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Dear All, Mike McReese said something along the lines of "why is everyone one in an uproar about psuedo-science? How can there be psuedo science it science has nothhing to do with truth?" The uproar in my experience is pretty asymmetrical. I have yet to meet a scientist who has said that his or her discipline convinces them that "faith" or "religion" is all bunk. They may well believe that, but usually for reasons other that their work. But I have heard religious people state that their beliefs prove that science is wrong. A scientific fact may well be wrong; but rarely for the reasons they propose! As has been said many times, science is concerned with those questions that can be answered, and so tends to deal with small points one at a time. If science gives us any sort of world picture or cosmology, it is purely serendipitous. Faith, on the contrary, presents a global image, which if accepted allows the individual to see divine handiwork in all things from the orbit of planets to the migration of birds. It does not need evidence, but rather acceptance and then interpretation. In my opinion, the two things simply don't conflict, even if they overlap. There is nothing to stop the faithful considering Van der Waal's forces or Bolide Impacts to be anything other than evidence of divine order. Let us not forget that many great palaeontologists, like Richard Owen, believed this to be true. Conversely, an aethistic scientist (or more commonly, agnostic) can see divine action is uneccessary: but that does not prove the absence of such actions. That any conflict exists between the two viewpoints is generally through misunderstanding what the other side is saying. Best wishes, Neale >From Neale Monks' PowerBook, at... Department of Palaeontology, Natural History Museum, London, SW7 5BD Internet: N.Monks@nhm.ac.uk, Telephone: 0171-938-9007
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