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Dear Peter Kaplan & Kenneth A.
Monsch,
I am finally back on line. Sorry I'm late getting
back to say thanks for replying to my email on the Creation-Evolution problem. A
storm knocked out our phone line and the first time it was fixed we got one call
and it was out again before I got online. At least it gave me time to think
about what you said.
I don't quite know what you mean by "your mode of
understanding lies not entirely in the rational realm". I have always thought of
myself as a rational thinker. I like to have logical reasons for everything but
I do think that we have to accept things we can't prove to get started and
feelings can help get a train of thought going to. For instance when I was
looking at a picture of the Venus of Willandorf in Nature Australia a few years
ago and reading their speculation about the markings on it's 'head' I had a
feeling they were not on the right track. In the process of more or less idly
thinking about it the idea came to me that they looked a bit like the
convolutions of the brain. Then I thought the 'head' might be a stylized brain
and if stylized probably symbolic. I suppose because of my interest in
Bible imagery I started to see that the whole thing might be symbolic and about
the mind and truth. An educational artifact from a time before writing was
invented. I wonder how many people have thought about how education might have
worked without writing! This train of thought is still continuing and has
produced what seems to me to be a feasible explanation of the selective pressure
necessary for the evolution of larger brains and our hair arrangement among
other things. The same sort of thing happened many years ago when I was mucking
about with geology. I had a feeling that the Convection Current Theory of
continental drift couldn't be right. I think it was the principle of the
Stirling Cycle engine that gave me the idea of a mechanism of my own for driving
the seafloor apart. There may be nothing in any of these ideas but nothing has
come up yet to knock them out. In fact the Black Smokers they find along the
undersea ridges fit in very nicely. I would like to know if they take in water
when not emitting 'black smoke' because something like that is required for my
mechanism.
I've always been a bit hazy about what people mean
by 'objective thinking'. If you mean 'unbiased, without prejudice' I think that
is very necessary. I think the problem with creationists is that they are
hopelessly biased because they are so impossibly sure of what they think they
know. I think that boils down to pride which reminds me that after sending my
email off I thought I should have given a definition of the word 'pride'.
Pride is often used these days to refer to ordinary self esteem which I see as
very necessary but as l understand it the proper meaning of 'pride' is
'inordinate self esteem' which nobody needs, it's a disaster.
I would like to point out that I didn't set out to
smudge over the differences between Bible creation and evolution. My solution to
the problem came as a byproduct of researching for a short column I write for
our Church program sheet each month in which I try to define words I consider
important for understanding the Bible and religion generally.
If anyone can find anything clearly wrong with
anything I say I would like to know about it provided that you give real reasons
that I can chew over.
Peter Hosier
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