1) We have been looking up, and wondering what is out there, and
2) We have been wondering where we came from.
The answer to both these questions is in the same spot - the stars. No, I don’t mean the answer is in your horoscope! Those can be fun, but about as helpful as a good cup of tea or another Valium. I mean the actual stars, where the materials that form our bodies were made. But that’s a long story.
Some sciences were just meant to upset the churches. Astronomy is one of them. Ever since Galileo was locked up for saying the earth wasn’t the centre of the Universe, the Catholic church has had to back off and apologize for being wrong. Actually, I’m not sure if they apologized or not, but they said they were wrong, and since it took them over 500 years, I guess it doesn’t matter much. Most of the other churches beat the Catholics to the punch on that one, and Galileo can pretty much start the year 2000 with a clean slate. Too bad he’s dead.
That pretty well sums up the history of people looking up. The more we learned, the more we rubbed up against the dogma of traditional religion, as a class I once took in Bible History showed.
The other question, where we came from, is the other sore point. Darwin took a stab at partially answering that one, and once again, offended the churches, which surprised Darwin, since he thought he was just helping out. In this case, the Catholics beat many other churches to the punch. Last year, they admitted that Darwin was more or less right, only three hundred years later. Who says improvement isn’t possible? But the Fundamentalists, are still holding out, insisting that the whole thing happened in 6 days, which doesn’t leave much time for evolution.
(See my book on www.lulu.com called Creation and Evolution)
More on this to follow......
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