THE NEW CREATHEISM
Gary Wolf missed a fascinating fourth path -- not theists, not fence-sitters, not atheists, but "creatheists" -- pronounced cree-a-THEIST or cree-Atheist, depending on temperament!
Creatheists see "God" as no less than a proper name for the creative, evolving Whole, measurable and non-measurable, which transcends, includes, and lives in all its parts. Creatheists view knowledge of the Whole and its parts generated by science as a kind of "public revelation" that we've only recently evolved to be able to understand. Moses would have been ignored or worse if God had told him to say stars were balls of burning gas billions of miles away. Today we have to stretch when science/God tells us that everything we know -- the entire visible universe -- is less than 5% of what's out there...
Efforts are well underway to discover new ways to understand and REAL-ize existing religious ideas as grounded, useful, and consistent with science. See TheGreatStory.org and EvolutionaryChristianity.org, as well as Michael Dowd's forthcoming book Thank God for Evolution! How Science and Religion Are Spurring Each Other to Greatness.
Faith and reason are about to find a grander sense of themselves in light of each other. The battle's over... and both sides won.
Tom AtleeCo-Intelligence InstituteEugene, Oregon
