As everyone with eyes is aware, Ken Ham & Co. opened their Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky last month. The bottom line, as I have enunciated in other posts of this ilk, is that no sentient being who is wholly (holy?) convinced that s/he has a direct line to The Truth from The God can be convinced that their worldview may be flawed. Introducing provable facts to the debate only gives rise to elaborate “explanations,” e.g. “God put the fossils in the ground to fool us,” etc.

However, the religious establishment’s view of what’s true and what’s not has changed markedly over the centuries, usually under overwhelming factual weight–but NEVER until the weight became utterly unbearable.

Remember our friend Galileo; the apocryphal E pur si muove quote (which, while it is debatable if he actually uttered, still makes a point) certainly didn’t cause the Catholic Church to change its view on the structure of the universe. However…and stick with me here, as I’m attempting to use the Galileo trial as an object lesson with regard to *all* excursions of organized religion into hard science.

At Galileo’s second trial in 1633, the concern was not about the doctrine of a heliocentric universe as with the person of Galileo, and his manifest breach of contract in not abstaining from the active teaching of a scientifically proven theory. (Note: Remember, several years earlier, Galileo had been threatened with some pretty heinous consequences if he didn’t keep his cake-hole shut and stick with the literal reading of the book of Joshua with respect to the earth being the center of the universe. Again–the LITERAL INTERPRETATION of a Biblical story as hard science.)

Now follow this: The sentence, passed upon him in consequence, clearly implied a condemnation of Copernicanism, but it made no formal decree on the subject, and did not receive the pope’s signature.

So, in a neat semantic trick, the Catholic Church condemned the MAN, without having to actually go on record condemning what he was teaching. Mr. Galilei was told he’d be burned alive for teaching science–but the science itself wasn’t actually condemned! The Pope *did* put the Copernican publication on the banned Index, and it didn’t get removed until 1758, LONG after a heliocentric universe was accepted as fact. That’s 218 years after its publication, boys and girls, and over 125 years after Galileo’s trial.

Lesson to be learned: Darwin (Wallace, Lyell, Hooker, et. al.) published On the Origin of Species in 1858. Using the publication of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium as a model, then, we can possibly expect the fundamentalist, literal readers of the Bible to accept evolution–and all the explanations for fossils, the age of the earth, etc.–as a viable model for the origin of life around 2073.

The promulgation of reason, proof, and fact over mythology and anthropological folk-tale (Gilgamesh, anyone?) is a hobby of mine.

My advice to those of you who are irritated at the wrong-headedness of the Creation Museum and the mythology which it very slickly purports to be science, is to simply wait. You can lead a fundamentalist to evidence, but you can’t make him think–until enough evidence accrues that continuing to insist on a literal interpretation of whatever scripture is their Final Word starts to make them look idiotic. Then, and only then, will an avenue to compromise be built.

Remember, friends, we’re talking about people who suggest that their God built the Earth, fossils and all, just to fool us poor humans. What kind of narrow-minded folks would believe in their own creation myths so deeply as to turn the very God they worship into a mean-spirited Loki figure? Just approaching them with provable facts doesn’t stand a chance.

See you in 2073!

(part II tomorrow)

This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 10:20 pm and is filed under Religion, Worldview. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.