Thanks to Green Man for pointing my way to the BBC Science and Nature page this morning. While browsing through the stories there, I came across an article about pterosaurs, those ancient flying reptiles from the days of the dinosaurs. In this article, I found out about new discoveries that indicate that some pterosaurs could grow so large that their wingspans extended 60 feet.
Reading that made me say, “Wow!” – out loud. It made me imagine what it would be like to see one of these creatures today, sailing over my house. I don’t think that my house, as nice as it is, is 60 feet long. I encourage you to take your kids and go out with a tape measure and show them how big 60 feet is.
Religious evangelists often moan and groan about how awful life must be for people who don’t believe in God. They seem to believe that all the wonder there is exists in their little books, and nowhere else.
Of course, they’re wrong. Science has accumulated a library of wondrous material that is many times larger than anything the religious community could ever hope to amass. The great thing about the scientific works is that they very often offer us new stories of wonder – like flying beasts with 60-foot wingspans.
Religion has a very hard time incorporating new material such as this. The Christians can’t just go and insert a story about a flying animal with a 60-foot wingspan into the Bible. The Bible was all done a long time ago. All they can do is try to relate new information to the same old thousands of years old stories, or pretend that the new information does not exist. New wonders are not allowed to compete with the old ones.
Of course, many religious people also embrace science. That’s their right, although the two kinds of thinking must occupy separate spaces in their minds, as their modes are mutually incompatible. Faith does not ask for proof, and science does not trust in faith.
Just for this morning, I”ll put aside the question about which mode of thinking is correct. Instead, I’ll ask the more snarky question: Which has the most style points?
For me, science wins easily. Science can always bring us new wonders, so it is much less repetitive. I can count on science to bring me dazzling new information and ideas year after year. But, even just given the information that science has already brought to us, science still wins. After all, where does the Bible talk about gigantic flying creatures? Where does it talk about previously undiscovered animals living on the bottom of the ocean? Where, in the Bible, are there exploding stars one thousand times the size of the sun? Where are the discoveries of Planet X – a mysterious world out in the far reaches of the Solar System? For that matter, where in the Bible is there even an accurate understanding of what the Solar System really is?
Look, I don’t want to take away anyone’s right to practice their religion on their own. However, the very same right wing element of Christianity that is so eager to dismiss science is the same element of Christianity that is working as hard as it can to enforce its beliefs on everybody else. They’re trying to use the government to replace real science with those tired old stories from the book of Genesis.
I’m against those efforts not just because the stories of the book of Genesis have long been exposed as bunk, but because I want a life that includes new ideas, collected by the some of the smartest people we’ve got, working full time to discover new stories and insights. I want many books in my life, and the freedom to add whatever new books to my library that I like. The same old book, week after week after week, is not enough for me.
Even just from an aesthetic sense, I need science in my life. For that reason, I will defend the right for me, and my kids, to have access to genuine science. Let the Creationists keep their boring, bland fictions where they belong. I don’t try to teach evolution in your church, so please, don’t try to teach your religion in my kids’ school.
Science…! Wonderful science. I have seen the way this can shape one’s world view, and how things change. I have in front of me my wife’s grandfather’s diary. Her father was born in 1892, was a WWI vet, but when he was born, many things hadn’t happened yet which we take for granted. He lived in Ohio as a boy, was in a railroad town and his mother ran a boarding house. Among their boarders were engineers of both the slide rule type and throttle type.
He liked Jules Verne and such things, and according to an entry I’m looking at, his father was somewhat upset that he had been required to go to the school where my father in law attended, and spank him for saying that men would routinely fly. This was blasphemy, and since some of their boarders had proved mathematicly that heavier than air flight was impossible by use of their slide rules and science, while he hated to do it, it was for the kid’s own good. Another entry four years later records that he again had to administer punishment for blasphemy because he claimed people would one day walk on the moon.
My father-in-law died in 1987, and was very much alive when the lunar landings took place. I also have a picture of him and an airplne, an Avro 504K that he and his work gang had to repair during WWI. He flew in this plane in 1918, just the once. Next time he flew was in 1987 in a DC9. I asked what he thought of it, and he said, “They don’t give ya enough PEANUTS”. That’s progress, in one lifetime from something unspeakable to so commonplace that company parsimony is the only thing to be commented on.
Yeah Sarge..My aunt passed away at 99 years of age about three years ago. She was quite lucid up until the last few months, and would regale us with “tales of the old days”. It was like having a live history book and a sweet aunt all rolled into one. The progress she had seen in her lifetime would take too long to document here. One interesting thing she told me years ago. Sha told me,”Mike, whatever Man can imagine, Man will eventually create”. Now, mind you she was a very religious lady, but she put her faith over to one side and her pragmatism over to the other…and somehow, at least in her mind, the two never contradicted each other. And she was right! Remember the communicators on the ORIGINAL “Star Trek”? Anyone out there got a Motorola Cell phone, the flip-open type? How about the “transporter”? Down at CalTech, the whiz-kids have built one. It’s all a matter of the technology catching up with the imagination. Hell, this computer that I’m hammering away on was science fiction 25 years ago. Don’t ever be afraid to dream. That’s how we move forward.
Ah, yes! I have a flashlight without a battery or light bulb which works very well, (they did have them in my teenage years, but not like these!) and I noticed a book I read bavk in the ’60s is back in print: A Canticle For Liebowitz. It was/still is a great read about the world after a nuclear war, in three sections, and it is centered around a monastary in Utah. First, things are in a sort of dark ages mode of life, second section takes place in a sort of renaissance, and the third is futuristic. The premise is that what was once the US is now several kingdoms, and Utah they speak a language called Laredan, and in my part of the country they speak Alleghenian. And at the beginning of the third section, the monestary is in radio contact with the see of the Bishop of Pitsburgh. Problem: the translator isn’t working, and no one at the monastary speaks Alleghenian. Now, a reviewed of the book, when it was first published said that the book had been outstanding up til then, but that ruined the book for him, because there was no way that any machine could ever recognise and translate speech. It was just too complex, no machine could do such a thing. And, I have an advert for a program which will do just that on my computer. And in front of me I have a program which does exactly that. The march of time and science.
My father-in-law was a great rememberer, and he LIKED modern times. He remembered “the good old days” as being mighty long on working hours, hot summers cold winters, sickness, early death, and short on pay, central heat and air conditioning, good medical care, and general comfort.
I don’t get how people used to say that heavier-than-air flight was impossible…
Did they never hold a bird?
Believe it or not, HareTrinity, the old adage went,”If Man were meant to fly, God would have given him wings”. And, with every failed attempt, people would shake their heads and repeat it. Oh, yeah Sarge? The other old adage: “Ah, the Good Old Days…Formerly known as these Hard Times…”
Hare, there was, appaerntly, a mathematic formula which “proved” that heavier than air flight was impossible, and my father-in-law told me that these slide-rule type engineers, at his father’s request, demonstrated this. In the parlance of the day, it “didn’t figure”. Birds were “created by god” to do so, and it wasn’t really questioned. Even today people will tell you that the bumble bee is breaking all sorts of aerodynamic rules by flying. Not true, the air density ratio to its size and the way its wings perform are the key.
Mike, we have the Glidden Tour through our area this week, and I’ve seen some really great old cars. Love to look at them, hear them, ride in them. Love owning my modern vehicle, though. I learned to drive on a ’28 Nash, the guy I trained horses for had a 1907 Mack 7!/2 tonner, chain drive truck which he still used on the farm, and when I started dating my wife in ’63 her family was still driving a ’33 Buick. Ran good, why get something new if it still worked? (Let me count the ways, why…)I got my drivers license at 15, and my father-in-law-to-be alwats insisted that we use the old Buick when we went on a date. Hey, the “Untouchables” was one of my favorite TV shows, so to actually drive a car like that was really great. (He got the idea when I drove up from Virginia with my motorcycle and pulled up in front of the house to take his daughter on a date. Projected date WAS NOT going to happen if a motorcycle was involved, so he offered an alternative)My father felt he was being too generous, but was told it was a moral decision. He knew the car was not going to be drag raced, could not be easily maneuvered into “parking areas”, was well known around town (thereby eliminating all sorts of oprotunity for shennanigans), required both hands to operate, had no climate control, and was built like a tank. I could have said the same thing about the motorcycle, but het, I was just a kid.