It is not JUST a theory
I just had an argument at the coffee machine with , who tried to convince me, that the world was actually created in seven OR six CONSECUTIVE days of 24 hours. And that the Bible consists of FACTS, NOT metaphors. And that HUMANS WERE CREATED, while plants and animals could have evolved.I am totally disbalanced.
My hands are actually shaking - I am so horrified by (what I perceive is) a lack of logic. Help.
I understand her angst and trauma since I experienced something similar a few years back when at a backyard party a fellow told me that evolution was "just a theory." Awestruck, I turned and responded, "Huh?? You have a science Ph.D. - you KNOW that "theory" is as good as it gets!" That pretty much ended the conversation.
For those of you unfamiliar with the scientific usage, "theory" doesn't mean "speculation." A scientific theory has passed a rigorous test of time by being able to:
- explain the observations
- suggest (and pass) new experiments testing the theory
As I noted at the party, theory is as good as it gets in science and is accepted as FACT and provides a foundation for further research and discovery despite always being subject to revision as new insights and knowledge becomes available. There might even be a third aspect of a scientific theory:
- you can make money from it.
The reason being that a good theory inspires new lines of thinking and, therefore, enables new possibilities. Thus, the theory of general relativity leads to GPS satellite systems. Similarly, evolution leads us to new drugs, oil-eating bacteria, the yeast strains that Dow Chemical uses in their industrial bioreactors as well as the genetic programming algorithms which I use in my DataModeler software to evolve expressions which model data sets.
To maximize the money, we try to speed up the evolution process; however, evolution naturally happens continuously and on a variety of time scales. In fact, there is an example of evolution in process within the human species right now: lactose tolerance. Most animals and humans are lactose intolerant - i.e., they cannot digest milk once they reach maturity. However, 80% of people of European ancestry are lactose tolerant. What gives? Well, in the era before McDonalds and potato chips and rampant obesity, getting ENOUGH calories was a problem so the ability to handle a new and efficient food source (a milk cow is a golden goose since drinking the milk is a much better caloric return for the food fed to it than slaughtering it for meat) provided a significant competitive advantage. The neat thing here is that being lactose tolerant would only be an advantage AFTER humans had domesticated cattle or goats so in the space of less than 10,000 years a mutation to be able to handle milk as an adult swept through Europe and dominated the population. The summary is that evolution is ongoing, doesn't require billions of years, doesn't require a guiding hand and humans are NOT excluded from the process.
I think the thing that disturbs me the most about the "JUST a theory crowd" is the ability to partition the world and arbitrarily and definitively turn off the critical thought process in areas deemed verboten by their religious leadership. I'm always reading and scavenging for new ideas to synthesize with the old so such behavior to me seems intellectually dishonest (and also makes me suspicious about their scientific capabilities). I also suspect that despite their education such people could easily embrace the horrible atrocities Voltaire saw as the Catholics and Calvinists fought for the dominance and purity of their dogma - which would make me a leading candidate for a long and painful death.
The really sad thing about such boundaries and rule-based thinking is that it is Old Testament based rather than being truly Christian. Jesus understood this:
"When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I though like a child, I reasoned as a child; but when I became a man, I gave up my childish ways." - 1 Corinthians 13:11
Thus, an unwashed goat-herder in the desert isn't equipped to handle cosmology and evolution theory any more than he or she is capable of comprehending quantum mechanics. Truth is revealed slowly and patiently. To accept the philosophical foundations of a primitive culture as divine truth is no more rational and desirable than to freeze the human thought process and behaviors at the the level of a three year old child.
Learning and growing - it is a good thing for people and cultures ... and religions.
My contention is that faith needs to adapt to fact rather than the other way around. It is interesting, however, to look at some of the implications of blindly accepting the bromides. For example, my father asked the pastor of a local church what he thought heaven was like. "Singing hosannas while walking streets paved with gold," was the response. Now an eternity of that would be a version of hell from my viewpoint since I would be bored out of my gourd.
Additionally, if the pastor had to listen to me sing for all eternity, I'm pretty sure that he would quickly come around to my perspective.
Originally posted here: link
From my perspective, whether you believe my two little boys were:
you're believing in something that I can't possibly fathom or observe scientifically...you're making a decision based on faith, regardless.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I suspect our friend was trying to express something more like this.
Several months back, JS and I discussed the idea of starting a sort of group blog for us (you, me, JS, BH, KM) to discuss stuff like this. Just a couple days ago, KM expressed an interest in some sort of inter-faith lunch discussion (sparked by conversations he's had recently with a muslim colleague). Now, this musing has pushed me over the top. I'm going to set up the group blog (trips between China and the US for lunch discussions are currently cost-prohibitive). Throw in Madan or another hindu and KM's colleague, and we'd have quite a diverse set of scientists of differing ethnic backgrounds and religious points of view, most of whom spent years together in the same group in R&D. None of us have time for it, I'm sure...so it will be a slow discussion, but I think it will be interesting and worth a try.
I had originally suggested to JS that we read RIchard Dawkins' "The God Delusion " and Francis Collins' "The Language of God " and discuss them together. Maybe that's a good place to start, or maybe something else would be better...but I'd think it'd be fun regardless.
As long as faith remains orthogonal to fact, faith is free to wander into whatever rationales fit an individual's emotional framework. When they enter into conflict, reality rather than perceived reality is the winner.
Personally, I'm going to opt for the parsimonious solution. Kepler's elliptical orbits make a lot more sense than Ptolemy's earth-centered circular orbits or Copernicus' sun-centered circular orbits with their circular epicycles to allow the perceived reality to match observations. Of course, Newton built on this to simplify the system further to some simple rules and Einstein then built upon this to give us space-time and a mechanism for gravity. And the quest for truth and understanding continues.
Truth is revealed slowly and patiently.
My emotional problem with "faith", however, is that a search for truth is neither necessary nor desirable and, therefore, has historically been suppressed to the extent possible by the priesthood - be they Voltaire's Catholics and Calvinists or modern American or Middle-Eastern rightwing religious fruitcakes.
It seems to me that trying to understand 13 billion years of development through a smidgen of years of observation is a daunting but worthwhile task. While that effort continues, I think we can use evolution, quantum mechanics, atomic theory, general relativity, etc. as proven and valid representations of reality.
That goat-herder in the desert was ignorant and, therefore, can be forgiven. To reject the explanatory and predictive benefits of scientific theory to cling to that goat-herder's world view on the basis of faith is intentionally and willfully ignorant and THAT is just plain stupid.