"Bruce Sterling - Creation Science" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

Bruce Sterling

bruces@well.sf.ca.us



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From THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, August 1993.

F&SF, Box 56, Cornwall CT 06753 $26/yr USA $31/yr other

F&SF Science Column #8:



"Creation Science"



In the beginning, all geologists and biologists were creationists.
This was only natural. In the early days of the Western scientific
tradition, the Bible was by far the most impressive and potent source
of historical and scientific knowledge.

The very first Book of the Bible, Genesis, directly treated
matters of deep geological import. Genesis presented a detailed
account of God's creation of the natural world, including the sea, the
sky, land, plants, animals and mankind, from utter nothingness.
Genesis also supplied a detailed account of a second event of
enormous import to geologists: a universal Deluge.

Theology was queen of sciences, and geology was one humble
aspect of "natural theology." The investigation of rocks and the
structure of the landscape was a pious act, meant to reveal the full
glory and intricacy of God's design. Many of the foremost geologists
of the 18th and 19th century were theologians: William Buckland,
John Pye Smith, John Fleming, Adam Sedgewick. Charles Darwin
himself was a one-time divinity student.

Eventually the study of rocks and fossils, meant to complement
the Biblical record, began to contradict it. There were published
rumblings of discontent with the Genesis account as early as the
1730s, but real trouble began with the formidable and direct
challenges of Lyell's uniformitarian theory of geology and his disciple
Darwin's evolution theory in biology. The painstaking evidence
heaped in Lyell's *Principles of Geology* and Darwin's *Origin of
Species* caused enormous controversy, but eventually carried the
day in the scientific community.