How Religion "Advances"

Today it is relatively rare to find racist Christianity. Nowadays, fundamentalist megachurches proclaim that members of any race are equally invited to donate money to their coffers. But it wasn’t so long ago that many white fundamentalist Christian groups did not want to associate with members of other races.

It is even rarer to find Christians who insist that the Earth is the center of the universe. The only example of which I know is http://www.fixedearth.com. But it was not very far in the past that churches all insisted on geocentrism as a fundamental belief.

In these and in many other cases, the advances in belief—advances toward racial harmony and a scientific understanding of the universe—were the result of forces and processes that were not inherently religious. After slavery was abolished, people began to gradually realize that people of other races were fully human and deserved the same rights as one’s own race. Partly this was due to the utter failure of supremacists to find scientific verification for their beliefs, but mainly, I believe, because more and more people became acquainted with members of other races and discovered, usually pleasantly, that people they might once have disdained were actually nice, ordinary people. In many cases it was devout people who led the push toward racial harmony—and there is hardly a better example than Martin Luther King Jr.—but it was not religion itself that led these advances. None of the leaders, or followers, of racial integration re-read their Bibles and discovered, “Holy Moley! Right there is a verse that we’ve been overlooking for two thousand years.” The Bible did not change. There were, or so the fundamentalists claim, no new revelations from God. The advances in racial harmony, inside and outside of churches, came from accumulated experience which most religious groups have now acknowledged. Reason and experience led the way; religion followed.

It is clear that the conversion of religious people to heliocentrism occurred because science advanced, and religion followed.

Science, experience, and reason are the head of the animal of society; religion is the tail, sometimes wagging, sometimes dragging.

A Big Scary Eclipse

I’ve seen plenty of penumbral eclipses, when the full moon passes through the edge of the Earth’s shadow and turns orange. But last night there was a deep and full eclipse, in which, to use Biblical language, the moon turned to blood.

What did people think in the days before modern astronomy when they saw such an eclipse? They obviously gave it a supernatural, and apocalyptic, explanation. But even after scholars began to understand that the sun, moon, planets, and stars were objects in the heavens rather than gods, they still had a hard time explaining astronomical phenomena.

Back when church authorities enforced the idea that the Earth was the center of the universe, and that everything else revolved around the Earth, they had a hard time explaining the movements of the planets. Some of the planets would appear to reverse direction. Copernicus explained that the heliocentric model, with the Sun in the center of the solar system, could easily account for these movements. But geocentrists, who succeeded in arresting Galileo, burning Bruno, and would have done something to Copernicus had he not conveniently died when his book was published, invented “epicycles” in which the planets did little ballet pirouettes while they circled the Earth.

But even after the Copernican model was accepted, and everyone knew the Earth went around the Sun, many scholars still enforced a theistic model on the universe. First, they insisted that the orbits were perfectly circular, because both God and circles are perfect. We in the post-Newton era know that planetary orbits are elliptical, not circular.

Moreover, some scholars thought that a perfect solar system would proclaim God’s glory by having planets and moons that all lined up, all of them revolving in a perfect ecliptic. But if this were the case, the moon would have a blood-red eclipse every month, not just every thirty years or so; and there would be a transit of Venus (see here for my 2012 essay about it) not just every couple of hundred years but every year.

Instead, the solar system formed out of a revolving disc of dust and gas, in which the planets and moons formed imperfect planes of revolution, not the perfect ones that God would have created.

The very afternoon before the eclipse, I listened to a radio interview of two astronomers at the Vatican Observatory. They made it clear that, to them, faith was not a rock of certainty upon which they could build their beliefs, but a source of wonder and anticipation. To them, faith was expecting to discover something beautiful and surprising. The Vatican, these days, has come a long ways from the days of Galileo and Bruno.

Evotour 2012, part one. Eclipse of the Sun

I have begun a journey to California and back, during which I will be visiting sites of evolutionary interest. I will be making Darwin videos about these places, which I will post soon on my YouTube channel.

Evotourism is a new concept, which may someday draw attention among science-literate tourists the same way ecotourism now does. I am looking into the possibility of leading evotours, and my first step is to visit or revisit sites of evolutionary interest and make videos of them.

Until just three days ago, I was not planning to include the eclipse of the sun in my tour. Then I read that the eclipse would be seen clearly in New Mexico, and I knew I would be going through New Mexico as part of my trip. So I rearranged my schedule to be in Gallup, NM on May 19, to watch, photograph, and, if possible, make a video of the eclipse, which was to occur at 7:30 mountain daylight time.

I left my motel room about 6:00 and headed south on a state highway, expecting to easily find a place to pull off to the side of the road and set up my telescope and my camera tripod. This turned out to not be so easy to do. I wanted a clear view of the horizon, but there were few places from which I could do this. And almost the only side roads, off of the state highway, were private ranch roads with cattle guards. The residences did not look like the kinds of places that would welcome loiterers even outside the fence.

At last I found a side road of a side road with a church sign, and a little dirty spot to pull over. To my surprise, when I set up the telescope, I discovered the eclipse had already begun a little before 7:30. The disc of the moon was approaching from the lower right. I quickly set up my camera and took still photos and took some videos, which I tried to narrate despite the occasional cars whooshing down the country highway. For a perfect moment I saw the annular eclipse—the moon forming a perfect black disc centered in the sun. It was impossible to take photos or videos of the eclipse without the filter, and therefore nothing else was visible—until right at sunset, when the moon had nearly passed to the upper left, when a sun with a big bite taken out of it nestled down into piñon branches.

What I narrated about was that humans used to think that gods or demons caused the sun to darken and the moon to turn to blood (eclipses) and the starts to fall from the sky (meteors). This is the language used in the scriptures we still revere. The scientific view of nature, starting with Copernicus and Galileo and other astronomers, and continuing with physics and chemistry and biology, and finally the evolutionary understanding of humans and even the human brain, has shown us that the universe is not full of demons but that we are a part of its natural laws. We are at home. I did not express this as clearly on the video, where I’d been caught unprepared, as I did in this essay. But it was good enough. I may post it on YouTube soon, except that I got the date wrong on the narration, on all the takes.

For all I could tell, the people in the convenience store and driving along the road had no idea that an eclipse was occurring. The few people I talked to had no interest. Either they attended the little fundamentalist church beside whose sign I stood, or else they were totally absorbed in their own pleasures or problems or projects. In the old days, eclipses disturbed people. Today, they should be sources of wonder. But it appears that the geocentric theory has not been replaced by the heliocentric theory as much as by the egocentric theory.

My next stop on the evotour is Petrified Forest. I’ll let you know about it.

Note: Someone posted a comment on a previous entry, but when I click on it, my computer goes into an unresponsive mode. I have not read the comment but I suspect that someone has inserted a virus. Beware! Update: The problem was apparently a computer glitch caused by Google. The comment was not a virus.