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Re: Evidence for "Big Bang Theory"
Yasha Hartberg (Yasha@bigraf.tamu.edu)
16 May 1995 16:32:19 GMT
In article <5lz512dzcsB@khms.westfalen.de>, kai@khms.westfalen.de (Kai
Henningsen) wrote:
> This may be because science, to be successful, needs to be tolerant -
> different views are _needed_ here. While religion does not have that
> requirement per se, it has to live in a world where science is
> demonstrably vastly more successful (for example, through centuries
> (millenia?) of trying, religion has not managed to improve harvest -
> science does so quite easily) - so it needs to adopt some of science's
> ideas, in a limited fashion, to avoid losing out completely. A limited
> tolerance is one of these. History shows that that's an unusual ingredient
> of religion, nearly never present where religion has the upper hand.
You may be skating on thin ice here, Kai. I remember hearing about
certain asian cultures whose festival schedule was linked to agricultural
concerns such as rotation of irrigation, planting, and harvesting.
Westerners came in with high yield hybrids and convinced the people to
give up their carefully honed rotation scheme and irrigate to their hearts
content. The result was disasterous, rodents, soil erosion, low yields,
etc. I don't remember if they went back to their traditional ways or not.
> All the stuff nowadays about religion and science being about different
> things is, in my opinion, a smoke screen.
While science and religion may serve some of the same functions in
society, they do not fill identical roles, merely overlapping ones.
Yasha Hartberg
Texas A&M University
"The most beautiful thing in Tokyo is McDonald's." Andy Warhol
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