Tag Archives: science

by Ben Trube | February 6, 2014 · 6:35 AM

Evolution vs. Creationism (IT DOESN’T MATTER)

Alright, before all of you think I’ve been sucked in by the recent Bill Nye vs. John (I mean Ken) Ham, I did not watch it. I like Bill Nye and grew up watching him, though I was a little mad he replaced Square One (which featured Mathnet). And Mr. Ham and I may have a very few things in common, but a literal interpretation of Genesis and a 6000 year old Earth is not one of them.

I’m personally very comfortable with the idea that evolution was part of the creation process, one kicked off by an intelligent designer (one might even say programmer since evolutionary systems have been modeled in programming).

But I’m not here to talk about that, because Christians and non-Christians alike are missing the point when they argue about creationism.

Let me speak to Christians for a couple minutes (but if you’re not one please feel free to listen in):

1) The most central point in our faith is not God creating the world in six days. It’s Jesus Christ! Christ and his death for our sins is the single most important part of our faith, and it has nothing to do with this debate. His resurrection and promise of return is hopeful, and a sign that he conquered death.

2) This debate makes us look dumb. And we’re not. But it doesn’t help to contradict scientific evidence. Is evolution fully explained? No. But let’s not lean too heavily on the whole “it’s a theory” thing, because that misunderstands what the scientific community means when they say theory. It’s the whole “this all happened randomly” thing, especially when everything else in the world seems to tend to entropy that gets me questioning some aspects of evolution. But the process itself? Not so much. You can be a scientist and still believe there are things out there you can’t understand, like heaven and the price of sin, or exactly how random mutations work or occur.

3) There are so many other valuable things we could be (and some of us are) doing! Let’s reach out a hand to those in our community, love in a Christ like way. Our church has a food-pantry every Saturday which serves 75 households (we’re a 60 person church).

Okay everybody, lean in, cause this one’s important:

4) It doesn’t affect your day-to-day lives. For Christians, how is believing in a literal six day creation helping you to live in a Christ-like way? For non-Christians, does knowing we evolved from monkeys and lesser creatures affect any of your daily choices? Who to date, what to eat, etc?

5) But what about thinking critically? Absolutely. But, I’d be more of a fan if we taught exactly what evolution can prove and show than what I’ll call for lack of a better term the “evolutionary belief system”. I’ll admit, we have not scientifically proven that a creator was involved in the evolutionary process, but we have not dis-proven it either. When it comes to things like “how or why does evolution work?” “how do simpler things reorganize into more complex things”, random mutation is kind of a lousy answer. What exactly causes mutations? Answering “we don’t fully know” here is an acceptable (and preferable) way to go.

6) We’re not changing anybody’s mind anyway. We can talk at each other all we like (apparently Ham and Nye went on for nearly two hours before the Q and A), but pretty much everybody’s leaving that room believing what they did before. You know what I’d like to see? I’d like to see a Christian who believes in evolution argue with a Christian who doesn’t. That would be a conversation I haven’t seen, and one that might get us to look better, and get the outside world to realize we don’t all think the same way about this. But really, I’d like to just move on.

So let’s have the debate that really matters: Which is better Star Trek or Star Wars? Please cite your sources.

The correct answer is Babylon 5.

23 Comments

Filed under Faith + Life

Tagged as Bill Nye, Creationism, evolution, Ken Ham, science

by Ben Trube | December 10, 2013 · 6:35 AM

You Almost Lost Me: Creation Care

One of the six reasons David Kinnaman outlines for young Christian’s leaving the church is that the church is perceived as being anti-science. (You can read an overview of the other reasons in my Dad’s post here).

My experience here is a little unique. My Dad works with grad students who work in all sorts of fields including physics, chemistry, engineering, etc. I’ve known many people who practice their faith and their science alongside each other. My workplace is full of lots of technical people, engineers of all stripes and programmers. And faith is in the house there as well, both in my little group and in conversations with other people. In other words, I know lots of smart people who believe as well, and who practice their faith in their work as well as in their church.

But here’s where I get tripped up, global warming or climate change, or just general care for the environment.

Here’s a little of what I’m talking about (Warning this is Louis CK so there’s quite a bit of language):

Somewhere along the way it became less about taking care of the planet God gave us, and more about keeping the economy going.

Now I know climate change isn’t exactly settled science, but there is definitely reason for concern. Even if our burning of oil is not changing our atmosphere, things are measurably different than they used to be. I’ve heard the argument that this might just be a planet cycle and we have nothing to do with it. That may be true (though I kinda doubt it), but whether we’re the cause or not, we need to be part of the solution, because it could be our survival we’re talking about.

Okay, lot of maybes and what ifs there. I recognize this is an area for discussion. What bothers me is the outright rejection of that discussion.

And unfortunately I have seen a lot of what CK is talking about, both at times in my church, and in my work.

This kind of anti-science mentality is more damning I think than evolution. The debate about evolution and creationism is an esoteric one. At the end of the day, does it really affect our day to day lives which is true? And for that matter, many Christians, myself included, are perfectly comfortable with the idea of evolution as part of creationism.

But if weather patterns change, if water levels and temperatures rise, that’s going to matter to our real lives, even the economy. Rejecting climate change and creation care kind of makes Christians hypocrites. We’re called to take care of what God gave us, to be faithful stewards of this world. That doesn’t mean we can do whatever we want with the Earth’s resources. We’ve driven hundreds of species to extinction, we’ve mined the ground and stripped the forest. And because America set such a good example, the emerging world is doing the same thing, and getting smog filled air in return.

Ultimately I’m still in the church because I do see some good examples of people who care about this stuff (my Dad and my pastor), but I know plenty of places where this is not true. The church needs to take a hard look at its stance on issues like this, and pull themselves away from the viewpoints of a “Jesus and” mentality. I’m not asking you all to be democrats (because I’m not one, neither am I a republican), but I am asking you to think about our responsibilities here, and the potential dangers as well as the potential good that come from clean energy, and turning climate change around.

Okay, now that I’ve riled you up I’ll pass you back to Dad 🙂

8 Comments

Filed under Faith + Life

Tagged as christianity, Climate Change, Global Warming, Louis CK, science

by Ben Trube | May 2, 2013 · 6:35 AM

There are always possibilities…

Believe it or not there are some scientists who believe in the possibility that science will one day prove (or at least strongly suggest) the existence of a god. Probably not the one that all the world’s religions have been talking about, but a god nonetheless. This group of scientists call their belief system creatively enough, “possibilianism” a term coined by Jürgen Schmidhuber, an AI researcher who blogs from time to time on Ray Kurzweil’s singularity site.

Suffice it to say there are many who feel that this ignores a preponderance of scientific thought. Their argument basically goes, just because a thing is possible doesn’t mean it’s likely, especially if all experimentation to date seems to lead to the conclusion that the thing is not possible. Gary Marcus in his New Yorker piece, likens this to a belief in flying reindeer. Stating it is possible if there are sleighs we have not seen ignores the fact that all evidence points to the fact that reindeer do not fly.

Unless you are younger than 7. Then you can ignore what I just said.

Here’s the thing, I do think that an understanding of science, mathematics and the physical world can help to solidify a belief that this world was divinely made, but I also think it’s possible there are reasons why science is not the best tool to answer this question.

One possible reason is related to the Tower of Babel, the story of which you’ll find in Genesis 11: 1-8, and alluded to in a recent story on this blog. I’ve always found this story fascinating, both in blaming it for the fact that I had to learn different languages in high-school, but also the goal of the people building the tower in the first place. They wanted to build a tower that “reaches to the heavens” or put another way, to touch the face of God.

Now it’s pretty obvious that the technology of that period of human history probably couldn’t even have scratched the surface of moderate high-rises in Columbus, let alone the buildings in Dubai, or the fact that we’ve reached out into space. There was no actual possibility, even if heaven were a place that could be reached simply by building upward, that these humans would ever reach God in this fashion.

Why then does God react the way he does, taking their one common tongue and changing it so none of them can understand each other? Verse 6 refers to the fact that if they all speak one language, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.

I have a feeling God wasn’t just talking about these particular humans, but about us as well. And I don’t think it’s that he perceived us as a potential threat. It’s just that this is not how we are to get to know God. The basic goal of the people building the Tower of Babel was to bring prominence and prestige to themselves, not to have a real understanding of God.

If we were to prove God’s existence, or even to meet him in a living context (leaving aside for the moment that most belief systems say we’d be struck dumb with awe) there’d be a sense that we did something. Certainly the scientist who proves the existence of God will have untold wealth and fame. But is this really the basis for a belief, for a relationship with God, for salvation. I actually give the human race a lot of credit. If we spoke with one language, and one mind, I bet we could literally find God. But that might not actually do us any good if it did nothing to change our hearts.

Even simple things we cannot prove like love are valuable to our lives, in many ways precisely because they exist on faith, not only blind belief, but the desire to act out of love, to keep love alive, and the desire to experience it.

It’s certainly something for a scientist to say God is possible. It’s something more for us to believe it as individuals.

3 Comments

Filed under Faith + Life

Tagged as Faith, God, Possibilianism, Religion, science

by Ben Trube | March 4, 2013 · 6:00 AM

Doctor, Doctor, Cut my throat!

No, this isn’t a cry for help, merely proof that Isaac Asimov has written about everything.

While browsing through the labyrinth of stacks at the Acorn Bookshop last Friday, I came upon a collection of Asimov’s science essays from about 40 years ago. Typically, Asimov afficiando though I am, I don’t tend to pick up out of date science articles from the 70s. But this collection had an interesting title, The tragedy of the moon, and one article in particular with the unfortunate title I repurposed for today’s post.

Seems Asimov and I both had thyroid trouble, though his tumor was benign and only required the removal of half his thyroid. Here’s the difference forty years makes, apparently his Doctor cut an incision ear to ear, and was poking around for four hours! Asimov’s response to this, largely under the influence of anaesthetic, was the following:

Doctor, Doctor, with green coat,
Doctor, Doctor, cut my throat
And when you’ve cut it, Doctor, then,
Won’t you sew it up again?

Suffice it to say my original reaction, under less dire circumstances (namely a 3 inch cut), was not quite so sanguine.

Asimov continues the article with a fascinating historical tale of the discovery of hormones in the early 20th century, and how they came from research on nerves.

A few tidbits you might enjoy:

– Pavlov, known for his salivating dogs and conditioned responses, got his start, and his Nobel, from nerve research on dogs. These dogs did not make out quite as well as the ones in his later research.

– Thyroid pills, in Asimov’s time anyway, are made from the thyroid glands of slaughtered livestock. If this is still true, I don’t want to know.

– Thyroid means ‘shield-like’.

– Asimov did not care much for Doctors, and Doctors seemed bemused with him.

You can read the rest of the article in the aforementioned book, or the August 1972 issue of F&SF, or possibly on the web. Anyone dug up any good books lately, particulary ones that are personally relevant?