Glenn,
In your correspondence with Howard van Till, you state that "Yet we believe
in a God who substantially intervened in history and actually changed the
course of history, but he can't change the sentence that a primitive man
might write on a sheepskin. There is a disconnect here."
Rather than saying that God "can't change the sentence...," maybe it might
be better to say that He did not see the need to do so. Maybe whatever
"primitive man wrote" was obvious to the then reader, but we have lost this
understanding. Could it be that our quest for science has dimmed our
understanding of non-scientific writings? With Valentine's day coming up,
most (if not all) of us have no problem with sending (or receiving) "heart"
shaped boxes of chocolate (although my wife prefers rectangular boxes of
higher quality chocolate to the stuff one buys at drugstores) even though we
full well know that the shape of these boxes does not even come close to the
shape of a heart. In fact, I would bet that many would be upset and/or
offended if they received their chocolates in a box that was shaped like an
actual heart. Sure would put me off chocolates for a while. ;-)
This lack of understanding reminds me of a presentation at an American
Nuclear Society conference some 20 years ago. I sat beside a Japanese and
listened to a speaker from India who had been trying to find alternatives to
the (to Indians) expensive Dowex-50X cation exchange beads to remove small
amounts of radioactive fission products from reactor coolant loops. He
tried a number of naturally occurring materials including the cigar-shaped
ends of bulrushes, the ones we commonly call "cat tails." When he mentioned
that "we filled the glass columns with cat tails," my Japanese neighbour
turned sort of pale and asked me if he understood the speaker correctly. I
assured him that, no, the Indians had not cut the tails of a number of cats
to use as a "cat"-ion exchange medium.
Glenn, I'm struggling with this topic as well, maybe not as much as you are,
but it's not easy. As the librarian at the college I teach part time
replied to my comment about the apparent disconnects, "maybe some questions
should not be asked." As scientists, we have asked and are asking these
questions and now have to deal with these apparent (and to us, often
obvious) discrepancies.
Chuck Vandergraaf
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