FAITH AND SCIENCE

A recent poll finds that 44% of US Americans believe that God
created human beings within the last 10,000 years. (? Usually
fundamentalists say our 'birth date' is 4004 BC, which would
make our race 6,013 years old.)

This is kind of scarey except that similar polls have been finding
the same thing for the last 30 years or so. What are we to make
of this?

There is no rational reason to believe that science and faith are
incompatible. The Puritans, noted for being, well, puritanical,
were nevertheless not rejecting of science. They thought that the
physical world mirrored God's majesty and that the more they
discovered of the world, the more they could understand God's
will.

How simple fundamentalist faith could be if the believer would
just accept that the world is a manifestation of God. But we can
bet that that's not about to happen.

It reminds me of the beginnings of the 'feminist era', during which
a best-selling book (don't remember the title) was about the 'nat-
ural' submission of women to men. That was scarey too but it
didn't prevent a new era of feminism from manifesting itself, which
leads us to interpret the book's popularity as a last hurrah of the
old guard rather than a portent of the future.

Similarly, polls rejecting the truth of science may be a last, desper-
ate stand to somehow prevent change from taking place in the
world. I think this is the key to the issue: not that people are
resisting science per se (although i'm sure they think so), but that
they are afraid of change itself. This is a prominent feature of con-
servatism: such people, sometimes called authoritarian personal-
ities, want to be told what to do and also highly prize the stability
of the status quo which allows them to refrain from having to
challenge their own beliefs.

But this is not how our world is. To the contrary, we are going thru
a period of change unparalleled in human history, in fact the
greatest change to the planet biome since 65 million years ago,
when the dinosaurs became extinct. Nothing is going to stop this
change--altho we hope that we can direct it into desirable channels.
Fortunately our children and grandchildren seem to be wiser than
we, even as we are wiser than our parents and grandparents. Per-
haps the hope of a better world is what real faith is in our times.