NPR letter put into perspective

My recent letter read on NPR's All Things Considered is, by an large, how I feel. But it was hacked up and meant to add a counter point to the letter they read before it. I was the bad-cop. I sounded like a Richard Dawkins wana-be and I need to set the record straight for my friends and myself.

Inteligent Design is not a scientific theory. It is creationism, wrapped up in a fancy new term. Since I am a Christian this seems to be a dilema for me. How can I assert that creationism is nonsense and evolution etc is corrent and still claim to be a believer?

For one thing I put faith in God that he gaves us big brains for a reason. I put faith in God that we can come to terms with the universe in all its complexity and not worry about where God is. We probably had more "faith", as biblical literalists would describe it, back in the days of Moses. However that definition of faith is inaccurate, if by that they mean a literal reading of the Bible since no prophet or desciple could be faithful since no such book existed in their day. How could they know God if they had no Bible to read? St. Paul could did not read the Bible nor did any of the 12 apostles or any of their imeadiate desciples. The Vulgate, or Common Bible, composed by St. Jerome, was not complied until the 5th century. I will not go into the plethora of biblical translations from the Septuagint, and Vulgate to Luther's german bible to KJV.

Clearly if you hold to biblical literlism, in my humble opinion, you build your faith on sand not rock. Faith based on one book is like a bad scientific theory. Bad theories get clunkier and clunkier until they collapse on their own. So too faith ascribed to one book. Either you choose to remain blind to the modern world and view things like TV as magic, or you try an mesh the modern marvels and mankind quest for knowledge with the book. Either way you fall down. So faith cannot be predicated on attempting to measure the imeasureable. True faith is a hard link between the diety and you. There is no physiological mumbo-jumbo to mess with.

ID or the attempt to measure the imeasurable or quantify God is nuts. It cannot be done. If God wished us to figure him out in that way why no just say "uhummm...over here!" I believe you could sift through each subatomic nuclei in the universe and not find a trace of God. And this has nothing to do with my faith. In a hyper materialist culture full of hyper-materialist church goers, whos faith is based on a book instead of their own connection to God, is it any wonder that people want to be directed to God like we are directed to Walmart?

Faith is not religion. God does not "belong" to a church. Nor is God an old bearded man with a crown on his head. But images die hard and the faith of our forefathers, full of superstition, meldrama, and materialism, is dying hard too. I don't think faith can be built on this world. Not that there is anything wrong with the universe. It is just the wrong perspective. So I guess I would admonish myself to not waste time finding some kind of physical proof of God in science by doing equations, I should save my effort and meditate on how best I can serve my fellow man. Concentrate on what purpose my life has beyond simple reproduction. The Bible has lots to say on that count. And so do lots of other books. And all, in my opinion, are manifestations of Gods word, that always works for good for those who love the Lord.