Science Movies

Today we spent three hours at The Chabot Science and Space Center high in the Oakland Hills. If you are in the Bay Area, be sure to check this place out, especially if you are or ever have been a space nerd. It is a first class science museum with such amazing things as a perfect Mercury capsule replica that you can sit in, lots of telescopes, and a Megadome Theater.

In that theater we saw what is probably the best Pro-Life film I have ever seen, The Human Body. What was so good about it is that it did not preach, it did not hammer a point home by argument, rather it simply showed the miracle of human life from conception to adulthood (with some amazing CGI renderings). Anyone who sees this film and thinks that abortion is somehow not killing a living, thinking human being is deliberately blinding themselves.

I do not get all excited about political pro-life actions. I think they are good, but do far less to serve the cause of protecting the sanctity of human life than simply showing the course of human life in detail. The abortion battle will not be won by politics. Our "pro-life" politicians lack either the belief in the cause or the fortitude to actually fight it out. They throw us a bone here and there so we think that they are not as bad as the opposition (and in fairness, they aren't), but they have been notoriously bad in the action that follows the "moral values mandate" they get at the polls.

Not to be pessimistic, but the situation after eight years of Bush will be about the same as before.

Eventually a political solution will be viable, but we must change the minds and hearts of many people in order for that to happen. The best way to do that is without preaching, without a consciously pro-life message, but simply showing, in detail, what human life is all about.

So, if you have a chance to get to a Megadome theater (a strange, but cool way to see films, as it covers the entire field of vision, at the expense of straight lines, but it is still cool) to see this film, by all means, do so. It is also worth it for the footage of what happens to food when we eat it (try to find a screening that is not full of junior high students who feel some need to say "ew" at just about anything).

I am not saying that marching and petitioning and all that are wasted, but without the culture being changed, wheels are being spun without traction.

We also saw Destiny of the Stars in the Planetarium. What a great way to contemplate the splendor of God!

For those who hold young Earth theories, you need to think about this stuff in terms of the wedding at Cana. Wine is a product of age. When Christ created wine from water, He was making a product that implies age. If we were to study that wine (which I am thinking more and more was like an old Hermitage), we would be expected to think of it as an old drink, even though it was made instantly very recently. If God created the universe six thousand or so years ago, then He created a much older universe. So, to fully appreciate the majesty of that, we need to study it as if all time were consistant with observed and deducted science.

Personally, I believe that the universe is as old as it seems to be, but I was not around then, and do not find my faith shaken one way or another. Either way it is an amazing miracle beyond my grasp. To think that God, who is beyond time, has created something so utterly vast, so completely complex as our universe is awe-inspiring. Whether He did it ten thousand years ago or billions of years ago is quite irrelevant.

I do, however, take a dim view of such nonsense as Scientific Creationism, which has at its root the notion that God is tricking us all the while setting up little clues for the True Believers (tm) to find. God does not lie. Period. If God made a rock yesterday that is six million years old, then it is six million years old, because God is outside of time. He wants us to experience the rock as a six million year old rock, otherwise He would not have created the physical properties that we can observe and measure.

God's universe is an ordered universe, and we are to understand that order through science.

If God made the world ten thousand years ago, then He made a world that included dinosaurs that lived millions of years ago, insofar as the observable time that we live in can measure it. If He wanted to create a world in which men coexisted with dinosaurs He would have done that, and the real scientific evidence would show that.

Shucks, I am getting all ready to rant and I noticed that it is 2am. More later on Intelligent Design!