I heard a question

Context
At my Quaker meeting today, we discussed this article about the Bible by Kristin Swenson. One of the regular attenders at the meeting has neither a strong interest nor a strong background in the Bible, so she asked what we thought the Bible was for. I said the Bible was for religious instruction. It has pretty good poetry, although it's probably better in the original Greek; reasonable history, especially if you're interested in the various kings of Israel, and some great philosophy. I also said it makes a poor science textbook. Someone at the table said this last would be a radical idea to the Texas Board of Education, because over the past few years, Texas has been embroiled in a debate about how to treat the theory of evolution in science textbooks.


Commentary
I need to start with some housekeeping. The link for Kristin Swenson's article goes to the Deseret News instead of the Shreveport Times, because the latter's archive didn't make it appear in a search. I'm sure they'll rue the day they lost the huge amount of traffic that comes from my blog!

Also, I try to be accurate in the Context portion of the blog, so I reported my comment that the poetry was better in the Greek. Upon further review, I should have said, "in the original language," because very little of the poetry in the Bible was originally written in Greek.

Lastly, I posted the most recent article I could find about the Texas textbook controversy, but if you do a Google search for Texas Board of Education creationism, you'll find all kinds of other goodies.

OK, now the actual commentary. Scientists don't like it when school boards put "all sides of scientific theories" language in textbook standards, because they think it's code for "take potshots at the theory of evolution." It may very well be, but the testimony on integrity (that again!) won't permit me to say so without positive proof.

So I won't deal with that issue. Instead, I'll talk about why the Bible itself, not any creationist-leaning textbook, makes a poor resource for scientific learning. The purpose of science books, and science classes for that matter, is to make observations about the world around us, come up with a plausible explanations for it, and ideally, teach people to do the same.

The Bible is terrible at this. In general, it jumps straight to conclusions without offering any physical evidence for them. I see no "We conclude God created the world in seven days because of this, this, and this" in Genesis; do you? Luckily, assertions about the nature of the physical world are kind of rare in the Bible; it's mostly about setting up a belief system and acting upon it. And to be fair, science textbooks are as bad as religious instruction as the Bible is at science.

Science is tethered to the realm of the possible. This is problematic for religion (at least my religion) in two ways:

1) Faith takes us outside the realm of what's physically possible. The Bible asserts that people can rise from the dead (2 Kings 4:32-37), that men can be thrown into a furnace and come out unharmed(Daniel 3:19-28), and that there will come a time when wolves lie down with lambs (Isaiah 11:6-8), and that's just in the Old Testament. The New Testament really goes berserk. Science can bring awe and wonder, but only faith sets us free from the tyranny of our lives to see new, unimagined possibilities. I recognize the irony of using that word, but whatcha gonna do?

2) Science makes no distinction between the possible and the desirable. Observable phenomena tell us that splitting atoms can cause horrific destruction. Science, in its purest form, has no opinion about whether this is a good or bad thing. Pretty much all religious thought comes down firmly on one side of the issue.

So science and religion have different purposes and places in our lives. Is that really such a radical idea?

What did you hear today?