Finally caught up

It’s good to have internet access again, after not having it all weekend while I was out in the Seattle area leading a youth advisor training. When I checked email today, a friend referred me to a fascinating Web site that points out how intelligent design might just be more complex than reductionist religious liberals like me have been making it out to be. (Thanks, Nat!)

I’d never really thought about the theological implications of a great spaghetti monster before. Oh, and check out those stick-on car emblems….

One thought on “Finally caught up”

  1. Administrator

    Comments transferred from old blog

    My problem with evolution is it’s stuck with a pretty rigid and archiac notion of time. There is a beginning and end and a line in between with all creation evolving ever onword.

    I’m not sure modern science goes along with that and I think maybe biology hasn’t caught up with the pack because it does boggle the mind a bit.

    Read American Scientist on some new books on Dimensions Demystified and one realizes a confrontation with the Spagetti Monster might just be around the corner.

    Michio Kaku’s Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos, although superficially similar to Randall’s book, actually differs significantly from it. Although Kaku worked on string theory in its early days, he has become well known more recently as a popularizer of physics, and this is evident from the text. Parallel Worlds is not written from the viewpoint of an insider relating developments as they occurred. It is telling, for example, that the bibliography consists solely of other books for a general audience, with no citations of the primary literature. Nonetheless, the presentation is extremely polished, and the discussion is invigorated by the inclusion of numerous interesting and revealing anecdotes about the participants.

    Kaku is also very attuned to the fact that what interests the general reader is not always what interests the professional physicist. He is quite willing to discuss the possibility of life on other planets, or even the religious implications of the work he describes. Statements such as “If true, [the multiverse] would unify two of the great religious mythologies, Genesis and Nirvana. Genesis would take place continually within the fabric of timeless Nirvana” are made as straightforwardly as comments on the cosmic microwave background

    Comment from bill67998 – 10/12/05 8:19 AM

    Bill: Thanks for your comments on the relationship between the concepts of time and evolution. As you point out, one distinctive of the Jewish and Christian traditions (as opposed to, say, Hinduism or Buddhism) is a linear concept of time — the universe starts with an originating event, and moves in a linear fahion to an ending event.

    Those of us interested in the fields of comparative religion and philosophy of science have long noted that science before the 20th C. adopts this linear concept of time pretty much without question. However, Einstein’s theory of relativity showed that time flows differently for different frames of reference; Richard Feynman showed how subatomic events work equally going forward or backward in time; and since then, physics has gotten further and further away from that simple linear concept of time. But Bill, it is not clear to me that evolutionary theory needs to take these new ideas about time into account. From what I remember of my year-and-a-half as a physics major in college, for the scale and frame of reference of evolutionary theory, a linear concept of time should work pretty well.

    Of course, these new ideas about time really wreak havoc with Biblical literalism, far more so than evolutionary theory, which is really your point. Your comments re: the multiverse raise some interesting theological issues…and I’ll bet that the intelligent design folks won’t exactly welcome your ideas.

    Comment from danlharp – 10/12/05 4:57 PM

    That’s it. I am officially converting to Pastfarianism. I Farfalle, therefore I am.

    Comment from writewrite – 10/12/05 6:10 PM

    Dan, you wrote, Of course, these new ideas about time really wreak havoc with Biblical literalism….

    But doesn’t the Bible have multiple creation stories e.g. Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 and then Genesis 2:4 to 2:25 and if you started talking about these new concepts of time and multiple universes, well, suddenly multiple creation stories make sense; or at least plausable.

    Multiple universes, multiple creations… who knows.

    My experience with non scientists armed with science is they can be awfully dogamtic and assert things the scientist would never claim. I wouldn’t ban an intelligent design advocate from the class room just because I think they’re unscientific.

    I wouldn’t ban Einstein from the classroom for saying God doesn’t play dice with the universe. It’s just way too complicated. I’d want more humility on the part of the teachers.

    Comment from bill67998 – 10/16/05 2:49 PM

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