08:41 – After almost 24 hours without Barbara, Colin and I are surviving. I like to exercise my culinary skills while Barbara’s away, so for dinner I had egg-salad sandwiches with egg salad that I made myself. And Barbara thinks I can’t cook. I made it through only five episodes of Heartland last night, S4E12 through S4E16. That leaves 21 episodes through S6E1 remaining, which I don’t think I’ll get through before Barbara returns on Saturday.
I also did some more work on the Life Science kit. I always order the lab manuals for any curricula I intend to correlate our kits with, and among those are religious “science” curricula from the likes of A Beka, Apologia, Bob Jones University Press, and so on. I always order the current versions, and the BJUP Life Science lab manual showed up Tuesday.
Much of the religious curriculum stuff simply can’t be correlated. For example, one of the “investigations” in the BJUP Life Science curriculum has the students drawing a cross section of Noah’s Ark and then cutting out little human and animal figures to scale and pasting them on the ark drawing. I am not making this up. And then there’s the “investigation” on evolution, which has students filling in a table that lists various phenotypic and behavioral characteristics of dinosaurs and checking the appropriate column for evidence-based versus guess. As we all know, scientists do a lot of guessing, right? Then there’s the “investigation” where students are tasked with reading specific bible verses and describing the animals that are the subjects of those verses. Geez. I can’t wait to get to Earth Science.
I’m a Christian, and I don’t think the Noah’s Ark thing sounds like anything that belongs in science class. I’ll go on a limb and say it sounds like a great idea for a Sunday School class, but not a science class. Also, if the Noah’s Ark thing is appropriate for Sunday School, it’s at a much younger age than seventh or eighth grade.
Bob, of course scientists do a lot of guessing, they just call it hypothesising. And then they go to the lab to test the hypothesis. If the results in the lab confirm the hypothesis, then they publish, and other scientists read it and go try it out in their labs.
All I know about science, I learned from Michael Mann and Phil Jones. I
learned that there is no place in science for guessing, but there is an
honored (but hidden) place for data concealment, data falsification, and
creative use of statistics and graphs.
Seriously, those stupid bastards probably set back the acceptance of
science and logical reasoning in the US by a century and a half. Why the
hell should the average American — who is likely brainwashed by
anti-logical religious programming anyway — believe anything a
scientist says, when it’s obvious that “scientists” just make shit up,
lie their asses off, and threaten to sue anyone who calls them on it.
Hypotheses are not guesses. They are proposed explanations for observed facts that are in every respect consistent with those facts. Critically, hypotheses must be testable and falsifiable. Guesses need not meet either of those criteria.
With most of the religious nutters around here, if you say “Your {scientific notion} sounds interesting. What steps have you taken to confirm your theory?” they simply replay “BUT IT SAYS IT IN THE BIBLE!!!”
Why even bother with life science? Physics is the only true science… -:)
A surprising percentage of fundamentalist homeschoolers use secular science, for two reasons.
First, although it all seems like religious nuttery to rational people, there are apparently real doctrinal differences in religious curricula from the point of view of fundamentalists. They dislike religious curricula that are not their flavor at least as much as they dislike secular curricula.
Second, many fundamentalists are smart enough to realize that colleges and universities don’t consider their “science” to be science at all. By teaching religious “science”, they harm their kids chances at getting into a good college or university. Even if the kid is accepted at a good school, he starts out with two strikes against him in the science courses.
And, from the fundamentalists’ point of view, the real bitch is that if their kids learn real science, they are overwhelmingly more likely to give up their religion. Something like 70% of fundamentalist students who attend normal colleges and universities leave their churches by the time they graduate. I suspect the percentage is considerably higher among those students who major in science. One can’t do science properly without learning how to think, and once a student learns how to think he begins questioning the arguments from authority that his soon-to-be-former religion uses as its sole basis.
Seriously now, why even bother with what the nutters are saying? If you include references to their books ou just lend them credibility.
Because I’m doing my small part in helping to create a new generation of scientists. Just because a kid is hampered by religious curricula doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve a shot at learning real science. There are a good many real working scientists who grew up in fundamentalist households but escaped the irrationality.
Nothing can lend credibility to religious “science” curricula. They are ridiculous on the face of things. They are anti-science.
And we always recommend good secular science curricula. For the biology kit, for example, we recommend Miller-Levine and CK-12. For Life Science, we’ll recommend CK-12, which has the inestimable advantage of being freely downloadable.
I look at your last paragraph from the opposite direction. Teach kids real science from the start and they will learn to reconcile faith and science.
I ran a calculation on the Noah’s Ark myth. Of course, I had to make some assumptions, but they were not unreasonable and the final result showed that they had no substantial affect on the conclusion. Such as, a uniform atmospheric temperature of 70 degf F over the surface of the earth, the standard atmospheric properties (temperature and pressure versus altitude). I started with a value of 100% relative humidity from MSL to 50,000 feet and finished with 0% relative humidity after the deluge (of which the 40 day peroiod was not a quantitative factor). (No, I did not reconcile the dispersal of the billions on BTUs of the heat of condensation that would have accompanied the conversion of water vapor to liquid water.)
Well,…..the envelope please….less than 3 feet of water. Now, how does that float your boat?
Any other questions?
OFD?
The two are irreconcilable, other than in the trivial sense that humans are capable of believing two conflicting ideas simultaneously. Science demands evidence for assertions, and regards faith as a dirty word. Religion demands faith, and accepts evidence only insofar as it confirms preconceptions taught by that religion.
Ken Miller, for example, is an excellent scientist and is also a devout Roman Catholic. He can be both because he reserves faith for outside working hours. You won’t catch him taking anything on faith when he’s in the lab.
But that’s no evidence of compatibility between religion and science. That’s merely evidence that Ken has two “modes”: rational mode when he’s at work, and irrational mode when he’s in church.
Stu Nicol asked: “Well,…..the envelope please….less than 3 feet of water. Now, how does that float your boat?”
Maybe it was really just Noah’s Canoe? Tales DO grow in the telling.
I take the same view of religion that I do aliens. I double-dare an alien to come and get me in his spaceship. Likewise, I double-dare any supposed omnipotent super-power creator to come down and tell me the facts, as preposterously occurred with Moses and the like. Ain’t ever gonna happen, because it is not true.
Stumbled across this very interesting ITV (British) documentary made in 1993. Since it withholds the premise until the very end, I’ll just save 40 minutes of suspense, that there is evidence Jesus never died; that the sponge with “vinegar” was likely some kind of sleep potion; that Jesus was absent from 14 to 29 because he was being trained as a Buddhist monk as previously arranged by the 3 wise men; that he escaped the tomb with friendly help and returned to Kashmir, where he continued to teach; that it was well-known in Kashmir that he had the scars of nails through his feet.
Fantastic story? Sounds just a slight bit more logical than immaculate conception and being whisked off to heaven—a part of the story that the documentary claims was added to the Bible some 200 years after the original gospels were written.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YbUEZfJJaQ
Even setting aside the fantastical elements of the Christian story, I’d
be a lot less inclined to laugh at them if they’d at least come up with
original fantastical stories. Christian dogma was mostly stolen
from other religions, conspicuously Mithraism. I’ll give ’em an A for
effort but an F for plausibility, morality, and originality.
“Ken Miller, for example, is an excellent scientist and is also a devout Roman Catholic.”
I believe you have said many times in the past that a “scientist” and belief in “God” are mutually exclusive. Are you saying Mr. Miller really doesn’t believe in God?
No, I have consistently stated matters as I did above. Humans, including scientists, are not always consistent.
I have the highest regard for Ken, personally and professionally. He believes that his religious beliefs are compatible with science, which they are not. He is correct that having religious beliefs does not mean that someone cannot be a scientist. It’s certainly true that scientists are much, much less likely than non-scientists to have religious beliefs, and the more educated in science one is, the less likely one is to hold any religious beliefs.
[snip] Science demands evidence for assertions, and regards faith as a dirty word. [snip]
I have faith in gravity, I just don’t pray to it. And was it really necessary for Admiral Noah to bring two each typhoid & cholera bacillus? And shouldn’t every typhoid bacteria we examine have DNA which is exactly like one of two possible samples? 😉
No, not necessary at all. I read the theocratic supposition in the A. D. White book. The common houseflys were not perpetuated on the boat by Noah and I assume similar for the above noted species. The common flies do not propogate in the normal manner. On the contrary, they spontaneously generate out of manure.
I take that “spontaneous generation” story to be both metaphorical and
Bowdlerized. You’re not supposed to say “horse’s ass” in front of
innocent little children, so we say “horse fly” instead. Thus, a
metaphor or parable of how politicians and Nosey Parkers and other
busybodies continually, spontaneously arise from the masses has been
contorted into some non-scientific nonsense about flies.
It is known that the Mediterranean was once dry. That was millions of years ago, but must have been quite the event when it started flooding through the Strait of Gibraltar.
Other seas were filled more recently, for example, the Black see apparently only 7600 years ago, when people were certainly living in the area. What kinds of stories and legends might arise from such an event? A great flood, a struggle to survive, perhaps using ships to save families and livestock? Perhaps, over centuries of retelling, such an event grew into the tale of Noah’s Ark?
What brad just said. So lots of people believe in a literal interpretation of the Noah’s Ark story, along with many others, and other folks enjoy ridiculing them for that. Good show! Been going on for a couple of centuries now. I agree that those stories do not belong in a science curriculum. But is that good enough? Nope. I am also irrational outside of the science classroom when I attend Mass on Sunday mornings, or whatever day. So probably a lunatic and a fool, like a billion other Roman Catholics. Oh well, I can live with that.
Also, if not for Holy Mother Church, we would have zippo for science now; it was the Church that got it going, encouraged it, and to this day supports it.
And Stu, three FEET of water??? You can DROWN in three INCHES of wottuh! How big would the ark have to be to displace the three feet and thus be immovable? In any case, these are STORIES, meant to ILLUSTRATE something or other; lighten the fuck up, everybody. And get away from all those fundie Prods that bother the hell out of you down there in the tropics. Rest assured no one will bother you with it here in Nova Anglia or upstate NY, or for that mattuh, most of the northern tier of states. The heat really gets to people, I reckon….
Um, no. The RC church, far from being a friend of science, has done everything possible to hinder it. Without the interference of the RC church, science would probably now be at least two to three hundred years ahead of where it is now.
immaculate conception
The Immaculate Conception is not the same as the Virgin Birth, but they are frequently confused. IC is the assertion that Mary was free of Original Sin.
Without the interference of the RC church, science would probably now be at least two to three hundred years ahead of where it is now.
So that is why we don’t have transporters, phasers (set to stun naturally) and warp drive.
The Immaculate Conception is not the same as the Virgin Birth, but they are frequently confused. IC is the assertion that Mary was free of Original Sin.
It does seem odd that anyone would confuse conception and birth.
Both involve a lot of effort, grunting, sweat, yelling, and fluids
all over the place… if you’re doing it right.
We may have warp drive soon. See? I follow the science nooz as a good, science-loving Roman Catholic.
And if it wasn’t for Alexander Hamilton, our financial system would be at least two to three-hundred years ahead of where it is right now. Geez, without the Church science would still be about where it is with the Arab world. Oh yeah, those buggers gave us algebra. Thanks a lot, guys!
If it wasn’t for Edison and them other big boyz messing with Tesla, our electrical systems would be a hundred years beyond where they are now.
Etc.
Women sure don’t.
The RC church actively suppressed science, and would still be doing so today if it could get away with it. Unlike the protestant fundies, the RC church is sensitive about looking ridiculous. The problem with that strategy is that you end up with god-of-the-gaps arguments, which are currently down to the quantum level, literally.
Actually, I was talking about virgin conception—no sperm, no partner, no sex, no artificial insemination. I did/do know what IC is, having grown up around many in the family who are RC, but my mind often jumps to the wrong word the older I get. Anyway, I was not talking about birth, I was talking conception. I know what birth is, having witnessed it up close twice. A lot more messy than the conception part was.
“……Arab world. Oh yeah, those buggers gave us algebra. Thanks a lot, guys!”
We also got the zero, 0, from them. (The Roman system started at one, 1). However, after that, the Arab, Muslim world went into intellectual shutdown. (Yes, I realize they are two different things, ethnic and religous.)
Regarding physical science as it is applied to the atmosphere, the baseball yappers are equally ignorant. I heard one of them yapping on a hot, humid night that the long ball, home run hitters would have it extra tough that night. They said that the very humid air is quite HEAVY and therefore the long fly balls would travel as far. Totally, completely wrong, inside out and upside down. Dry air has a molecular weight of 29.8 while that of water is 18. Consequently, humid air at 100% relative humidity is less dense and the atmospheric drag on a moving object will be proportionally less. Outside of that, ….. Oh yeah, tennis great John McEnroe was yapping the same wrong humid atmosphere drivel while commenting on a tennis match on TV while predicting less service aces. (Yes, I intentionally did not use commentating.)
While I’m here, another one from the A. D. White book:
http://www.amazon.com/History-Warfare-Science-Theology-Christendom/dp/0879758260/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1348183328&sr=1-1&keywords=history+of+the+warfare+of+science+with+theology+in+christendom
Specifically, the question of the Antipodes:
When it was believed that the earth was flat, such question was: “..do people live on the underside of the earth?”
The answer was no, because the Bible (or intpretations thereof by the clergy) said that people go down to hell or up to heaven. However, if they lived on the bottom, or underside, they would go up to hell and down to heaven and that would be biblically impossible.
Regarding the correctness of the Christian Bible and the interpretations of the Christian Clergy, I consider the A. D. White book to be the second most relevant after Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason.
Using my CB handle, I will note that subjects of a religous nature always kick up the activity level in these parts. lol
Have you looked at correlating with Nebel’s Middle School Science Education: Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding, Vol. III, Grades 6-8?
“…subjects of a religous nature always kick up the activity level in these parts.”
Dunno why that is, Slim; there are about three or four Christians on this board that I know of, and I think I may be about the only Roman Catholic, so we are heavily outnumbered. Why our little band of nutters surrounded by atheists is such a source of excitement is beyond me.
And the interesting thing is that there are NO fundie Prods here, yet they’re the ones who, rightfully so, cause the most consternation. My advice is to either ignore them totally, tell them to sod off, or move the hell away. We have very few up in these parts; most of the Christians in the northern tier are either mainstream denominations, all losing ground fast, especially my former church, the Episcopalians, who will be extinct by 2026 at current rates of attrition by one means or another, or Roman Catholics. Neither group will get in your face and rush you with their super-Christian bag.
Other than those two groups, we occasionally are confronted by Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses, which is fine with me, because I love to argue with them and prove them wrong about almost everything. So right off the bat, Mittens can come here and I will set his Richie-Rich ass straight. But Nosferatu II is a lost cause; twenty years soaking up the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s racist bigotry and hatred, being married in his church, and having his daughters baptized by that creature, is a nightmare, and then the hypocrite can’t get away from the guy fast enough.
Mormons and Jehovah’s come around here and take one look at the crucifix and our northeastern European Celtic-ness and Norse-ness and turn tail immediately. Clearly we are either slaves to the Whore of Babylon or neo-pagan human sacrifice maniacs who are buried in flaming longships at sea.
“…countless Catholic scientists and scholars who have expanded scientific knowledge across a diverse range of fields. The church itself has often been a patron of the sciences. Its longstanding commitment to expanding literacy and numeracy through education, and its provision of medical services has in many respects aided scientific development.”
“…t has been common for clergymen-scholars to also work as scientists – among them Nicholaus Copernicus who placed the sun at the centre of the solar system; Gregor Mendel who observed the foundations of modern genetics; and mathematician Georges Lemaître who proposed the Big Bang Theory for the origins of the universe. Other great Catholic scientists include Roger Bacon, Nicholas Steno, Francesco Grimaldi, Giambattista Riccioli, Roger Boscovich and Athanasius Kircher. The Catholic legacy can be witnessed in the use of Latin in the scientific naming of animals and plants and in the worldwide use of the Gregorian Calendar, developed from astronomical observations funded by Pope Gregory XIII. Catholic missionaries like the Jesuits were at the vanguard of international scientific and cultural exchange as European influence extended through the Americas, Africa and Asia – in places like China they introduced modern astronomy and mathematical theory and translated local texts to be sent to Europe for study.”
But of course there has been occasional CONFLICT between scientism and Roman Catholicism and the article mentions a couple of schools of thought on that. To make it sound like the Church has always fought science and dumped on it is patently absurd.
“The Catechism of the Catholic Church asserts: “Methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things the of the faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are”.
And There It Is.
“despite the widely held conception of the Catholic Church as being anti-science, this conventional wisdom has been the subject of “drastic revision” by historians of science over the last 50 years. Woods asserts that the mainstream view now is that the “Church [has] played a positive role in the development of science … even if this new consensus has not yet managed to trickle down to the general public”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_science
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Catholic_scientists
Dave, I don’t know how you can defend the RC church, or why you left Protestantism. These old jokers in Babylon on the Tiber have been making stuff up out of thin air for 1000+ years. Long live the Reformation!
The Reformation has metastasized again; the mainstream Protestant denominations are dying out, some faster than others, and their new Jerusalem is embodied in uber-fundie Prod cults, growing like wildfire, and seen as such in the so-called mega-churches around the country. These cults are also growing fast in the southern hemisphere and posing a strong challenge to Roman Catholicism. In sheer numbers/demographics, of course, nothing else. Like the muslim hordes.
Meanwhile Holy Mother Church, despite the fascistic patriarchal dictatorship of all those ancient pedophiles in Babylon on the Tiber, has over a billion faithful, again very, very strong in the southern hemisphere, and truth be known, around 80 million of us here in the U.S. That is 25% of the American population, and around the time of the Revolution and our War of Independence it was about one percent.
I can defend the Catholic Church all day and all night and I left “Protestantism” when IT left ME. Come home to Rome, Greg, and leave all that silliness and Henricus Rex VIII behind once and for all. I will put in a good word for you with the Cardinal down there in Oz accordingly. Pax vobiscum.
I used to date is Catholic (not Roman Catholic, she stated emphatically) girl, but her beliefs were just too weird, so we stopped dating after three months. Plus, her father was a damn-the-Protestants-to-hell type Mick. I don’ t think she ever told him I wasn’t an idoloter like them. Catholicism is just weird Dave, I’m sure you know that.
Boy, I’ve just been reading up on immaculate conception, papal infallibility, the Council of Trent and so on. What horse manure! Those guys must have been loaded with smack, rope, booze, crack (the chemical and feminine varieties) and a whole lot of other good stuff while they were dreaming that stuff up.
“Catholicism is just weird”
It may be, but in an abstract sort of way I have always found the ritualism kind of fascinating. The elaborate rituals give an interesting insight into the way people’s minds work, what they find comforting, etc..
Apropos of nothing, the Catholic rituals also seem to have formed the basis for ceremonial magic, in the sense of Aleister Crowley. The combination of the two is presented very nicely in the “Camber of Culdi” novels. A good read, for anyone who missed them.
I used to go to a fundamentalist Baptist church with very little ritual, no stained glass, etc. I liked it there but later joined a moderate Preslbyterian church with more ritual but not as much as the Micks or Anglos, and lovely woodworking and stained glass. In my old age I’ve come to like a bit of liturgy but the Micks and Anglos completely overdo it. I mean, what sort of guy prances around his workplace in a white nightie?
Re: religion vs. science, Emma Goldman presents a very reasoned article addressing the utter drag Christianity, in particular, is on progress.
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/goldman/failureofchristianity.html
As she says, “The reward in heaven is the perpetual bait, a bait that has caught man in an iron net, a strait-jacket which does not let him expand or grow.”
No one can prove reproducibly that a heaven or a god exists, and rituals do not make it so—although many believe that it does. There have been RC priests in my family, and at the end of their life, they declared their life to have been worthless, as they could not convince others to believe the fantasies with conviction as they did. The fact that after 2,000 years, only crazy idiots with wild, demonstrably untrue predictions of the end of the Earth come forth with decidedly false ‘messages from a god’ more-or-less indicates to me that those ancients written about in the fiction of scribes and ‘priests’ were the nutters of their day—if they even existed. At least the fiction of today is much more readable and inventive than the ancient fiction, which—remarkably—people are willing to believe as utterly real without reproducible proof.
People want desperately to attach a meaning, reason and sanctity to the life of man on Earth, when the fact is that it is a serendipitous accident of the coincidence of unusual circumstances. Does a dog, deer, worm, or fly contemplate the reason for existence? No. They get on with the obvious that is in front of them. Only man has the capability to be so distracted that he self-destructs to immobility and irrationality with the quite clearly false promise by charlatans of something that will never be delivered.
“People want desperately to attach a meaning, reason and sanctity to the life of man on Earth, when the fact is that it is a serendipitous accident of the coincidence of unusual circumstances.”
There seems to be a fundamental human need in play here. A need to feel important, to feel needed. At the risk of waxing Shakespearean: Why should one suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? Why not just jump off a cliff when the going gets rough (and surely everyone has had a rough patch or two)?
Religion provides an easy, pre-packaged answer. Frankly, there’s nothing really wrong with that. After all, most people want (need?) to have some sort of answer to this question, even though it makes little practical difference in day-to-day life.
It all started with the Witch Doctor and the Tribal Chief conspiring to establish control over the populace. It continues today with the new POTUS putting his hand on the Bible as he is inaugurated.
.. Ooo eee, ooo ah ah ting tang. Walla walla, bing bang……
.. Ooo eee, ooo ah ah ting tang. Walla walla, bing bang……
My wife’s side of the family wedding chant. With my side not being far behind as they don’t have the southern accent.
Hi OFD, I am a believer and am a member of the Church of Christ ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churches_of_Christ ). I’m not sure that you get more “Fundie Prod” than that. Of course, there is the Baptist preacher who maintains that the CofC is a cult. I just know that we are a very hard headed bunch and striving to be in Gods grace like all other Christians.
What is interesting is the number of scientists and engineers (including myself) that I know in the church. I have friends with PhDs in Chemistry and Engineering. There are five practicing medical doctors going to my church that I know of. My dad has a PhD in Chemical Engineering from Princeton and is a very strong believer. I’m just a plain old BS in Mechanical Engineering.
I would say at least half the adult members of my church (about 1700 people in all) have a college degree of some sort. Of course, I live in a very affluent area, Fort Bend County in Texas ( http://money.cnn.com/gallery/pf/jobs/2012/08/20/best-places-job-growth.moneymag/2.html ).
I just wish that people would not take the Bible so literally. It is a user manual, not a history book. I believe that people who try to identify specific times and events in there are in trouble.
“…What is interesting is the number of scientists and engineers (including myself) that I know in the church. I have friends with PhDs in Chemistry and Engineering. There are five practicing medical doctors going to my church that I know of. My dad has a PhD in Chemical Engineering from Princeton and is a very strong believer. I’m just a plain old BS in Mechanical Engineering….”
I was a Rocket Scientist for many years.
The Guidance, Control & Navigation Systems on our rockets were programmed to avoid the recently deceased on their journey to Heaven and the Angels flitting about as they attended the Saints.
A ha!
I always knew you were a closet believer… 🙂
Lynn, I never take the pit bull atheists seriously when they say being a Christian and a scientist is contradictory. There’s a number of scientists at my church in Canberra, including a retired geology professor with a PhD in his field who is as happy attacking creationism as he is ridiculing the athiest fundamentalists. And there are many public figures who are both scientists and believers. Even Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution Is True, and one of the less rabid pit bulls agrees that belief and science are not incompatible.
Roger that, Miles, neither am I a closet atheist nor a non-closet atheist.
Much to the contrary, I am a pantheistic deist.
Jerry Coyne agrees to no such thing. Where did you get that idea? He has stated frequently that science is fundamentally incompatible with religious faith. And Jerry is about as “rabid” an atheist as you’ll find.
Again, you mistake the trivial “compatibility” of a person simultaneously holding two conflicting beliefs with true epistemological compatibility.
In tune with Bob’s claim that 70% of kids are leaving the churches, I recently read a book called _Already Gone_, http://www.amazon.com/Already-Gone-your-kids-church/dp/0890515298/ . I do not disagree with the authors reasons but I do disagree with their cure. It is tough to reconcile ones personal beliefs, knowledge and ones faith. Many will fail to do so and fall away.
BTW, I have been told that many religions have a flood story but I have not verified this.
10-4, but only Judeo-Christianity has a parting the Red Sea tale.
Well, maybe Confusiousism(?) has a parting the Yellow Sea tale.
I’m away from home at the moment but in a few days when I get home I can provide a quote from WEIT.
Lynn, I don’t consider your church to be among the “fundie Prods” that I crab about; when I mention them I am referring to Assembly of God, the more virulent Baptists, Seventh-Day Adventists, Branch Davidians, the more virulent Presbyterians (like those who march in the Orange Order parades through Belfast every year), the snake-handlers and strychnine drinkers, et. al. Congregationalists, Methodists, Unitarians, Episcopalians, Lutherans and suchlike are considered the “mainstream” Christian denominations in the West. They are losing members left and right, mainly to the charismatic and fundamentalist denominations, and the growth in the Catholic Church is primarily coming from immigration from Mexico, central, and South America.
Many religions do in fact have some sort of ancient flood story but in line with what brad said earlier, we most likely have a cross-fertilization of literatures and cultural artifacts going back at least 10k years with some overlaps and similarities. There are believing Christians who take the Bible literally, called “inerrancy,” and there are those, like myself, who see not only literal and historical accounts in the Biblical texts, but also a lot of metaphor and poetry that most likely attempts to portray, or illustrate, events and concepts which are beyond our current, or perhaps permanent abilities to comprehend.
In the OT, did the Red Sea dramatically part in one fell swoop to allow the fleeing Israelites to escape and then drown Pharaoh’s armies? Maybe it did, and there is a perfectly rational explanation for it. Or maybe it is a gross embellishment of some similar historical event, later blown up for dramatic purposes, not unknown in later European literature, as with the Arthurian romance cycles, stretching between the British Isles, France and Germany.
Did Jesus miraculously produce the loaves of bread and fishes to feed the huge crowd all by Himself when it became necessary? Or did the call out to the ‘hood and neighbors and locals showed up with thousands of their donated loaves and fish?
See, one of the things we have going on here, which tends to aggravate me, is the folks who swallow a lot of this stuff literally and will brook NO dissent at all from that. Then we have, on the other side, the crowd that stands on the sidelines, jeering at these people, ridiculing them, and just having a ball over how smart and rational and scientific THEY are, and thus superior beings. And we have the claim that otherwise rational and scientific persons basically have two personalities, or two brains, or two distinctly separate belief systems, where they toil away in their labs and classrooms during the work day, and once outside, they collapse into a mish-mash of wacky supernatural faiths that otherwise would never stand the light of day and the god Reason, also one of the deities of the French Revolution, not a great time in the affairs of men, and not since, either. They keep these Jekyll and Hyde persons apart and thus are able to otherwise function normally in our rational and scientific world.
Pax vobiscum
You know, David, you might have a different take on things if you lived down here in the bible belt, where the fundies vastly outnumber the “mainstream” religious people.
And you’d find that there are shades of distinction even among the nutters. For example, we have one large baptist church here that I’ve heard even other southern baptists describe as “scary”.
I agree, Bob, and have said as much several times here before; the mainstream Christians are heavily outnumbered in the Bible Belt, and as Roman Catholics we would be even more outnumbered. We would, if living down there, be further driven into the arms of our co-religionists, of whatever ethnic background as a result; we find the fundies both scary and also laughable; their theology is wack. Typically they take one book from the library of books that is the Bible, as you know, and then go haywire with it. The most popular being, of course, the Book of Revelation. Written in a sort of code around the time of fierce imperial Roman persecution, they make up all kinds of stuff from it and then apply it to contemporary times and places. Others took a line or two from Leviticus and went on their brutal witch-hunts, typically killing off the innocent while the actual guilty parties, genuine witches, got off scot-free. Still others take another line and go nuts on homosexuals. Or find a case for black slavery. And so on.
And we are aware that there are a host of fundamentalist Protestant cults and sects that hate each others’ guts, case in point being a group like the Branch Davidians, a splinter cell from the Seventh-Day Adventists.
We wouldn’t live down there anyway, though we, and me especially, find much in common politically with many people in the South; it’s just too damn hot, and there are too many bugs and venomous reptiles and we simply would not otherwise fit in. We would also be sensitive to being seen as typical nosy and arrogant buttinsky Yankees, which is far from the truth.
Not sure what the Irish and/or English Catholic population is in whatever areas of the South but I figure it is pretty tiny. We’d probably end up in a Latino parish and learning Spanish real fast.
No thanks; we’ll stick to northern Vermont and parlez however much Francais we have to when we go to Mass in Montreal and Quebec Ville. (though we stick out like sore thumbs up there, too; most of the froggies up this way are midgets and both of us tower over them comically; some of the women barely come up to my waist; the land of the hobbits. We’ve lumbered into a couple of their little parish churches and their eyes get as big as pie plates, the place goes dead-silent for a second, and they look like they are seeing an invasion of Visigoths or orcs.
I keep tellin youse guys to move the hell up here and you won’t be bothered by the in-yer-face fundies anymore. Not even on the tee-vee or radio. But ya gotta be able to handle the snow and ice. And how we talk funny.
I like to filter my Christianity through the WWJD and wish many of my fellow Christians would do the same. As far as the homosexuals and other “bad” people, I firmly believe that Jesus would just love them. He is where the old saying, “love the sinner and hate the sin”, came from. He would be more than happy to go to lunch with ANY sinner, including me. Because that is what he did in his time. He was kind and loving to anyone EXCEPT those actively misrepresenting God to the masses.
We take a lot of things in our time as givens and do not realize that just a couple of hundred years ago, very few people saw 40 years of age. Most people died of infections from a bad tooth, an infected something or other or a cold. Most of the people going to Jesus were sick and looking for healing, I imagine that the crowds around him would actually be quite deadly from all the disease, etc.
Houston is real hotbed of Fundies, Prods and Catholics. We’ve got Joel Osteen and his 45,000 member church meeting in the old basketball arena. Some of the traffic here on Sunday mornings is worse than Monday morning. I’ll bet that we have at least 100 churches with more than 1,000 members attending at least once per week. The Catholic church (St. Lawrence) near me has 5 masses on Sunday and another one on Sat night.
brad says:
There seems to be a fundamental human need in play here. A need to feel important, to feel needed. At the risk of waxing Shakespearean: Why should one suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? Why not just jump off a cliff when the going gets rough (and surely everyone has had a rough patch or two)?
Religion provides an easy, pre-packaged answer. Frankly, there’s nothing really wrong with that. After all, most people want (need?) to have some sort of answer to this question, even though it makes little practical difference in day-to-day life.
I am not sure I can agree with that. Living where I do, in what I find is increasingly a Bible-banging and religious proselytizing area (much more so than what I remember growing up), I think it does make a difference. I find people all around me looking for any excuse to bring religion into conversation—from shoe salesmen to store clerks and even barbers. They use their post as a platform to get a lick in for their version of Christ. A couple times a month, there are church invitations hanging on my front doorknob when I get home—some telling me that non-church-goers will be going to hell if not attending a church on Sunday. Politicians running for legislature here make sure you know they are believers and most of them pro-life. It just cannot be that such a situation makes no difference; laws are crafted and decisions which affect me are made, based on a belief that the fiction of the Bible, revised many times throughout the eons, is real—when all of it is hearsay that was at least a dozen generations old before it was even first written down. What is clear to me, is that it was subsequently revised to reflect how religious belief evolved over the ages.
The most popular restaurant in Tiny Town, a locally-owned establishment that has been around for over 50 years, burned down to the ground 2 weeks ago. It is remarkable to hear the projections people have about what is going to transpire. Some say they are going to rebuild with a larger building. Others are quite sure they will rebuild on another piece of their large property, to allow better use of the odd-shaped parking lot. Still others predict they will rebuild on another part of ‘the strip’—the long business section at the edge of town, which long ago replaced the downtown. And yet others claim that the owners will take over another troubled restaurant in the ghost downtown, that recently closed due to poor finances.
Both the owner of the burned-out restaurant and the active operator/manager of that restaurant are good friends of the family, so I know what is going to transpire, and it is none of the above. They will neither rebuild nor return to business. Both guys are past retirement age, and they have no interest in continuing after this unexpected event. But people I talk to, are positive that they know otherwise.
Speculation on that restaurant—true enough—has no effect on me; but when legislators believe in a story that they feel gives them a moral charge to legislate either for or against things like abortion and gay relationships, then it starts making a difference to me, my friends, and my family.
As that ITV documentary pointed out, few historical scholars contradict that the first version of the Bible did not contain the resurrection from the dead, nor did it claim Jesus later ascended into “heaven”. That did not appear until hundreds of years later. Yet those elements are absolutely crucial to the beliefs of modern Christian churches, and the decisions those people make in deference to their beliefs of life, influenced by the wild, unconfirmable stories in the Bible, do make a difference. How ridiculous that one cannot buy alcohol on Sunday in this state, or that the making, growing, or use of alcohol or marijuana is anybody’s business but the user’s. And it all stems from Christian religion.
Harry Houdini promised his wife that he would communicate with her from beyond the grave. She is long ago dead, and it did not happen. Whether some guy we now call Jesus promised to return or not, is open to question, but what is not open, is that an incredible 2,000 years have passed and it has not happened. As I understand it, the language used in the promise to return, meant it would be soon—certainly within the hearers’ lifetime. But yet, both Jews and Christians wait for two different events that will never come. Remarkably—we build lives, laws, and a society on a fictional story that has never been proven and fuzzy contentions that lack even possibility, let alone being reproducibly demonstrated.
Back in the psychedelic days, I knew people who believed that the Alice in Wonderland story was true. If you took enough of the right pills and shot up with the right stuff, you, too, could find the door in the tree and enter the wonderland. Those people either grew up or died, but I have never heard of one of them that found the door.
RBT wrote:
“Jerry Coyne agrees to no such thing [that ‘Even Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution Is True, and one of the less rabid pit bulls agrees that belief and science are not incompatible.’]. Where did you get that idea? He has stated frequently that science is fundamentally incompatible with religious faith. And Jerry is about as “rabid” an atheist as you’ll find.”
From Why Evolution Is True p xx
“Accepting evolution… Nor need it promote atheism, for enlightened religion has always found a way to accommodate the advances of science…. The truth… is surely more satisfying than the myth that we were suddenly called into being from nothing.”
I couldn’t have put it better myself.
Jerry may be right up there with you, Dawkins et cetera on the atheism scale but he is more moderate than most about the way he expresses his opinion. I’ve never seen him call for Mecca to be nuked, and he has some kind and wise words to say about Stephan Jay Gould:
“In his superb book The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould documents the unholy connection between biologists and race in the last century.”
I like Gould and his writing, so although he may be a rabid atheist he’s less rabid and more reasoning than some of his associates.
The quote about Gould is on page 212 of the paperback edition of WEIT.
Your original statement was “Even Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution Is True, and one of the less rabid pit bulls agrees that belief and science are not incompatible.”
The quote you post says nothing to support that. Nothing. And I happen to know that Coyne considers religion and science to be fundamentally incompatible. Just read his blog.
I do read his blog. Yes, I know he doesn’t agree with NOMA, but he says that belief in evolution need not promote atheism and that “enlightened” religion can accommodate itself to science. How is that fundamentally different from what I said at first?
Coyne is referring to the god-of-the-gaps arguments used by many mainstream religions, which are the core of the non-overlapping magisteria position. This position attempts to claim for religion everything that is not firmly established by science. In other words, it attempts to establish that science and religion are “compatible” by abandoning its religious arguments every time science learns something new that contradicts religious teaching.
The atheist Irish comedian Dara Ó Briain commented indirectly on this in one of his stand-up sessions: “Science knows it doesn’t know everything; otherwise, it’d stop. But just because science doesn’t know everything doesn’t mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.”
Hmmm, I don’t see any sort of god-of the gaps argument there. What I do see, if you are correct, is a guy who has written the opposite of what he believes. Coyne wrote:
“Accepting evolution… Nor need it promote atheism, for enlightened religion has always found a way to accommodate the advances of science…” when he *really* meant to write: “Accepting evolution leads straight into atheism, and rightly so…. Religion is the enemy of science” blah blah blah.
What Coyne wrote in that passage has no resemblance to what you’re attributing to him.
Um, no. What Coyne wrote has nothing to do with the meaning you’re attempting to put to it.
Shall I email Jerry and ask him?
I just posted in reply to a post of his about the Biologos foundation, stating how I interpreted what he wrote in the book WEIT.
The whole point of that page in WEIT, and his argument, seemed to me to be that it’s okay to believe in evolution. You won’t become a card carrying fascist, or communist, or atheist, or agnostic, or anything else. And that’s a very good thing. If you’re trying to persuade people to believe that evolution has occurred you don’t bring in extraneous arguments or conditions.
And what he has to say about the Biologos foundation is interesting. He used to take notice of it when it had some genuine evolutionists writing for them. Now they are, he says, much more into “natural theology”, something I think is interesting in an abstract sort of way but not helpful to the good guys in this argument.
I don’t need or want god-of-the-gaps type arguments. I believe in keeping religion out of the classroom just as much as you do. What I do object to is attempts to say that science has done away with God. It’s done no such thing.
Eh? I never said that science had “done away with” god, although science has definitely made god unnecessary in the Occam’s Razor sense.
What I said was that science and religion are fundamentally (epistemologically) incompatible, a position I think you’ll find that Dr. Coyne agrees with.
As to the god-of-the-gaps argument, that’s effectively what you (or any intelligent, well-educated person) is forced to use. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps
and Dawkin’s chapter on the subject in The God Delusion.
Eh, where do I use god-of-the gaps type arguments?
One of the reasons I keep science and faith separate is so I don’t have to. If science can’t explain a thing then either it can’t or it can’t at the moment. To put God in the gap invites the kind of trouble atheists delight in seeing us get into. I avoid it by not using it. It doesn’t make sense to use it. I mean, why bother. We’re not going to gain by it and Coyne and the like will just laugh when science fills the gap.
If I were a science teacher I’d keep religion completely out of the classroom. And politics, and poetry, etc.
Ah, so you’re a deist rather than a theist?
Most of our Founding Fathers were deists, which back then was (pretty much correctly) considered just another word for atheist.
A deist is completely different from a theist (me) and an atheist.
I avoid god-of-the gaps arguments because I don’t like getting egg on my face when science fills the gaps. I avoid the argument from design because it’s obviously fallacious. I avoid ontological type arguments because they’re worthless – you can “prove” almost anything that way.
I think religion should be kept out of the classroom because it’s claims aren’t testable. If there is a gap in our scientific knowledge and I was a teacher I would simply say so. I’d say science might one day find the answer, or it might never find the answer. Just because religious claims can’t be tested scientifically doesn’t make them false.
I know a lot of atheists, especially the pit bull types, think that science and religion are incompatible by definition. But not all do. The philosopher f science Michael Ruse describes himself variously as an atheist, agnostic and septic but argues that science and religion don’t have to be at war, as the extremists on both sides say. He’s written a couple of good books on the subject:
Can a Darwinian be a Christian? the relationship between science and religion (2001)
Science and Spirituality: Making room for faith in the age of science (2010)
He also wrote an excellent defence of Darwinism against both punctuated equilibrium and creationism, although somewhat dated now:
Darwinism defended, a guide to the evolution controversies (1982)
The amusing thing is that although he’s an atheist the pit bulls hate him more than the creationists.
*septic. I meant skeptic
Septic is a good description of Ruse, who claims to be an atheist but sure doesn’t talk like one.
The word ‘ruse’ also mean trickery. And what the heck is Philosophy of Science? Almost sounds like some attempt to bridge science with pseudo-science.
When I was an undergrad (in electrical engineering at RPI: a real
curriculum at a legitimate engineering school) I sometimes amused myself
at parties by telling people I was majoring in Philosophy of Engineering
or Sociology of Science or similar, the melding of hard technology and
the softer, more human-centered studies. Imagine my horror when I
discovered that several unis do in fact offer degrees in such arrant
bullshit.
Well Ruse is either very subtle or very mixed up. He claims to be both an agnostic and an atheist. I suppose that’s possible, but I would have thought a person would be one or the other – or neither.
He did write an excellent book in the early Eighties, Darwinism Defended, bagging both punctuated equilibrium (hi Steve G!) and creationism. There were some quite humorous passages in it. Very well written.
SteveF, although in the early Eighties I was fairly right wing I did know a lot of communist claptrap, from my days participating in so called “student politics” (or kindergarten politics as I now think of it.) I amused myself at work by sometimes pretending to be a hard line communist, and took in one of my smart but not-worldly wise colleagues. He’d argue with me, not seeing that I was having a lend of him. One of my co-workers who saw this and knew I was kidding complemented me on my knowledge of Marxism – although I don’t know why they teach that crap at university level. I tried to get through Das Kapital once. I made a mental note to keep it in case I ever started suffering from insomnia.