Woodward Norm Civ WRALC/TIEDM wrote:
> Hey George…
>
> Was that first line a Freudian slip? 8^)
>
>
> No - just a dumb one.
>
>
> As I have stated before, I believe that meaningful discussions
> concerning alternate Origin stories should be presented to all our
> children, and if it can not be done in our public schools (or any
> other public forum), then, perhaps by default, it must occur in our
> other “meeting houses,” our houses of worship.
>
> Which "alternate Origin stories"? Should we teach in public
> schools that Odin & his brothers made the world out of the body of the
> giant Ymir, or the Egyptian story of the god who created the world by
> masturbating, as possible alternatives to evolution? Or if we're
> limited to the church, should we teach that God created the universe
> by defeating a primordial sea monster, as in Ps.89:8-13 &
> Job.26:12-13?
> Of course the teaching of creation in the church should be
> distinctively Christian. I.e., it should speak about the world _as_
> creation & talk about evolution in terms of the providential action of
> the God who is revealed in Jesus Christ. But that means putting
> evolution in a theological context, not trying to present some
> alternative to it as a scientific theory.
>
>
> I am surprised that everyone here seems to have forgotten (or never
> learned) that throughout the period between the observation of the
> “red shift” in the cosmos, and the confirmation of Gamow’s predictions
> by the Bell Labs radio engineers, it was the Humanists who had
> resisted, and, to some extent, continue to resist, the Big Bang Theory
> the strongest, due to the theological implications of a finite
> universe.
>
This is misleading. Sure, the desire to get rid of a suggestion
of a creation moment was one of the motives of the steady state theory,
but there were plenty of "humanists" who never bought into that - Gamow,
e.g. Moreover, the idea that big bang theory has "theological
implications" about creation is belied by the fact that somebody like
Weinberg can be quite comfortable with it. & on the other hand, the
steady state theory could be reconciled with belief in God as the
ultimate ground of being of the universe - the same kind of approach
that would be necessary if the Hartle-Hawking model turned out to be
true.
& having said that, the relevance of this to teaching about
evolution in the church is unclear.
Shalom,
George
George L. Murphy
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
"The Science-Theology Interface"
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 05 2002 - 17:02:54 EST