The Questions of Life

In the excellent movie The Truman Show Truman Burbank, played by Jim Carrey, is having a crisis of identity and perception. His whole life he has been told that the world operates a certain way, yet he is noticing strange anomalies; His observations often don't match how other people relate, and tell him to relate, to the world. Ultimately, he comes to understand what everyone has been trying to hide, namely, that he lives a sheltered and artificial life where much of what he thought he knew about the world was false.

Philosophers and theologians have wrestled with how to best understand reality for as long as we have recorded history. The proposals have ranged from the bizarre and mystical to skeptical ideas such as Solipsism, which denies that we can know anything outside of our own minds. Rationalists debate with Empiricists, and skeptics argue with believers. The question of how to understand our existence has occupied our consciousness and after many thousands of years of debating we wonder if we ever will fully understand our existence and how we view and interpret it.

Religion stakes out its territory through means of "revelation". While many have decided that we understand through a process of investigation and discovery, religions insist that we also must consider the possibility of divine revelation and of truths that originate from God himself (or herself). Where there is a conflict between what is observed and what is revealed, the revealed is believed to preempt the observed (or even reason) since the latter depends upon our ability to correctly and clearly observe and process what we see. Our own deductive powers are considered no match for God's divine revelation since He ultimately knows and sees all from an unrestricted perspective.

For those of us who were brought up in a religion-dominated culture, realizing that there are empirical truths that directly contradict what we were taught is unsettling. We were told to view reality through the filter of Scripture and church dogma and were taught to regard Science and reason as suspect. God had taken the responsibility of teaching us exactly what we needed to know in order to help us navigate this evil and deceptive life.

Christian pastors and theologians insist that the spiritual doctrines of Christianity can not be subjected to reason; what is expressed in terms of faith can never fully satisfy the inquiry of reason. The difficulty with this idea is that where empirical data contradicts facts presented in the Bible Christian apologists object to both the data and the method of deriving the data. When observers began to suggest that the earth was round and orbited around the Sun, the Church objected to the ideas and to the people and methods. (So tradition holds - I suspect the issues were much deeper.)

I find it interesting that my own, and many other, denomination used science to disprove other religions. For example, mainstream Christians use the disciplines of archeology and biology to disprove the claims of the Book of Mormon. They show in solid terms that there is simply no evidence to support the existence of the Nephi and other Mormon civilizations and Joseph Smith claimed existed. They use DNA evidence to demonstrate that the native American populations came from Northern Asia rather than from Europe and so could not be the lost tribe(s) of Israel. Science solidly disproves the claims of Mormons, and is used to refute the credibility of the Book of Mormon and of Joseph Smith and the subsequent Mormon prophets and scholars.
When the same types of techniques are applied in verifying the claims of the Bible, however, they are considered evil. They are, in that context, the tools and the attacks of the Devil. When biology and archeology and geology make discoveries that seem to -- or solidly do -- run contrary to what the Bible teaches, it is Science that is attacked. This is obviously a double standard.

For my part, I feel like Truman in a way. I've discovered that there are a number of scientific observations that negate the possibility of a world-wide deluge. More disturbing is that my laundry list of creationist refutations and "proofs" have dissolved one-by-one as I've researched them.

• Footprints in Paluxy
• Carbon 14 dating wildly inaccurate
• Radiometric dating inaccurate and based on flawed assumptions
• Principle of uniformatarianism flawed
• Grand Canyon carved by receding floodwaters
• Polonium halos
  

There are many more than these. I've discovered that most scientists are guided by three things: First, they are very smart and well-informed and educated. Second they are honestly searching for truth. They want to understand. Finally, science has a built in checks-and-balances system where a scientists reputation depends on his accurate description and interpretation of the data. Even if the scientist is evil incarnate he is still motivated by selfish ambition to make sure that his data is accurate and his interpretations are logical and sound. While this peer pressure can, and does, work against the facts, the blanket statement that all of science is tainted with evolution and the dogma of billions of years does not address the core question: Are evolution and the dogma of billions of years false?

And so the journey continues...