Letters to the Editor
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Heaven as hell
I sing Amazing Grace to my son to lull him to sleep--not because I'm particularly religious, but because it's the only thing in my key I can remember the words to. But there is a verse that used to really fascinate me as a kid and now when I sing it it gives me the creeps:
"When we've been there [in heaven] ten thousand years/Bright shining as the sun/We've no less days/to sing God's praise/Than when we've first begun."
Which now just makes me think of endless choir practice. I'm with Wilson- I certainly hope there is something more entertaining and edifying out there than an frozen moment of eternal bliss.
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Patrick -- a different theory on time
Time is relative but that doesn't mean its existence is relative. That just means its passage is different for different observers.
Right now in string theory, some people are talking about the emergence of space from time. Time could be something fundamental from which space emerges through a process.
So maybe time is God, who knows.
What I'm curious about is how I evolved an ability to love forms of mathematics that aren't obvious to nature. One could argue the brain was prepared to understand algebra and calculus because we live in a world with shapes and motions and as we evolved we needed to be able to measure those shapes and compute those motions without conscious thought.
So our brains do calculus and algebra in some way already. The ground was laid for the abstract in the concrete.
But what prepared our brains to love something as abstract as differential geometry?
Why love? Love according to Darwin is nothing but a cultural interpretation of the biological drive to reproduce. Being a math nerd certainly does not help one's ability to reproduce.
It's interesting that yeshiva students tend to make good mathematicians. For some people it's been a toss up between physics or the seminary. I know there is at least one Russian Orthodox priest out there now who has a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from my school.
Arguing about the supernatural turns out to be a good preparation for arguing about abstract math, something else we believe in that can't easily be seen or measured, only conceived of in the mind.
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One Should Be Careful
To not lump all of those who have come to the conclusion that a particular source of knowledge is as reliable if not more so than any other, into the camp of idiots and automatons.
It is estimated that 90% of the world's population believe in a personal entity outside the realm of full understanding. Does that mean that 10% of the world's population are superior to the rest? There are many things outside the realm of full understanding, whose existence remains undisputed, even by the 10.
There is one undisputable fact: man's pride knows no boundary, followed closely by his arrogance.
Poco
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Blinded by your assumptions
What Professor Wilson and so many of the letter writers fail to ask is the most fundamental question of all: Is there a possibility that this or that religious claim might actually be true?
In the case of Judaism and the Christianity that grew out of it, the answer is most certainly yes. Only the most obtuse historian would deny that a man named Jesus of Nazaeth walked the earth some 2,000 years ago and said and did certain things. There are very good reasons to believe the documentary evidence and the historical claims of Christianity. (One example: The New Testament gospel writer Luke got all of his ancient history correct, including facts that many disputed for centuries until they were verified by archeology. And yet Luke matter-of-factly reports the miraculous alongside the historically verifiable.) For this reason and many others, it is safe to say that Christianity is not some evolutionary adaptation; it is truth.
But Wilson and others start off with an assumption that is unverified by anything remotely resembling objective scientific inquiry, yet they pass it off as "science." Even the field of evolutionary psychology and socio-biology are based mostly on speculation of the sort that would get an ID advocate kicked out of the room were he to do the same type of speculation.
In short, don't be fooled by something just because an apparently smart guy says so. Look behind the assumptions that underlie his beliefs and you'll see that, in the end, Wilson et al. are operating just as much on "faith" as the most ardent Christian.
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The question I wish I could ask Wilson
How do you feel about the way Darwin has been used in the past by certain white males in science as a way to convince people who aren't white males that they shouldn't even bother trying to learn science?
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GIVE US SOME INFORMATION THAT MIGHT ACTUALLY HELP US
Isn't it amazing that salon just happen to have found a SOUTHERN BAPTIST to explain that humans invented God! Better a Southern Baptist then a Jew for instance to show that the Christian right is brain dead! If salon had not found a Southern Baptist from Alabama some people might thing that they are anti-christian and anti-southern bigots.
Now that we know that science can show that evolution explains our need for a God and we can trust this information because we heard it from a man born in Alabama and raised a Southern
Baptist - where can we learn what to do about jews in the United States govenrment and our media and how can we get Israel off our backs? Give us some information that might actually help us.
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Scientific belief itself is a religion
I fail to see the difference between the science-rejecting preacher and the religion-rejecting scientist. They are absolute in their beliefs. Yet they are human, faults and all. Over the years the 'scientifically-proven facts' have changed just as much as religious beliefs have evolved.
Modern science is the exchange of an old set of fairy tales (dragons and magic potions and chivalry) for a new set of fairy tales (limitless economic growth, natural rights, the sacred borders of the nation-state, the intrinsic wisdom of the scientific method and math logic).
Most scientists who are presented with the option of accepting a new theory contradicting 'knowledge' they're familiar with, or clinging on to an antique idea, most scientists cling to the antique idea. Darwin, for instance, was bitterly rejected by his contemporaries. So was Einstein initially.
That religion is categorized as an adaptation speaks to the limits of the power of evolutionary theory to categorize things, not the limits of religious belief.
Religion fails when too much faith is put in people, and not enough in God. Science fails when it places too much faith in method, and not enough in people.