Ronn! wrote:
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 . . .)Or one could simply rely on the linguists' belief that Genesis is a poem and therefore not meant to be taken literally, in which case it stands up rather well...
I suppose that fits under your category of assuming that one is true and trying to fit the other one into it. But it makes a lot more sense to me (and many others) that science is a description of the rules of the Universe, and spirituality is about the Maker of those rules, than it does to believe that the bible is literal truth (which it clearly can't be, because of the contradictions mentioned by The Fool and others), and to try to bend science to fit with that framework.
Reggie Bautista
I've *got* to find those references Maru
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