At 05:59 PM 1/5/03 -0800, Nick Arnett wrote:
> -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On > Behalf Of Richard Baker... > The thing is, it's not possible to prove the Big Bang. How would one > even go about trying to prove it? But this guy is questioning the very notion of order arising from chaos, as though science couldn't possibly deal with such a concept. Hello? We don't need God to show how that happens. From my point of view, God created a universe made of stuff that works that way; if there's a miracle there, it's that such things exist, not how they behave. How much education will it take for people to realize that understanding how creation works, whether in evolution, the birth of the universe, or whatever, doesn't rule out God's existence?
An illustration I have used both in my astronomy classes and Church settings is to draw a Venn diagram with two partially overlapping circles, one of which is labelled "Science" and the other "Religious Belief", then draw a circle in the intersection and label it "TRUTH": the idea being that whatever we discover that is really true will contradict neither true science nor true religion. Sometimes I follow that with another diagram in which the two circles are clearly disjoint, and label one of them "MY religion = TRUTH" and the other "Science = OF THE DEVIL!" and comment that this is the worldview some people seem to espouse, which, as intended, generally does get some laughs.
I suppose I run the risk of offending some friends (not here, I suspect) by saying that every time I see some Christian slogan or symbol decrying Darwin, I immediately tend to assume that it belongs to someone who ever learned much of anything about the science of evolution.
Would that be "… NEVER learned much …"?
And on this subject, is anyone here familiar with Dr. Charles Townes and his talks on science and Christianity? He's speaking near here on Feb. 8th and I'm thinking of going.
If you have a chance to go, your mission, of course, is to return and report.
He's the inventor of the laser, a Nobel laureate and the flyer for the talk says he "will speak on the modern convergence between science and religion into a unified way of understanding reality."
The problem with many attempts (NOT necessarily Dr. Townes's) attempts to "unify" science and religion is that they basically assume one is completely true and then try to make the other one fit into that framework, regardless of how much they have to hammer on it or trim pieces off. The classic example is the various attempts of so-called "creation scientists" or "scientific creationists" to make the creation of at least the Earth, and possibly the whole Universe, fit into the six days of Creation that are described in Genesis, on the assumption that the word "day" in that account refers to 24 hours of 60 minutes of 60 seconds, each of which is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom (for which I assume we have to wait until God has created the first Cs¹³³ atom . . .). Frex, that the ground was so soft after the Flood that geological features like the Grand Canyon were formed in a few days or weeks by the runoff of the waters (which, BTW, to cover the whole Earth above the tops of all the mountains currently on Earth would require an additional volume of water some 3.6 times the volume of all the water currently in the oceans), or that somehow the Earth was originally created in close orbit around the black hole at the center of our Galaxy, then somehow flung off into space where it travelled until it came to rest at its current location, and the relativistic time dilation allowed the Earth to age 4.5 billion years while the rest of the Universe aged 6 days. (Identifying the problems inherent in the latter scenario is left as an exercise for the reader . . .)
--Ronn! :)
I always knew that I would see the first man on the Moon.
I never dreamed that I would see the last.
--Dr. Jerry Pournelle
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