Hi, Steve.
I'm not sure what you're referring to, but I'll take a stab at it. I
don't think the minister was saying don't look at the material, but
that there was some kind effort at NASA to stop presenting the
material because it was too 'provoking' of thinking about God. It's
from a few months ago when a guy by the name of Steve Allison (I
believe he's a member of a Church Of Christ congregation in Knoxville,
TN) told me the following:
Our minister preached a sermon against evolution a few
months ago. I was surprised to hear him say that NASA had
recently stopped presenting Hubble Photos on the web
because it caused too many people to comment about God. I
can't believe that what he said is true. Seems to me that
it must be an evangelical urban legend. I checked the
NASA site afterwards and they were still there. A search
engine will turn up lots of Hubble-related sites on the
web. Does anyone know what he was referring to?
Furthermore, I'm sure that most people at NASA are like
people anywhere else, a large fraction of them are
religious. I can't imagine such a decision.
To which I replied:
Such a claim is absolutely wrong.
Go to the Hubble Space Telescope site at:
http://www.stsci.edu/
Click on "Pictures" (should be third bulleted item). This
takes you to "Hubble Space Telescope Public Pictures." The
first bulleted item is "Latest Release" (link address:
http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/latest.html). NASA has
been adding new HST images with description to this list
something like an average of about once every 10 days.
(Notice that the list shows the posting date.)
Perhaps this is what you are referring to.
There are so many, many examples like this, that I must completely agree
with Bob Miller and George Murphy that seminaries is where information
and discussion targeting efforts should be focused. It is typically
preachers who are the day-to-day "popular promoters" of such poor
information related to religion-and-science issues. (Of course, this is
my opinion based on my personal experience, and is certainly not based
on any formal study of the situation.)
Regards,
Todd S. Greene
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Thebes/7755/
###### Stephen J. Krogh, 4/2/01 11:37 PM ######
Hi Todd,
Was it you that said you had heard from someone that they were told by
their pastor to not look at Hubble photos? Is that 4th or 5th hand ;-)
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