Gareth Cook, Pulitzer prize winning science writer for the Boston Globe, sums up the Evolution Wars this way.
"The question posed by intelligent design is not whether evolution is true, but how much it can explain."
Both sides of the Intelligent Design-Evolution debate—either God as a lab coated scientist in the sky, or life as we know it as mere happenstance and simply the random outcome of a mechanistic evolutionary process—seems lacking any appreciation for the awe and wonder of our universe.
Bill Bryson, in his delightful book, "A Short History of Nearly Anything" puts human understanding of the universe in some perspective. "We don't know very much," he writes, "and what we do know, we haven't known very long."
The kind of certainty that ID and evolutionists talk about the origins of life seems a bit absurd.
Bryson, who describes human nature as "both divine and felonious," was surprised in the research for his book, an overview of current scientific understanding, to find that there was "nothing at all incompatible with profound religious belief and an understanding of science."
In this interview with the Australian Broadcasting Company , Bryson also points out how incredibly fortunate any of us are to be alive at all.
"An awful lot of things have had to go right for nearly 4 billion years for you and me to be here now looking at each other," he told the interviewer from ABC.
Now that's something to be thankful for.
Here's a bit more from the Bryson interview:
KERRY O'BRIEN: One cosmologist in your book acknowledges that the big bang theory throws up questions that "are very close to religious questions". How did you personally deal with that one?
BILL BRYSON: Well, I'm not a spiritual person myself, but the thing that did kind of surprise me is the realisation that there's nothing at all incompatible with profound religious belief and an understanding of science, and that in fact, the further you go back - I mean, when you go back asking questions, when you go back to the beginning of any area of science and you go back to the beginning of it, you know, God is as good an explanation as any. Why did we have a big bang? Why was the universe created? Why did it happen when it happened? No scientist can give you a scientific answer for that; we don't know. So God is as good an answer as any.
KERRY O'BRIEN: You say it yourself, that we have come this far only with an inordinate amount of good luck, good fortune. I mean, the odds against the universe, the odds against our planet, the odds against life on the planet, etc, etc, they just keep throwing up more questions, don't they?
BILL BRYSON: Yes. I mean, we are extremely lucky to be here, and the one thing that I really came away with from doing the book is how lucky we are to exist, both as a species and as a planet and as individuals - you know, all the chain of events that were necessary to happen just the right way in order to get you here now, 'cause your great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was just some little unicellular organism, and an awful lot of things have had to go right for nearly 4 billion years for you and me to be here now looking at each other.
"The question posed by intelligent design is not whether evolution is true, but how much it can explain."
Both sides of the Intelligent Design-Evolution debate—either God as a lab coated scientist in the sky, or life as we know it as mere happenstance and simply the random outcome of a mechanistic evolutionary process—seems lacking any appreciation for the awe and wonder of our universe.
Bill Bryson, in his delightful book, "A Short History of Nearly Anything" puts human understanding of the universe in some perspective. "We don't know very much," he writes, "and what we do know, we haven't known very long."
The kind of certainty that ID and evolutionists talk about the origins of life seems a bit absurd.
Bryson, who describes human nature as "both divine and felonious," was surprised in the research for his book, an overview of current scientific understanding, to find that there was "nothing at all incompatible with profound religious belief and an understanding of science."
In this interview with the Australian Broadcasting Company , Bryson also points out how incredibly fortunate any of us are to be alive at all.
"An awful lot of things have had to go right for nearly 4 billion years for you and me to be here now looking at each other," he told the interviewer from ABC.
Now that's something to be thankful for.
Here's a bit more from the Bryson interview:
KERRY O'BRIEN: One cosmologist in your book acknowledges that the big bang theory throws up questions that "are very close to religious questions". How did you personally deal with that one?
BILL BRYSON: Well, I'm not a spiritual person myself, but the thing that did kind of surprise me is the realisation that there's nothing at all incompatible with profound religious belief and an understanding of science, and that in fact, the further you go back - I mean, when you go back asking questions, when you go back to the beginning of any area of science and you go back to the beginning of it, you know, God is as good an explanation as any. Why did we have a big bang? Why was the universe created? Why did it happen when it happened? No scientist can give you a scientific answer for that; we don't know. So God is as good an answer as any.
KERRY O'BRIEN: You say it yourself, that we have come this far only with an inordinate amount of good luck, good fortune. I mean, the odds against the universe, the odds against our planet, the odds against life on the planet, etc, etc, they just keep throwing up more questions, don't they?
BILL BRYSON: Yes. I mean, we are extremely lucky to be here, and the one thing that I really came away with from doing the book is how lucky we are to exist, both as a species and as a planet and as individuals - you know, all the chain of events that were necessary to happen just the right way in order to get you here now, 'cause your great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was just some little unicellular organism, and an awful lot of things have had to go right for nearly 4 billion years for you and me to be here now looking at each other.
posted by Bob at
2:13 PM
