Title: Re: paleonet Faith and
skepticism
To grossly oversimplify, the point at
which American creationists chose the
"wrong track" was approximately 1955-1965. At this
time, two related but
very different books were published.
The "right track" book was Bernard Ramm's "The
Christian View of Science
and Scripture (1955)," which suggested several possible
interpretations of
Genesis that could be reconciled with modern science. The modern
science
part was heavily informed by Larry Kulp, a pioneer of isotope
geochemistry
and geochronology at Columbia and a
Wheaton College grad.
I hadn't heard of Ramm's book and so did what I usually do these
day. I typed his name into Google.
The first return is a 1979 interview with Ramm by Walter Hearn, a
representatiove of the American Scientific Affiliation (Science in the
Christian Perspective).
http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1979/JASA12-79Hearn.html
Here's the crux (pun intended):
Ramm: What
disturbs me the most about the most rigid creationist views is that
they drive Christians and scientists millions of miles apart. Some of
them amount to a total denial of anything significant in geology.
There's a unity to the sciences and the borders of the sciences
overlap. You can't just pick out geology and say, "Science is all
wrong there, but it's right in all these other territories." Take
the use of atomic materials, high-speed atomic particles, X rays and
so on; going to the doctor to get an X ray is one piece of the
science, but it spills over into geology. It's odd if you have to say
that almost 100% of the world's geologists are wrong, but once you get
away from geology the scientists are pretty right. That seems to me to
be something creationists have to come to terms with.
Hearn: The
most energetic special creationists would argue that essentially all
of science has to be restructured. Do you think there's any
possibility of doing that?
Ramm:
There's a certain pragmatism to science. If you have to restructure
science, you have to deny an enormous amount of success up to this
point. Take the sophistication of going to the moon and back. However
right or wrong one thinks science is, it did do that. Think of the
number of successful surgeries that go on in hospitals every day. And
technology in industry. So there is enormous pragmatic weight in favor
of a lot of scientific theory. Even if you could restructure, that
wouldn't mean you're going to totally overturn. Maybe you're going to
suggest some new basic principles.
Hearn: I
imagine you've heard about astrophysicist Robert Jastrow and his
admission that the structure of the whole universe is so remarkable
that people who look at that structure have to acknowledge that they
face mystery. I've seen a quote of his to the effect that when the
astronomers have learned all they can, "when they have crossed
over the hill they find that the theologians were there ahead of them
thinking about these things."
Ramm: Yes,
and the "Big Bang" theory has picked up new prestige. But
I've talked to scientists who don't believe anything, and I find that
they are not impressed with that kind of reasoning. Their basic
response is, "Yes, there's a crook in the road, and it appears
that yes, there's a God who is doing this, but we're going to do some
more experiments and ten years from now we won't look at it that way.
So we'll just sweat this one out until we find out the answer later
on." And when it comes to the "argument from design," I
heard a scientist make an absurd statement that at least showed his
mentality. He said that if something appeared to be designed with a
probability of a billion to one, he still wouldn't believe it was
designed. So you have that kind of tough attitude in a lot of
scientists. They won't believe anything but what they empirically
know, and if there's a puzzle they just say, "Well, we'll sweat
it out and we'll eventually solve the puzzle."
Hearn: Isn't
that why the conflict is really a philosophical one? I mean, there's a
scientific way of looking at the data and a religious way of looking
at the data. There are two ways to do it, and you have to decide which
way to look at it.
Ramm: What had
in mind is this: sometimes Christians think that if you come to the
place where we are now, with the Big Bang theory picking up what I
gather is experimental verification, with discovering the "hisses
of the original electrons"-or whatever the new findings amount
to-they think all scientists should capitulate, that they are forced
to believe in God. But scientists can be tough characters. They don't
capitulate that easily.
Hearn: Philosophically, can't you say that
that's a basic difference between the scientific outlook and the
religious outlook? In science there's nothing that can force you to
believe. If there were, you wouldn't need a religious outlook, because
you'd get it all out of science.
Bill
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William P. Chaisson
Adjunct Assistant Professor
Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences
University of Rochester
Rochester, NY 14627
607-387-3892