(Disclaimer: all below is transcribed sic.)
The defense of 'True' Science
By Ian Burleson, Staff writer
Part One
Imagine if someone today were to deny the existence of germs, the roundness of the earth, or the heliocentricity of our solar system. Suppose this person denied the credibility of science, which purports these theories, and that "true" science proves the opposite.
Would you be skeptical of this person?
Would it be consoling to know that she has a single book to back up her claims that germs do not exist, that the earth is flat, and that the sun revolves around us? Her book has not been, nor will it ever be, updated to fit our current scientific conception of how the universe works.
Does the fact that the book's teachings are eternally unchangeable ease your skepticism?
Most people these days will answer no it does not. In fact, most would--or at least should--consider the mentioned claims to be outlandish, beyond incredulous.
Interestingly, some of this debate still continues to this day among the fringe of the fringe: The Flat Earth Society and the first annual Catholic Conference on Geocentrism entitled "Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right" in South Bend, Indiana near Notre Dame University which took place last Saturday.
What have we learned from instances in history when the obviously false was Biblical doctrine. If not that we must update our model of reality in light of scientific evidence on a constant basis if we are to ever understand it?
Now fast forward a few hundred years, and the new "debate" in the forefront is between the same historical opposition: scientific evidence vs. a literal interpretation of Biblical scripture.
In our case, the theory of evolution is the subject.
The theory, as science understands it today, maintains that evolution is a natural occurrence whereby all species of life developed their vast diversity and complexity from a common single-celled ancestor through an ongoing process of genetic natural selection. Creationism asserts that an intelligent, supernatural being had to have made all things in the universe because evolutionary theory cannot account for the diversity and complexity we observe--it must have been intelligently designed.
USI has been graced by the presence of one such fellow, Marlin Goebel, who argues for the latter, claiming that true science defends the Bible--that's his slogan anyway.
Let us put aside the fact that he has no training in biology, no experience in a laboratory or in the field, and further he has no official theological tutelage. He owns his own real estate company called Goebel Commercial Reality, Inc., and so he is, in a word, a businessman.
He is here--by invitation and sponsorship from Chi Alpha--for a series of lectures to inform us that mainstream scientists have got it all wrong: the answers are in the Bible.
Does this kind of rhetoric not sound hauntingly familiar? The examples presented earlier were based on the same mode of logic.
The Bible never once mentions the existence of germs, rather it explains in Luke 13:11-13, among a long list of verses, that disease is caused by evil spirits. The Bible never once mentions the roundness of the earth, rather it explains in Daniel 4:10-11 that a sufficiently tall tree can be seen from "the earth's farthest bounds," clearly implying that the surface of the earth is flat. The Bible never once mentions that the earth orbits the sun, rather it explains in Psalm 104:5 and I Chronicles 16:30 that the earth is permanently immovable and stable in its position.
Of course these are factually incorrect statements, so it's reasonable to say that if we based our scientific knowledge on them, then we couldn't have vaccines, antibiotics, satellites or an understanding of why something as fundamental as changing seasons, or retrograde motion of other planets in the night sky, occurs.
In short, if we take the Bible at its word on issues like physics, chemistry and biology, we'd be vastly ignorant to how reality operates, and we would not have the technology and medical advances that have made our lives as relatively safe and simple as they are today.
The same applies to the theory of evolution.
As the Russian Orthodox Christian evolutionary biologist once quipped, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution."
If we blind ourselves to the reality of evolution, then explaining the foundations of biology go out the window in favor of a book which teaches us that disease is a spiritual matter, the earth is flat, and the sun revolves around us.
Part Two
We enjoy the life that scientific progress has afforded us. Taking away the fundamental pillars that allowed the progress to flourish as it did is to return us to a primitive state of ignorance.
Perhaps it's just me, but Mr. Goebel's series seems like a sully insult to the biologists and scientists on this campus who spend an enormous amount of their professional life studying all the research, theories and debate that go in their scientific domains.
In none of these domains is anything like creation even a legitimate option, not because of some gung-ho crusade against theological explanations that scientists have (indeed many of them are Christians themselves), but because none of the evidence actually points to such explanations as being the right ones.
Despite the fact that the germ theory is "just a theory," no one seems to be stripping it down, tarring and feathering it in favor of the evil spirit theory as described in the Bible. Despite the fact that even before we went to space, we verily knew that the earth must be round because of incredibly compelling experimental evidence from what was then "just a theory." We often scoff today at those who believed something so simplistic as a flat earth. Despite the fact that some were tortured and even executed for dissenting against the Church's geocentric doctrine for "just a theory" of heliocentrism--a theory first formulated in 260 BCE by Aristarchus, but was truly solidified by Copernicus in 1551 CE--we again wonder how anyone could have been so malevolently fatuous to have taken the Bible so literally in spite of the clearly presented scientific evidence.
And yet, a few hundred years later, we have a man on our campus promoting the same kind of message: couching literal Bible interpretation as "true" science, and lambasting the scientific theories which contradict the Bible as essentially works of the devil, and scientists as heretics.
I for one find it truly amazing how far we've come in terms of scientific knowledge, yet how short we've come in terms of educating our nation about how science actually works and the indispensability of the theories it often produces--such as the theory of evolution--to our everyday lives.
The consolation I find in this situation is the fact that no matter how hard the church has tried to suppress scientific knowledge in favor of literal Biblical interpretation, science has won out in the end.
I suspect Mr. Goebel's presentations are the contemporary countenance of history's long-fought battle between science and Biblical-literalism. His stance is one that our descendants will look back on with the same shameful guffaw we have when discussing the literalists of our scientifically ignorant past.
Can't we just evolve already?
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