The recent hullabaloo on JU between certain atheist bloggers and certain Christian bloggers has brought one of my biggest pet peeves to the surface; that is, the inability of either side to acknowledge and/or learn from the other.
On the Christian side, we have certain individuals who refuse to entertain theories such as plate tectonics, evolution, and other theories because those theories are not explicitly supported by THEIR INTERPRETATION of the Bible (doesn't mean they're not supported by the Bible, just not by THAT interpretation). To those particular individuals (who, by no means represent the whole of Christianity), anything that is not spelled out in the Bible is heresy. They refuse to acknowledge the possibility that scientists may well be shedding a great deal of light on the nature and scope of creation, but instead throw out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak. This makes their position very unappealing to even the most open scientific mind.
Conversely, many atheists (who, similarly, by no means represent the whole of atheistic thought) refuse to entertain honest questions and challenges to the theories that have been advanced. They refuse to acknowledge even a possibility of intelligent design, even given the qualification that the designer may be a being without attributes such as omnipotence and omniscience that are usually ascribed to a creator in most theistic thought. They claim to rely solely on empirical evidence, without the basic acknowledgement that most scientific theories are based not on empirical evidence, but on a preponderance of physical evidence.They refuse to open their mind to outside possibilities that should be explored in the pursuit of knowledge upon which they claim to be travelling.
Me, I'm somewhere in the middle (though decidedly on the theistic side). I know and believe in God, and in Christ, but am not quick to dismiss physical evidence, which, from my point of view, elaborates on, rather than undermines, creation theory. I believe God intended for us to seek these things out; just as I would study the works of an artist or an author if I wished to "know" them, I feel that a creationist seeking to grow should study God's creation in order to know Him better.
There are many issues that I would like to discuss intelligently with people on the other side of the coin. But unfortunately, any attempt to do so through JU usually results in a piss fit or degenerates into a satirical ridicule of the original poster's position. The best way to learn,in my experience, is to first admit you DON'T know everything.