Science & Religion: a grand canyon?

According to the website of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (www.peer.org) the Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the age of its principal feature, due to pressure from “Bush appointees”. “In order to avoid offending religious fundamentalists, our National Park Service is under orders to suspend its belief in geology,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. “It is disconcerting that the official position of a national park as to the geologic age of the Grand Canyon is ‘no comment.’” The fundamentalists in question are a branch of the Intelligent Design (ID) protagonists called “Young Earth Creationists” or YECs. YECs believe the canyon was created during Noah’s flood, less than 10,000 years ago.

Many books have been written recently debunking Intelligent Design in all its forms; one that demands attention is by Ken Miller, professor of biology at one of the top Ivy League schools in the nation, Brown University. Since Brown is in Providence, RI, it’s perhaps appropriate that Miller is also a devout Christian. Yet he spends 3 chapters of his book “Finding Darwin’s God” roundly debunking all comers from the ID dressing room. He, as much as anyone, knows that modern biology itself is predicated upon the theory of evolution by natural selection and that the arguments of the IDs and YECs are simply specious, a grasping at straws. So why do so many Christians (mainly) still cling to a “young earth” view (according to a recent survey, a view held by 40% of Coloradans!)? Miller’s view, argued convincingly, is that many – most – of the defenders of evolution think that evolution debunks religion, so you cannot have one without the other. Since Christians, Jews, Muslims tend to be a tenacious lot, they would rather keep the faith and jettison the science, even if that means grasping the specious straw. Oxford don Richard Dawkins is a perfect example. He has written a series of marvelous books enlightening the ignorant, such as myself, on the wonders of nature and its intelligence-less workings. But then he goes and spoils it all by publishing such books as “The God Delusion” and saying things like “whether there exists a God…is a scientific question. My answer is no.” (Time magazine, Nov 13 2006). Of course, if it’s a scientific question the answer is no, but seeing religion as scientific is to make the same error as the YECs. ID is pseudo-science in defense of religion, Dawkins is pseudo-religion in defense of science. No wonder we still have a grand canyon in this area!

So how does Miller resolve it? Watch this space