Next time you find yourself in conversation with a young-earth creationist (who believes that the earth is 6,000 years old), ask them this: What is the origin of our collections of hundreds of thousands of fossils of now-excint creatures like trilobites, dinosaurs, giant marsupials, australopithecines, Neanderthals, and Homo erectus?
The response is likely to set you giggling.
You get extra laughs with questions like: How do you explain the Grand Canyon?, How do you explain the smooth transition of creatures, from single-cell organism up to humans, throughout the fossil record?, and What of Pangaea?.
Given it a whirl! Big fun!
Of course, I’m sure you can fully explain consciousness and intelligence, let alone how life came to be in the first place.
Or how the Universe formed into stars and other objects rather than expanding outward, remaining a continuous sea of particles. Shouldn’t all matter and energy (in whatever form it was) have spread out evenly across the Universe?
And what about the properties of each of the individual elements? How did they all become so well defined? Why are hydrogen and helium so different when all that really seperates them is one proton, and why are they different in the ways that they are different?
Science is left without answers, or with hypotheses with little evidence to back them up, in these cases.
I’ve given up on the idea of teaching creationism in schools; there would be little support for it as most people would disagree with which version(s) should be taught, and would have just as much controversy as evolution (I much suspect that your recent attention towards this subject might have been better spent on a different subject, rather than insulting religious people). But remember that much like religion, science can be imperfect and even have to rely on conjecture on occassion. Your faith in these theories is much the same as the faith a religious person holds, though I guess there is no way to argue that one with you, as you’d probably say it is an “illogical” argument.
But I guess that will just leave me giggling.
I recognize that the things that science currently explains incompletely it will be able to explain through further research. The incredible advances of the past 500 years (even the past 5 years) make that clear. To relegate science’s mysteries to “God did it” is to have an ever-shrinking god — s/he gets smaller and smaller as our collective knowledge expands. This “god of the gaps” is a truly unfortunate means of viewing the world, and dooms one’s own god to extinction.
I don’t insult religious people. I insult foolish people — those who believe that a budget can be based on the promise of a free lunch, that the earth is flat, and that man was formed one day out of mud — who believe that facts can be false facts, and thus ignore them in favor of their misguided world view. Religion is incidental to the matter.
To relegate science’s mysteries to “God did it” is to have an ever-shrinking god…
Could not the same be said of science?
To believe that everything must follow reason is the true foolishness. There is little reason (if any) to love. There is little reason to faith. There is little reason to hope. Yet, these things have persisted, and there is no doubt that they will continue to. If you think that everything in life can only be left to “reason”, I feel sorry for you.
Yet more and more science is beginning to explain the “how” and “why” behind love, hope, and faith, and similar abstractions. Neurologically, chemically, psychologically and biologically, we’re learning more every day. It doesn’t mean that reasoned knowledge will lead to rational action (and, indeed, few would argue that we could ever be deliberative and dispassionate about something like love or courage), but don’t confuse understanding with coldness. There has yet to be a problem posed that science cannot answer or cannot reasonably be expected to answer sometime in the future, and I think that’s the crux of Waldo (and my) unyielding trust in science. It’s given us no reason to doubt it for the past three millenia.
Back to the post, Waldo– my brother worked for a while at the Nature Company, and had great stories about fundies telling him that selling fossils was false advertising.
I can’t get my head around why it is that people who ostensibly believe in a religion that has as its basis FAITH want to engage in a scientific pissing match anyway.
Could not the same be said of science?
Nope — science gets bigger as we learn more. Science only got smaller for a brief period of a few hundred years in Western Europe. Thankfully, it was kept alive and well in the Middle East.
To believe that everything must follow reason is the true foolishness.
Not everything must. But damned near everything.
“What is the origin of our collections of hundreds of thousands of fossils of now-excint creatures like trilobites, dinosaurs, giant marsupials, australopithecines, Neanderthals, and Homo erectus?”
Dead trilobites, dinosaurs, giant marsupials, australopithecines, Neanderthals, and Homo erectus.
“How do you explain the Grand Canyon?”
The flood.
“How do you explain the smooth transition of creatures, from single-cell organism up to humans, throughout the fossil record?”
A myth.
“What of Pangaea?”
The Flood.