Faith

From an article titled "Scientists Call Fish Fossil the 'Missing Link'" by John Noble Wilford in the NY Times:

Scientists have discovered fossils of a 375 million-year-old fish, a large scaly creature not seen before, that they say is a long-sought "missing link" in the evolution of some fishes from water to a life walking on four limbs on land. In addition to confirming elements of a major transition in evolution, the fossils are widely seen by scientists as a powerful rebuttal to religious creationists, who hold a literal biblical view on the origins and development of life. Several well-preserved skeletons of the fossil fish were uncovered in sediments of former stream beds in the Canadian Arctic, 600 miles from the North Pole, it is being reported on Thursday in the journal Nature. The skeletons have the fins and scales and other attributes of a giant fish, four to nine feet long. But on closer examination, scientists found telling anatomical traits of a transitional creature, a fish that is still a fish but exhibiting changes that anticipate the emergence of land animals - a predecessor thus of amphibians, reptiles and dinosaurs, mammals and eventually humans. The discovering scientists called the fossils the most compelling examples yet of an animal that was at the cusp of the fish-tetrapod transition. While Dr. Shubin's team played down the fossil's significance in the raging debate over Darwinian theory, which is opposed mainly by some conservative Christians in the United States, other scientists were not so reticent. They said this should undercut the creationists' argument that there is no evidence in the fossil record of one kind of creature becoming another kind. Dr. Novacek responded in an interview: "We've got Archaeopteryx, an early whale that lived on land and now this animal showing the transition from fish to tetrapod. What more do we need from the fossil record to show that the creationists are flatly wrong?"

The recent case of Mary Winkler in TN who recently shot her husband, a COC preacher, stirred up a bees nest of controversy for the COC when it was called a cult on CNN. Some of the details are documented on Travis Stanley's blog.

When Jesus was walking on water, was he really walking on ice? From a story by Sara Goudarzi on MSNBC.com:

Rare conditions could have conspired to create hard-to-see ice on the Sea of Galilee that a person could have walked on back when Jesus is said to have walked on water, a scientist reported Tuesday. The study, which examines a combination of favorable water and environmental conditions, proposes that Jesus could have walked on an isolated patch of floating ice on what is now known as Lake Kinneret in northern Israel.

It's an interesting hobby, I guess...searching for natural explanations for the many supernatural events described in the Bible. Sure, some more or less far-fetched explanation could be concocted for each individual event, but it's not likely there's only only one or two of them. It's be quite a coincidence if all of the supernatural events described in the Bible each happened to have a natural explanation. Take them at face value and believe them or not...don't try to make them more believable.

From the March 3, 2006, issue of The Week (my favoite mag), p. 33:

The Civil Rights Act mandates religious tolerance at work, said Matt Villano in The New York Times. By law, the religious practices of employees should be accom­modated, as long as they don't interfere with day-to-day tasks. An employee can pray in the office, for example, but if he keeps asking colleagues to join in despite repeated nos, he "may have crossed the line into a form of harassment." But harassment goes both ways. Repeatedly asking a religious co-worker to join a basketball tournament betting pool or to go for a round of drinks after work could violate his rights. Just remember, said Robbie Blinkoff of the Context-Based Research Group, that "religion is a tough issue for everyone." A proposed law could soon expand the rights of religious workers, said Gil A. Abramson in the Baltimore Daily Record. The Workplace Religious Freedom Act would require employers to engage in an "affirmative and bona fide effort" to accommodate on-the-job religious prac­tices, such as a time and place for prayer in the office or the use of vacation time for religious holidays. The act would also require companies to accommodate reli­gious employees unless the concessions would cause "significant difficulty or expense," a stricter standard for employ­ers to meet.

The other day I blogged the recent study that showed prayer didn't aid heart patients' recoveries. I later saw the following press release from the Ayn Rand Institute:

"The Harvard medical study showing that prayer has no effect on recovery from heart surgery is shocking," said Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute. "It is not shocking that prayer has no medical effects--what's shocking is that scientists at Harvard Medical School are wasting their time studying the medical effects of prayer." "Science is a method of gaining knowledge by systematically studying things that actually exist and have real effects. The notion that someone's health can be affected by the prayers or wishes of strangers is based on nothing but imagination and faith. Such blind belief represents the rejection of reason and science, and is not worthy of serious, rational consideration. What's next? A study of the medical effects of blowing out birthday candles?" "Every minute these doctors spend conducting this sort of faith-based study is one minute less spent on reality-based research--research that actually has hope of leading to real medical cures."

I kind of think they have a point though of course I don't share their perspective that imagination and faith are equivalent and both are associated with things that don't "actually exist." I can see why it would seem pretty silly to try to test the possible effectiveness of expressions of faith via the tools of science.