Title: Re: paleonet science-faith
relationship
science and religion are not mutually
exclusive ...
they are compatible. the Biblical account says that
God said "Let the earth bring forth ... " and
"Let
the waters bring forth ...". This, my friends, is
evolution .... highly simplified. God doesn't make
life in the account ... just commands it to begin.
There are many other examples in the
Christian/Judeo/Islamic holy books and in other
religions. Read St. Augustine's early essays.
Some religions are compatible with some aspects of science.
Evangelical Christianity doesn't seem to have any problem whatsoever
with the ahistorical aspects of physics, chemistry, biology or earth
science. In fact professional fields like engineering that apply
principles of some principles of science to "practical use"
seem to be chock full of members of the religious right.
Something about a dictum giving us dominion over Nature ...
Holy books are essentially tract-length Rorschach tests.
You can get out of them what ever you bring to them. The people
who wrote them lived in a different time and place and so brought
their own experiences to the writing of those books. That modern
people try to extract meaning from stories that were based on the oral
tradition of Iron Age shepherds and then written, re-written and
mis-translated a few times is a dodgy enterprise at best.
Take a look at the lyrics to an Appalachian ballad sometime.
Many of them are based on one or more related Child ballads that were
originally written down during the Renaissance in England or Scotland
and whose roots are, of course, much deeper. They came across
the water in the 18th century and were isolated in the hollows of
Appalachia for a couple hundred years by folks who didn't write them
down and shifted the signifiers in the stories to match their own
experience.
It's actually conceptually similar to trying to reconstruct
living assemblages from fossil assemblages. But faulty memory
and changing intentions take the place of pore-water chemistry and
sorting by bottom currents. The result is the same: a
time-averaged puzzle.
Science is an attempt to explain how all
of this works
and religion is an attempt to explain
why.
Which is why the two time-averaged puzzles, the Bible on one hand
and, say, a Devonian limestone on the other are interpreted with such
different intents. We honestly want to know what the benthic
environment was like in the Devonian and so scrupulously disentangle
the artifactual from the factual in order to understand how it
was. And yet millions of people try to use a text that is
essentially as cryptic as a shell midden to guide them toward
discovering how to be and why. I sincerely wish them
well.
Best wishes to all in this holiday season,
Bill
--
_____________________________
William P. Chaisson
Adjunct Assistant Professor
Dept. Earth & Environmental Sciences
University of Rochester
Rochester, New York 14627
607-387-3892