Excerpt

BONES & STONES

SCIENCE AND RELIGION: DINOSAURS, EVOLUTION AND TECHNOLOGY

Two million years ago, on a balmy summer morning about 9am, primitive man took a break from scratching his chest and said “Let's see now, I've taken my morning constitutional, Jane and I gathered enough nuts and berries and bones for today's food, then did our bit to propagate the species, now I've spent the last fifteen minutes scratching myself and I've only been up for an hour. What else is there? What's the meaning of life? If I don't come up with some kind of theory it's going to be just another night with the guys watching the stars with nothing to say but 'Hern...Hern...'” But the question was too vast and swampy, it swallowed the man in a psychedelic swirl (also some of those berries he'd eaten were mildly poisonous) and the question of meaning drove him insane until the stars came out and he said to his friends “Ride the snake to the ancient lake” and they all shook their heads and said “Hern...Hern...” That man had opened the door to an avalanche closet.

I don't know if any of you here have an avalanche closet in your house. We do – our house has many doors that open into different rooms, but there's one that, you open it and a Biblical flood of stuff comes rolling out, engulfing the entire hall in a primeval swamp of spiraling scarves and crispy swimsuits and lonely shoes and slithering strands of Christmas lights and unfortunately this door is right next to the bathroom door, always waiting to swamp some confused house-guest. And once the door is opened there's no closing it again without a snow-shovel. Really, we should call it 'Pan-door-a.' You get it? Eh... “What's the meaning of life?” It was like an avalanche closet – don't turn the knob unless you're ready for a swim in the murky mix of what we would call Science, Religion and Politics, any one of them a daunting topic alone, but for millions of years they mingled together in a swampy jambalaya called “Culture.”

About ten thousand years ago, some tribe came up with an experiment – they decided to remodel nature's house. An immense and terrifying task that we've not finished yet because it turns out Mother Nature never really throws anything away. She just...stews in it. But turning this swamp-shack into a shopping mall seemed like a good idea at the time. And one thing that had to be dealt with was the avalanche closet, the “Meaning of life.” And these early people eventually did what my wife and I will do with our avalanche closet someday – they set up dividers, a handy shelf system. And they divided “meaning” into Science, Religion and Politics so that these could be dealt with one at a time. They still shared the same closet, but they were more manageable that way. And Religion was the top shelf.

About two hundred years ago, certain thinkers were digging through the shelves of Science, Economics and Gender Studies and every so often they would say “Aha!,” jump up in excitement, and slam the top of their head on that bulky upper shelf called Religion. And they began to ask – “why does this big shelf need to be on top? Slamming me on the head every time I come up with an idea. Religion has been lording it like a king for too long – it's time Science and Politics declared their independence.” Certain thinkers began to feel that Religion was getting in the way of the search for the meaning of life. Religion was even getting in the way of the quest to understand God. This event is known as the Great Enlightenment.

THE BONES

Had the Enlightenment thinkers attempted to assassinate God, Religion would have had the high ground – easy to mobilize the impoverished faithful against an attempted siege. But the intellectuals were planning to break God out of the great stone cathedrals, tunneling under the scriptural foundations of the Church to rescue God from Religion. This put Religious leaders on the low ground, so they hatched a plan to regain the high ground by girding their loins, grabbing shovels and digging for the proof.

Archaeology burst onto the scene in the Nineteenth Century – but it wasn't only tomb-raiders looking for King Tut's gold. It was also True Believers digging for evidence to prove the Bible as Fact. As Sir James Frazer observed, “the field of geology was invaded by an army of theologians.” The results were, of course, disappointing. The tree of Knowledge, Noah's Ark and the Cross Jesus died on were all made of wood, which doesn't generally last for thousands of years. Jerusalem had been destroyed twice and the Ark of the Covenant wasn't found until Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, which turned out to be only a movie. Besides which, any actual relics or remains in Israel had long since been looted and sold on the lucky-charm collector's market, to become idols and amulets – Martin Luther once said that on a trip to the Vatican he saw enough “nails from the cross” to shoe every horse in Europe.

What the pious archaeologists turned up instead were bones – not the bones of Adam and Abraham, but the fossilized remains of giant monsters. These were called “Dinosaurs,” meaning “terrible lizards” because seriously, anything that big must have been a jerk. And the most dangerous of them was named “Tyrannosaurus Rex,” meaning “tyrant lizard king,” on the assumption that he must have legislated unjust tax laws and partied like Jim Morrison. I wish we had a Tyrannosaurus Rex with us today so he could say “What? I kill, I eat, it's not like anybody listens to my political opinions – why do you have to call me a tyrant king? Why can't you call me something cool like 'Hunt-o-Matic' or 'The Terminator?' I'm not even, technically, a lizard.” But now I'm glad we don't have the Tyrannosaurus Rex with us today because we wouldn't be able to get him to shut up, and we've got to stay on topic.

The biggest problem with discovering the Dinosaurs is that they were found to be much older than the human race and...gasp...older than the Earth itself, since Bible scholars had long since established the first Day of creation, October 23rd, 4004 years before the Christ. And yet here were these bones, millions of years old. There was a simple explanation for this - God had fabricated the bones in order to test humanity's faith. And most people since have failed that test, myself included. Religion's fleeting honeymoon with Archaeology ended in a very sober annulment, and clerics became fond of quoting Ecclesiastes 1:18 “In much wisdom is much vexation, and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow.” So the borrowed shovels were returned to the nerds, who have gone on digging for evidence of God's works, regardless of how they contradict God's Word. Of course some True Believers are still digging for proof of the Bible as fact, this is called Pseudo-Archaeology (“Pseudo” meaning spurious, fallacious, fake) and in a supreme irony that must surely give God a smirk, Pseudo-Archaeology sells about a thousand times more books than real Archaeology.

And what if the True Believers had actually found what they were looking for? Would the Church have regained mastery over human imagination? It might have looked that way for a while, but ultimately it would have destroyed the Church. Oscar Wilde once said, “Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.” Once the Bible had been verified by Science, it would have become a Scientific document – nothing to be taken on faith. And without Faith in what can't be seen or proven, Religion is over. God's judgment in Religion isn't based on your believing what you can clearly see, it's based on your believing what you cannot prove. Imagine if some priest said to a pauper, “give me your last fifty cents and I promise you a nice piece of pie in paradise,” and then the pauper said “Show me the pie.” The whole thing would fall apart. And churches would have to turn into bakeries to stay in business. So by proving the Bible as Fact, Religion would have become Science, not Religion anymore. What a mess.

When we first moved here, one of Elizabeth's medical coworkers asked me what I was going to do for work. Fresh out of Seminary, I said I was going to be an itinerant Bible teacher like Jesus was. To which this doctor responded, “Uh-huh. And then what are you gonna to do...for work?” Because doctors know that, these days, a doctor's husband can't stay at home darning socks anymore. So I said, “Well, my degree in Bible study also certifies me to teach Biology in public schools.” And that doctor never spoke to me again. Because either they didn't get the joke or, more likely, because they did.

[Etc. - this goes on.]