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

But convincing the scientific community was far from the end
of the matter. For "creation science," this was only the beginning.

Most Americans today are "creationists" in the strict sense of
that term. Polls indicate that over 90 percent of Americans believe
that the universe exists because God created it. A Gallup poll in
1991 established that a full 47 percent of the American populace
further believes that God directly created humankind, in the present
human form, less than ten thousand years ago.

So "creationism" is not the view of an extremist minority in our
society -- quite the contrary. The real minority are the fewer than
five percent of Americans who are strictly non-creationist. Rejecting
divine intervention entirely leaves one with few solid or comforting
answers, which perhaps accounts for this view's unpopularity.
Science offers no explanation whatever as to why the universe exists.
It would appear that something went bang in a major fashion about
fifteen billion years ago, but the scientific evidence for that -- the
three-degree background radiation, the Hubble constant and so forth
-- does not at all suggest *why* such an event should have happened
in the first place.

One doesn't necessarily have to invoke divine will to explain
the origin of the universe. One might speculate, for instance, that
the reason there is Something instead of Nothing is because "Nothing
is inherently unstable" and Nothingness simply exploded. There's
little scientific evidence to support such a speculation, however, and
few people in our society are that radically anti-theistic. The
commonest view of the origin of the cosmos is "theistic creationism,"
the belief that the Cosmos is the product of a divine supernatural
action at the beginning of time.

The creationist debate, therefore, has not generally been
between strictly natural processes and strictly supernatural ones, but
over *how much* supernaturalism or naturalism one is willing to
admit into one's worldview.

How does one deal successfully with the dissonance between
the word of God and the evidence in the physical world? Or the
struggle, as Stephen Jay Gould puts it, between the Rock of Ages and
the age of rocks?

Let us assume, as a given, that the Bible as we know it today is
divinely inspired and that there are no mistranslations, errors,
ellipses, or deceptions within the text. Let us further assume that
the account in Genesis is entirely factual and not metaphorical, poetic
or mythical.

Genesis says that the universe was created in six days. This
divine process followed a well-defined schedule.