Oh honestly. Christianity Today reports the travel of the Australopithecine fossil "Lucy" to the US with the closing paragraph:
It should be interesting to see what the interest in Lucy is, given that according to opinion polls roughly half of the American public has expressed serious reservations about the theory of evolution, which nonetheless has enjoyed almost unquestioned hegemony in academia and the mainstream media. Perhaps one explanation for the throngs at the Creation Museum is that there are so few politically correct alternatives for people who question the evolutionary metanarrative, which usually excludes God.
Meta what now? The reason why God doesn't appear in evolutionary "narratives" is because it's a science. God also doesn't appear in orbital mechanics, despite Newton's adducement of God as the corrective for instable orbits, which, when Laplace worked out that they were stable on their own, he famously responded to with "I have no need of that hypothesis". Is there a politically correct metanarrative for the orbits of the planets and moons that includes God now?
The reason for the throngs at the Creationist museum is that they are very badly served by their pastors, ministers, and religiously inspired educators who do not teach science, that's all. They think that they have to deny reality to be religious. If the editors of Christianity Today don't get that, they too have been ill-served, by someone who educated them, or whatever Power gave them their brains to use.
Stumble It!
Comments
Strange... if 'science' is an arbitrary game, it would seem its exclusion of supernatural explanations would be arbitrary. That means we could just as easily define science to arbitrarily include them.
Posted by: Caledonian | August 29, 2007 8:52 AM
Interesting that belief in a god has enjoyed an "almost unquestioned hegemony" that has been far more widespread and lasted far longer than any major scientific theory.
Yet they still fear evolution.
Could the strength of that fear be a measure of how great a threat to that "unquestioned hegemony" they believe science to be?
As for the arbitrary exclusion of supernatural explanations - what Laplace said.
Posted by: Ian H Spedding FCD | August 29, 2007 9:54 AM
I hereby declare "the evolutionary metanarrative" to bullshit concept of the month.
I think meta-narrative should be written with a hyphen, it looks so fuckin' ugly without one.
Posted by: Thony C. | August 29, 2007 11:02 AM
When your defense of a belief boils down to "lots of people think so", I suspect you already know your side is in serious trouble.
Posted by: Aaron Clausen | August 29, 2007 1:23 PM
"Metanarrative"? Wow, postmodernist metachristians. The word does emit an aura of elegantly simplistic metacomplexity. But creationism + postmodernism is... what, intelligent design?
Posted by: jeff | August 29, 2007 2:54 PM
Interestingly, the display of Lucy that is now installed at the Houston Museum of Natural Science requires that you first walk through galleries of Ethiopian artifacts, almost all of which are religious (primarily Christian, with a few Jewish, Muslim, and Rastafarian bits as well) before you reach her. An attempt to assuage Creationist sensibilities, perhaps?
Posted by: writer | August 29, 2007 3:48 PM
> when Laplace worked out that they were stable on their own,
> he famously responded to with "I have no need of that hypothesis".
Off topic (so sue me), but I wanted to know more about this, so I did a web search for "hypothesi non fingo". I only got 10 hits, and one of them was for a draft book of my own on a totally unrelated topic! (At least I didn't attribute it to Newton.)
The web is a scary place.
Posted by: Jason | August 29, 2007 5:57 PM
Napoleon: You have written this huge book on the system of the world without once mentioning the author of the universe.
Laplace: Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis.
Later when told by Napoleon about the incident, Lagrange commented: Ah, but that is a fine hypothesis. It explains so many things.
Quoted in A De Morgan Budget of Paradoxes.
Posted by: Thony C. | August 30, 2007 2:08 AM
Well, gee, John. I admire you for even slogging through Christianity Today. Anyway, I want to talk about plumbers. I've yet to see one even consider the possibility of supernatural activity in their line of work. For some reason, their metanarrative excludes God, as well. They seem to think that, given unexpected moisture, they should reach for a spanner or try to detect a poor fitting rather than consult with the One Who Made Plumbers Possible in the first place. Heathens.
Posted by: Scott Hatfield, OM | August 31, 2007 2:59 AM
Just wondering, is the term "metanarrative" being used as an insult or is it just post modernist babble?
I have come across meta used to imply important on occasion, seems to be a prefix much misused.
Posted by: Chris' Wills | August 31, 2007 8:54 AM
...creationism.
Posted by: MartinM | August 31, 2007 12:06 PM