Friday, September 07, 2007

The coming of endarkenment........

It is something that has worried me for many years now, the growing credibility of completely un-credible "science". For example Homeopathy and other such "earth-mother will heal all" based rubbish, advocating that sticking mushrooms up your nose and meditating is better than seeing your GP, is not only laughable, it is dangerous! Of course there are homeopathic remedies that are proven to work and have real evidence to back them up, but these seem to be in the minority compared to the vast weight of unsubstantiated bovine fecease the seems, in most cases quite obviously, to be concocted by people out to make a quick buck off the not-so-bright.

This trend is even more worrying coupled with the growing belief in creationism and intelligent design, I think "The Endarkenment" (as David Colquhoun refers to it) is a good title for it . My father is a Vicar and so naturally Christianity featured heavily in my early life, he however never advocated that the book of genesis was a literal account of the creation of the earth, he made it clear to me it was a metaphor.

When you analyze it closely the bible gives a remarkably accurate account of the creation of the earth, told in a way that people 2000 years ago could understand. Imagine trying to tell people who lived in mud huts, who had no concept of space, planets, DNA etc that there was this big bang millions of years ago and then as everything cooled rocks began to stick together, oh yeah by the way there is this thing called gravity, then there were these monkeys, well first they were bacteria, and they slowly turned into monkeys.......It just wouldn't have worked and if attempted would probably have resulted in a rapid stoning closely followed with the scattering your body parts to all four corners of the land. So the story of genesis takes place over 6 days, the actual Hebrew translation is "period of time", so 6 ages would be a better way of looking at it. First there was darkness and light (the big bang), then the land and the sea (formation of the planets), then beasts of the sea, land and air and then man (evolution). Of course there are morality tales mixed in with it but my point stands that it is not a literal account and it scares me it is advocated as a scientific possibility let alone a theory to rival well established planetary science or Darwinism!

Anyway the underlying point behind my ill-conceived ramblings are put much more eloquently by David Colquhoun in this article for the Guardian.

I pray for the victory of common sense and the scientific process!

No comments: