Re: Science is an all-or-nothing endeavor

"Cyde Weys" <cydeweys@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:Xns9802E4149AE732galopagosterrapincy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I was talking with one of my friends recently. He's a pretty smart guy
(physics major), although he is a rather devout Catholic. That's okay
though, he's mostly reasonable, and he sometimes complains to me about
how his fellow Catholics are too conservative; blindly supporting Bush,
not caring about the environment, caring too much about the use of
contraceptives, etc. Although, he is rather rabidly anti-abortion and
anti-stem cells, so he's not totally "cool" :-P

So, about six months ago, we were having another discussion on evolution
and I brought up Pope John Paul II's encyclical on evolution. This guy
really respects that pope (probably literally taking his words as the
words of God, i guess). So, a few days later, after pretty much a
lifetime of skepticism and ignorance of evolution, I've given him enough
reading material and convinced him. That was the only time I've ever
successfully evangelized evolution. Although I must admit, I sort of saw
it coming, as he does like science a lot, and he just had to be shown the
evidence. Now we make smug/sarcastic comments about all of those
Protestants (apparently he hates them) that don't believe in science.

So it's much to my surprise that I'm talking to him today and Jesus'
resurrection comes up. Our disagreement isn't over the resurrection per
se (I'm wise enough to know I can't convince him on that), but he was
trying to pull some bullshit about the stars changing in the sky when
Jesus was born, and NASA confirming it or something. What the hell? I
almost couldn't believe my ears. It was pure nonsense. It was pretty
much on par with that old Internet legend about NASA scientists using the
Hubble Space Telescope finding a "missing day" that turned out to be that
bit from the Bible when the Sun stood still in the sky. So I brought
that up ... and my friend was arguing with me about it! He was saying
stuff like "These people have thousands of years of accumulated
knowledge, and you're only, what, 21? You really think you know more
than all of them?" What kind of a statement is that?

So I was kind of dismayed. My friend accepts a good bit of science, but
his faith blinds him to other areas of science. He'll still argue
vehemently that adult stem cells are as effective as embryonic stem
cells, and that we shouldn't be funding embryonic stem cell development
at all. He's pathologically incapable of making any sort of distinction
between abortions at different term lengths (once the sperm and the egg
meet it's a unique human life, aparently). And now I learn that he has
various nonsensical beliefs that science somehow backs up the Jesus
story. I even asked him to elaborate on exactly what he meant by "NASA
found something different in the stars that year", but of course, he
couldn't. He also failed utterly to bring me any scientific journal
citations.

In hindsight I'm surprised that he believed his star nonsense on faith
and expected me to believe it like everything was hunky dory. Has he
ever considered that maybe if there *was* good physical evidence for any
of the Jesus story I wouldn't be an atheist? If what he was saying was
true, that crazy stuff was going on in the heavens when Jesus was born,
I'd at least have some sort of naturalistic explanation for it, and if I
didn't, I'd be religious. But of course, none of that ever happened. I
don't think he's intellectually made the connection in his mind that each
star in the sky has its own solar system, and messing around with them to
make some sort of sign on Earth upon Jesus' birth would literally muck
about with a whole lot of entire solar systems. But, hell, it's God, he
can do anything he wishes, right?

This brings me back to the central tenet of this post. Science is an
all-or-nothing endeavor. Either you believe in scientific principles
100% of the time, or you don't. If you do, great, you get a sticker. If
you don't, you're going to be clinging to all sorts of irrational,
unsupportable beliefs that conflict with what science is actually telling
you of the world around you. It's untenable. I have no questions that
my friend makes a competent enough physics major, but there's some areas
of investigation that are still closed to him because he has these
irrational beliefs. If he *just* believed in the general existence of a
deity that'd be one thing, and maybe he could reconcile that with what we
actually know of the world, but he has this specific religious view about
Jesus, resurrection, embryoes, the heavens, and other stuff that is just
fundamentally incompatible with a fact-based world. And his "logical"
attempts to justify it or back it up to people that don't have the same
blind faith that he does fail miserably.


For more on the sharp divide between science and faith, see this essay by
Larry Moran:
http://tinyurl.com/eqx4d
http://bioinfo.med.utoronto.ca/Evolution_by_Accident/Theistic_Evolution.h
tml

--
~ Cyde Weys ~

Sub veste quisque nudus est.


This is only an educated guess, but possibly your friend was giving a very
garbled version of the thesis that the Matthew version of the birth of Jesus
and the Star of Bethlehem was actually an astrologically significant
configuration involving a pair of lunar occultations of the planet Jupiter
in March and April of 6BC in the sign of Aries. Mike Molnar recently wrote
a book about this.

M. Molnar, ?The Star of Bethlehem: The Legacy of the Magi? (Rutgers 1999)

A bit more can be found in my paper published in _The Observatory_, v 118,
22-24, 1998:

http://www.star.ucl.ac.uk/~mmd/star.html

There have been many attempts to identify the Star of Bethlehem as all sorts
of astronomical objects or events, including Kepler's discovery of a triple
conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, while others regard it as a Midrash, a
story with no factual basis but told to make an important religious or
spiritual point. In this case, the astrology was essentially Chaldean and
Roman, with many interpretations different from modern astrology. I don't
believe in either; but 2,000 years ago many people did.

--
Mike Dworetsky

(Remove "pants" spamblock to send e-mail)


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