Celebrating Darwin: Religion And Science Are Closer Than You Think

[moonbladem]

He looked really uneasy. I'd just finished giving my first lecture of 8.282, MIT's freshman astronomy course, but this one student stayed behind in my classroom. He nervously explained that although he liked the subject, he worried that my teaching conflicted with his religion. I asked him what his religion was, and when I told him that it had

Comments

[skellington1]

I just read a blog post about the 'problem' (scare quotes mine) of young people leaving the church (in this case they were speaking broadly of evangelical churches). The whole article made me a bit twitchy, but the comment section was something else again.

I was frankly appalled by the number of people who

1. realized that kids were leaving because they'd studied science and
2. thought the 'solution' to this was to teach better apologetic

It included bits about how 'evolution is wrong but the church hasn't done a good enough job of showing kids the evidence', about how kids needed to be 'armed' with apologetic defenses, etc. NO ONE on the page said 'Hey, y'know, maybe we should back off on the more nut-job claims about the 6,000 year old earth and get back to the bits that actually matter to our religion.'

A lot of religion is strange foreign territory to me to begin with, but this issue in particular is baffling on multiple levels. I've known a great many religious people who were also people of science, and found no conflict

[moonshaz]

This suggests that the belief gap to do with intellectual disputes and more to do with an epic failure of science education.

Ya think?

Seriously, if 18% of the US population thinks the sun revolves around the freaking earth, there is definitely some MAJORLY EPIC FAIL going on in science education.

As bad as it is that so few people seem to realize how old the universe HAS to be, this is the one that completely blew my mind.