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[Phys-L] Re: god friendly science



I teach physics at a religiously affiliated school. It
is a Jewish community school, which means that it has
people who live their everyday life based on a strict
interpretation of the Torah (including not wearing
clothes of mixed fibers) to those who believe that the
Torah is collection of moral tales written by people
that may have been inspired by God.

The groups get along as well as might be expected;
they bicker like siblings.

So, teaching how their Tanach (Torah) classes are
different from science classes is important.

We say that the religious studies classes are an
appeal to authority, maybe even THE Authority. Truth
can be found in the books, written with the hand of
God, inspired in sages, and so on.

In science class, truth is hard to come by. Generally,
we are happy with models that make predictions that
can be tested. Models whose predictions come out right
are considered good models, and models whose
predictions come out wrong are not so good models.
Maybe even wrong.

The religious studies teachers seemed to be satisfied
by this distinction, and we have no problem with them.
I happily teach that the rainbow is pure optics and
that it has existed forever (even before the flood!),
while the biology and environmental science teachers
teach about evolution by natural selection without any trouble.

Marc "Zeke" Kossover
The Jewish Community High School of the Bay
San Francisco, CA 94121
<http://tochnit.jchsofthebay.org/~zkossover>



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