Malcolm Pollack points out what has to be one of the most egregious examples of doublethink I've ever encountered. Imagine, if you will, a guy who gets his doctorate in the field of paleontology... but who is, at the same time, a young-earth creationist.
You primed? You curious? Go read Malcolm's essay and find out more.
(If I'm not mistaken, the title of Malcolm's essay refers to a rather frightening passage in Ezekiel about a valley of dry bones. The bones undergo a very "Raiders of the Lost Ark"-style transformation, but in reverse: the flesh flies onto the bones, and you end up with a valley of the living.)
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Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Ave, Malcolm!
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3 comments:
Thanks as always, Kevin.
There's also an old song based on that story from Ezekiel, an old-time-religion singalong number. I thought it made a good bridge between evangelism and paleontology.
In grad school, I had an encounter with a fellow student who was into --I think it was called Creation Science back in those days (the 80s). He was a biologist who believed that a new species only came about as a result of God's explicit intervention. Within-species variation occurred as a result of natural processes, but only God created new species. As a biologist, he considered that his area of study was under what circumstances God decided to create new species, so that he and his fellow Creation Scientists could predict when God would do it again. I think maybe they thought if they could catch god in the act, it would prove the existence of God once and for all.
He was very intense, very committed, very interested in persuading us of the legitimacy of his perspective. But I did give him a moment's pause when I told him that I thought that what he was doing amounted to attempting to comprehend the mind of God, and that sounded rather blasphemous to me. The interesting thing about that is that I was pretty firmly on the atheistic side of my chronic agnosticism at the time--and yet I really did feel that what he was describing seemed blasphemous.
Never underestimate the power of the human mind to compartmentalize. Or to believe six (was it six?) impossible things before breakfast.
PS Now that you've enabled comments, it would be nice for us browsers if we could tell if there are comments accompanying a post without clicking on the thingy to find out. Unless you have some reason for not wanting the existence of comments to be apparent, maybe you'd consider changing that?
PPS What has happened to the book? It seems as though it fell into a black hole.
Addofio,
re: book
A long story, the telling of which is worth the wait. Peace.
re: more visible comments
In a word: no. I'm a cyber-misanthrope who has never been comfortable with the comments function. I'm also a lazy bastard who doesn't want to root around a perfectly good (if somewhat outdated) blog template to make changes that won't matter to me, even if they matter to others. So along with misanthropy and laziness, I suppose we should add selfishness to the list of my attractive qualities.
Kevin
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