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Re: possibly OT: NYT article on GA creationism/evolution debate



Mr. Tarara's comment:

It seems to me that part of the problem with communicating much of this
to the public (in fact to almost anyone)is the difficulty in _really_
understanding large numbers, long times, and what statistical
probabilities really mean. Having any conceptual grasp of just how long
1.5 billion years is and how many reproductions have gone into the
evolutionary process is almost impossible.

What ultimately makes the two approaches (strict creationism and
macroevolution) irreconcilable is that both rely on what are essentially
irrefutable premises; the former posits an omnipotent deity (so that
anything which occurs could be, under this belief system, attributed to
said deity), while the latter assumes that given enough time, any event, no
matter how improbable over a brief interval, is likely to happen.

Hewitt, in the introduction to Conceptual Physics, suggests that educators
introduce science as a search for an explanations of the workings of the
universe, while religion is the quest for its origin. Under these
definitions, religion and science are not at all incompatible, at least to
my admittedly agnostic mind.