|
Or when we look at a satellite image, it is easy to see how hurricane class storms have impacted the shape of The Gulf of Mexico. In the same way we can recognize how Africa and South America have pulled apart from each other. And these large scale tectonic movements take orders of magnitude more time than the time required for hurricanes to shape a coastline. Like I found when working up data on Yellowstone Lake, working with these data, scientists come to an understanding of the fact these geological and atmospheric processes do not correlate with religious folks insisting Earth is only 6,000 years old. And so these differences in understanding creation time-lines shuts down communication and closes minds.
Keeping the closed system at Galveston Island in mind as an analog for the various support systems in our individual lives, realize the next event to "act upon" the things on Galveston Island might not be a hurricane. It might be too many cars, the lack of a clean potable local water supply, Avian Bird Flu, a giant oil spill, a major gas pipeline leak, or even a terrorist attack. Science provides the best way to optimally prepare for many of these alternative futures.
However, when it comes down to the direct and immediate impact of virtually any of these acts on those geological and biological systems which support our personal lives, religion can play a much more important role than science in helping us as individuals to weather the storms, as illustrated in the personal examples from Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita cited above.
In other words, both science and religion are needed to face future trials. This is true, even though it seems to be a paradox to many how, given the different views science and religion have of the same things, they can even co-exist, let alone work together.23
It does not take much intelligence to recognize how the earth, everything on it, whether inanimate or living (and therefore ourselves) are all built on a common foundation of geological and biological things. These things have existed for a long, long, long, long time.
Compared to our 100 +/- year sojourn on earth, this existence is in the same class as God, who the Bible teaches has existed from eternity to eternity.3.136
Through studies and through prayer, I have found both scientific and religious entities do and can naturally exist in the same time and space.
And as will be discussed in the next sections, these things to be acted upon, both the geological and the biological, are found all across the Earth.
|
paradoxes