No Official Statements on Age of Grand Canyon, Please!
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Barbara Fitzpatrick
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Savonarola
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I disagree. There's more of an onus on the media than on us because the media report it in the first place... Should average Joes be expected to fact-check everything they hear from all news sources?Betsy wrote:well, heck. I'm just as guilty, because I took this information as true without calling the park service, either, and went around repeating it. Doh!
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Barbara Fitzpatrick
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We SHOULDN'T need to fact check the media, but under the current circumstances, we probably do. Especially progressives/liberals since we expect the kind of behavior reported, having had too much experience with it - we need to fact check everything anto the neocons, just to be sure we don't fall into their trap. Righteous indignation over something they didn't do gets as much, if not more, play amongst the wingnuts.
Barbara Fitzpatrick
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Doug
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DOUG
A column on the controversy.
Here.Includes:
Granted, the new museum in Kentucky, like the creationist book at the Grand Canyon, may shore up the already-believers. But if winning new converts to Christianity is the aim, the strategy can only backfire.
How many Americans are ready to accept the proposition that science has made a colossal error interpreting the fossil and geological record and — more radical still — that the validity of Christianity depends on proving it? If anything, a stance like this repels those wavering between faith and disbelief and gives skeptics one more reason to reject religion.
A suggestion to creationists: Let science be science, and let religion prevail in the vast areas where science has little or nothing to offer. It's not as though science has an answer for everything of consequence. The purpose and meaning of life, the existence of good and evil and love and hate, the nature of a human soul and what becomes of it at death, the existence and will of the divine — these are questions that belong to ethics, philosophy and, of course, religion.
No, religion shouldn't be picking this particular fight with mainstream science. Can't the Bible literalists concede matters of empirical evidence and rational inquiry to science and devote themselves to the questions of ultimate meaning — the mighty questions that rightly occupy religion? Their religion doesn't need any scientific proof. Why should their own faith?
A column on the controversy.
Here.Includes:
Granted, the new museum in Kentucky, like the creationist book at the Grand Canyon, may shore up the already-believers. But if winning new converts to Christianity is the aim, the strategy can only backfire.
How many Americans are ready to accept the proposition that science has made a colossal error interpreting the fossil and geological record and — more radical still — that the validity of Christianity depends on proving it? If anything, a stance like this repels those wavering between faith and disbelief and gives skeptics one more reason to reject religion.
A suggestion to creationists: Let science be science, and let religion prevail in the vast areas where science has little or nothing to offer. It's not as though science has an answer for everything of consequence. The purpose and meaning of life, the existence of good and evil and love and hate, the nature of a human soul and what becomes of it at death, the existence and will of the divine — these are questions that belong to ethics, philosophy and, of course, religion.
No, religion shouldn't be picking this particular fight with mainstream science. Can't the Bible literalists concede matters of empirical evidence and rational inquiry to science and devote themselves to the questions of ultimate meaning — the mighty questions that rightly occupy religion? Their religion doesn't need any scientific proof. Why should their own faith?
"We could have done something important Max. We could have fought child abuse or Republicans!" --Oona Hart (played by Victoria Foyt), in the 1995 movie "Last Summer in the Hamptons."
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Barbara Fitzpatrick
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They could just as easily ask why modern Amish use propane refrigerators and internal-combustion powered vehicles, but don't use electricity, or why (until Vatican II) RC nuns wore medieval European housekeepers garb. Bible literalists wouldn't be bible literalists if they could say science is science and faith is faith. The fact that they don't admit to interpreting the bible (they say a "day" as written in Genesis I is 24 hours - even though an hour is a construct and the first of those "days" occured not only before there were humans to make that construct, but before the sun and earth were created to produce the "evening and morning" that constitutes a "day" in the actual written text.) is just that much more irritating. Like the various religions (Amish included) who freeze "appropriate clothing" in time - but the time is the start of their religion, not anything biblical or moral although they say it is.
Barbara Fitzpatrick