Two Books but Just One Subject
My 75th and 76th titles for the year are two books I've been putting off for a long time: The Light of Day, by John Burroughs, and Rocks of Ages, by Stephen Jay Gould.
Burroughs and Gould are my two favorite nature essayists, and until a year ago I was systematically working my way through the complete works of Burroughs. I stopped because of the subject of the 11th volume, which is science and religion. Gould's book is on the same subject, and it, too, had been languishing on my unread shelf.
The problem is that, ex-science student and ex-minister's son that I am, I'm really sick to death of the topic. Bored, bored, bored; not to mention tired of it.
Still, these are my favorite nature essayists, so I resolved to read them in tandem and get it over with. They're well-written, of course (though some of Burroughs' arguments and examples have dated badly), and I picked up a nice quote from George Washington ("the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion" in a treaty with Tripoli), and some insight into why William Jennings Bryan was so adamantly anti-Evolution (influenced by the "social Darwinism" and "imperial Darwinism" which were widespread, and had nothing to do with Darwin's arguments). Otherwise, though, the same old stuff.
Proof of it being the same old stuff, is that both make exactly the same argument, and both acknowledge that you can find the same argument in writings going back centuries: that religion and science are, in Gould's phrase, "non-overlapping magisteria" and that neither can prove or disprove the other. Burroughs kinda cheats, though, because he can't resist the temptation to claim that Science can refute the miracles in the New Testament, and therefore Science is valid and deadly in destruction of specific creeds. To him, true religion is a "sentiment" and theology is by its very nature antithetical to it, because it pretends to be a science of that which science cannot touch.
Now I can get on with my life. No more zombie novels for Tim, and no more books on Science vs. Religion, neither.
CBsIP: (a few hundred pages of student manuscripts)
2666, Roberto Bolano
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay, LL.D.
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, James W. Loewen
The Natural, Bernard Malamud
Four Dragons, Diana Botsford
The Tools for Successful Online Teaching, Lisa Dawley