Just in case you can’t make it out to Fargo or LA this weekend, where I’ll be, I’m going to reciprocate by not showing up at the Creation Science Fair.
Twin Cities Creation Science Fair (Fair Guidelines)
University of Northwestern, Maranatha Hall
3003 North Snelling Ave. Roseville Minnesota
I’ll warn you: it’s kind of depressing. Like any science fair, you’ll see some smart kids there, and some apathetic ones, and some good experiments, and some bad ones. Only thing is, all of the experiments, good or bad, have to include a Bible verse and are used as PR by the loons of the Twin Cities Creation Science Association.
Just think how crippled science would be if real research had to be justified with a Christian Bible verse…or a quote from the Quran.
I think science would be crippled even if you had to include a justification from Mark Twain with every one (though at least you’d get some mighty nice quotes). That sort of restriction on science is stifling.
Well, since Christian exegetes generally have no scruples about quoting the Bible out of context, I see no reason why I should; so here’s a verse from Proverbs that by itself doesn’t seem too science-crippling to me (aside from excluding women…).
1 Thessalonians 5:21. “Test everything, hold on to the good.” It’s in with a bunch of nonsense, but that one verse (in some translations, at least) is pretty solid.
I’ve always liked another snipped from Thessalonians, “Quaecumque vera”, “whatsoever things are true.” Of course, that’s buried in along with a lot of annoying assumptions and confabulation, but the line itself is brilliantly compact. Frankly, it’s the one line I’ve kept on admiring from my proto-religious days.
It reminds me of that time when my mother was instructed to teach material science “from the Marxist-Leninist perspective”. She had only a few weeks to rewrite hundreds of lectures and lesson plans to submit them for Partorg’s approval. Working ideology into a discussion of physics proved challenging, to say the least.
Wait. You aren’t required to include a quote from Charles Darwin in every biology paper published? How are other scientists supposed to know if the research is ideologically pure?
At least with the Qur’an, you always have Surah 17:36: “You shall not accept any information, unless you verify it for yourself. I have given you the hearing, the eyesight, and the brain, and you are responsible for using them.” http://www.quran.mu/surah-al-isra.html
Yeah, I think I remember something like that in the Bible — NOT.
“Jesus wept.”
If only a single verse is required, there are many possibilities. Here are three:
I think I’d just start my intro/background, or perhaps one section of the methods, with “In the beginning,”
I didn’t grow up in a place where kids participate in science fairs (as a teenager I only knew of the concept from American films), but if I had done I’d have wanted to see how many parents and teachers I could persuade into believing that I had been successful in extracting sunlight from cucumbers.
Now that I’m a bit older I can think of a couple of ways of possibly achieving this.
So this is happening at my university. Ugh. (No, not here by choice.)
If “the devil can read Scripture for his purpose”, then so can we…
Given the 17th-century meaning of “man”, I wonder if the verse also excludes women in the original.
:-o
Oops. Italics not intended, they’d make sense on another blog where blockquotes don’t get a sidebar or a different color. I should have gone to bed already.
Sura 67: 3-4, quoted by Abdus Salam in his Nobel acceptance speech;
Will there be a problem if the Biblical quotes are excerpted from the Latin Vulgate? I hear there was quite a dust-up when Latinos tried to impose a Latin motto on Vermont. (They were probably all illegals, of course.)
There are hermaphrodite species and serial hermaphrodites, e.g., in a school of clownfish the dominant male changes sex to female when the top female dies. In wrasses the change goes the other way. A good bible verse for these would be, “Male and female created he them.” (Genesis 5:2 KJV) An experiment would let us see the Lord’s hand working before our very eyes!