Book review in Thursday's Wall St Journal. Interesting writeup. On the other hand, is the science vs religion topic truly relevant today? Far back, in ancient times, before the invention of science, religion explained all things as God's will, the weather, disasters like volcano's, earthquakes, and hurricanes, creation of the world and all that is in it. Science, newly invented in the Middle Ages, offered the Copernicus heliocentric theory sometime in the 16th century. That was the first serious head-to-head set to, the Church espoused the older earth centered Ptolemaic system, for reasons that I no longer remember. They made life hot for Copernicus and then they laid onto Galileo even harder. Darwin in the 19th century caused an even bigger fuss, a lot of people liked the creation story given in Genesis a lot better than they liked evolution and the idea that man was descended from apes.
But today, surely this is no longer a real issue. I know the creation story in Genesis, I even read it aloud to my children. I also know the creation story from astronomy, cosmology, geology, and evolution. When I think about it, I realize that the two stories are incompatible with each other. But, that's OK by me, I know and understand both stories (all except Guth's idea of inflation) , my head is big enough to hold them both and let them be. I have no plans to resolve the issues, I know plenty of better men than I have tried and short of becoming an atheist, unattractive at my age, there is no resolution. The incompatibilities just don't bother me that much, I know they are there, I know they will be there for a long long time, and I know there is little I can do about it. So I don't worry about it.
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