of all the campgrounds, from where I can say, “Ah, so this is human activity and striving!” Sort of like the person in the story of the blind men and the elephants who can actually see the whole elephant to give us the moral of the story.

But of course, even at that point, at what I think would be be a unique and privileged vantage point, I find yet again that the place is crowded with people pitching different tents.

It’s really interesting how some of these issues matter for some people and not for others, as you point out. For all of the people who think evolution is irrelevant to the things that REALLY matter, there are just as many who think that the question of an Personal God or an afterlife are just as irrelevant to what really matters for them.

Maybe at the heart of the matter is the question of how we resolve things that seem to have real stakes in our lives but at the same time remain so endlessly debatable, so seemingly NOT grounded on anything universally verifiable, and which we consequently cannot seem to really say anything that is indisputable or uniquely true. Like how it seems that the sayings “Distance makes the heart grow fonder” and “Out of sight, out of mind” are equally true – opposed to each other, but equally real.

In a somewhat similar way, I am compelled to different degrees by both sides of the debate over whether the precise natural laws of the universe and the phenomenon that life perpetuates itself could not exist without a Cause. On one hand, I can see how it seems too specific, too improbable, to be random, but on the other hand, I can see how it could be equally justified as being something more like the example of walking past a row of license plate numbers in a packed parking garage and wondering how we stumbled upon these numbers, exactly and in this order, among the virtually infinite possibilities of numbers that could have been encountered.

But even beyond this, a whole array of such unanswerable questions arise. When I consider the question of evolution, I have to consider the question of a Creator, but then in the question of the Creator, there is the question of whether or not he is a Personal Creator… At every step of the way, a whole new door (or campground) of uncertainty opens up. And if i were locked in a bathroom like you, or similarly on some freezing mountain path and i had to choose between a forking path, i would probably choose macroevolution and lean away from divine agency, not even to mention a Personal God – but I could not disallow the other views with some kind of dismissive absolute certainty.

But how do we still arrive at such different conclusions? i don’t know. i feel like i have inklings, from books, from certain authorities i have come to carry in my mind and life, from my own experiences and reasoning… and to me, like i’m sure to everyone else, it FEELS certain that i know at least a LITTLE more about what reality is… but I don’t know.

Somewhere along the line, contending groups seem to make either stance a stake of TRUE membership, while others (like myself) would argue that maybe they are all questions that we can be comfortably agnostic about for now… like the Higgs Boson or string theory, even when a deeper level of knowledge about these things would provide important clues of our very existence. At some point, one community would attach severe life-and-death, or at least, just social, stakes attached to other contending communities divided by the questions of baptism, communion, predestination, etc. – though these matter less today.

In the end I guess I can only continue to argue the case that makes sense to me so far, acknowledging only that we be civil, and that there seems to be this kind of upper limit of certainties on what we can know about these things, at least for now.

Sorry for the length of this.