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Ask Dr. Robert Bakker About Dinosaurs and Merging Science and Religion
With his trademark hat and beard, Dr. Robert Bakker is one of the most recognized paleontologists working today. Bakker was among the advisers for the movie Jurassic Park, and the character Dr. Robert Burke in the film The Lost World: Jurassic Park is based on him. He was one of the first to put forth the idea that some dinosaurs had feathers and were warm-blooded, and is credited with initiating the ongoing "dinosaur renaissance" in paleontology. Bakker is currently the curator of paleontology for the Houston Museum of Natural Science and the Director of the Morrison Natural History Museum in Colorado. He is also a Christian minister, who contends that there is no real conflict between religion and science, citing the writings and views of Saint Augustine as a guide on melding the two. Dr. Bakker has agreed to take some time from his writing and digging in order to answer your questions. As usual, ask as many questions as you'd like, but please, one question per post.
Let the mud slinging BEGIN!
A central tenant of science is that you could be wrong, that seems to conflict with religion. Which is not to say you can't have faith and be a scientist. Just that you would have to keep a fair amount of mental separation between the two. I would even go so far as to say that to be a good scientist you would have to question your faith.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
It's fake. You aren't that idiotic, right? Right?
Whether the Bible is or is not based on divine revelation, it was written by pre-industrial people for pre-industrial people.
The moon was many times more important to them than black holes.
And the Bible's purpose is moral, not to "advance medicine".
The purpose of the creation story in Genesis is to establish God's authority as creator and ruler of man, not to teach science.
Even today, we have people like you who cannot come up with simple logical answers to your questions.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
I can assure you, that the "God" of the Hebrew Bible, is not one used to explain nature. The Hebrew Deity was about how to live life "correctly" and has a prescription about that. I can understand the modern rejection of those principles as being archaic, but the result is, IMHO, more uncivilized behavior. Action without consequences are impossible, yet that tends to be the modern Atheist's goal.
Here is but one example: "I want to fuck all the time, but don't want to deal with pregnancy". The consequences are wraped up in terms like "fetus" and "tissue" and discarded to the trashheap. Regardless of your views, I think that anytime one can dehumanize the smallest among us, we all lose. To me, it is no different than saying "Jews are monkeys" and "Blacks are Niggers" or terms like "faggot", "Dweeb", "Retard" any other term of dehumization we use.
Words have power that science can't measure.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The funny part is how neatly this falls into "more of the same." If you read the biblical narrative of Jesus, the Pharisees and Sadducees would do similar tactics, asking no win trap questions, which Jesus was able to intellectually smack them down. You come to know the difference in people who are curious and seek knowledge, and those who have hate in their heart and seek to tear down. I'm sure Dr Bakker is content to speak to those free thinkers whose narrow world view isn't threatened by his views, nor will anyone on Slashdot be so clever as to trip him up in ways he has not already considered far more than they.
So, I see you are coming at the issue with an open mind...
I think that the thing that bothers me about those who see Science (capitalized for a reason) as the only means of knowing things is the same thing that bothers me about young Earth creationists: the utter lack of humility.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Here's the thing about evidence and verifiability. Science is a framework which has proven extremely useful, for good reason. It distills out a sort of best practices for a kind of practical philosophy of approach that results in its practitioners being able to make more effective predictions about the universe around them. I would hope anyone interested in truth of any sort is keenly attentive to the benefits of exploring the world scientifically.
But the problem is that this is not enough. We are forced to live in all the dimensions of life, constantly, many of which are partly or entirely made up of decisions and beliefs (or at least tentative beliefs) for which we have no choice but to rely on unfalsifiable, unprovable hypotheses. I would venture to propose that most of our everyday decisions about how to live our lives, what to pursue, how to interact with other people, what is worth spending a life on, what is good and what is bad...basically our entire set of operating assumptions about the meaning of our lives is untestable, because we can't step outside of those lives, we can't see them from an objective point of view, we can't repeat conditions, we don't live consistently enough to isolate any of the possibilities as we'd have to do in order to measure things in a controlled test, and we won't be around in the end to see whether we were right (nor is there is any obvious way of measuring this even from the perspective of the "end of the story"). Plus, well, once we're dead, the outcome is not helpful, so we all live according to our best estimation of what life is about.
This doesn't by any means demonstrate that a particular faith of any sort has a basis in truth. The point is that there is no choice but to live by faith, because the knowledge we have about the whole deal, or even that we can possibly acquire in time to make any difference, is miniscule. The faith we're holding to might not be religious or deistic in any way, but no matter who we are, we're living according to some operating assumptions, and putting enough faith in them to make decisions based upon them, letting our lives slip away having applied them irrevocably to one or another path. And so, knowing that there is utterly no way to apply the framework of science to all of the matters concerning us, we have no choice but to use other methods of exploration as well, in order to build anywhere near complete enough a working model of how things are. Philosophy, theology, these are just that sort of exploration: ways of searching for understanding in the midst of this situation. One can't live without them, live "only by science", any more than one can make a successful and worthwhile journey by car taking into account only those truths that are clearly visible within the small bit of road directly illuminated by one's headlights.
(Even worse would be to insist that only the things that can be illuminated by headlights exist at all. Occam's Razor often gets shoved into the "science vs. religion" debates in a way that doesn't work. It's a very useful expression of the mentality one uses within science because it creates methodical practice out of what could be chaos. What it is not is any kind of proof of how things actually are. It is helpful to investigation to avoid multiplying entities unnecessarily. But is it true that there are no entities beyond those which are required to explain the currently visible portion of a phenomenon? We can't actually make that kind of positive assertion without resorting to exactly the kind of unfalsifiable truth claim that science supposedly doesn't care much for.)
But interesting you should mention critical peer review- in this area you'll not find theology wanting, at least not when it comes to trying. There is not a doctrine out there that isn't dissected, taken apart, put back together every which way, and run through the rigorous gauntlet of critical review, in many cases hundreds or thousands of years of such review. Of course, the whole thing lacking some of wh
No. The scientific method was established in the west by medieval bishops.
Who immediately failed to apply it to their own dogma, and in fact, propagated memes against doing so.
Thanks.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
I noticed that you glossed over the part of that wiki article which refers to exactly the concept that I was referring to: and the reality of a single human ancestor (commonly called monogenism) for all of mankind. Yes, the Catholic church accepts theistic evolution. No, the very specific doctrine of Christian monogenism(not the scientific idea of monogenism) is not supported by science.
I think genetic science and the figurative language of genesis are not far off from each other.
"Two pieces of the human genome are quite useful in deciphering human history: mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome. These are the only two parts of the genome that are not shuffled about by the evolutionary mechanisms that generate diversity with each generation: instead, these elements are passed down intact. According to the hypothesis, all people alive today have inherited the same mitochondria from a woman who lived in Africa about 160,000 years ago. She has been named Mitochondrial Eve. All men living today have inherited their Y chromosomes from a man who lived 140,000 years ago, probably in Africa. He has been named Y-chromosomal Adam."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_modern_humans#Genetic_reconstruction