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The Scorpions of Scienceand the Ossified Orthodoxy of the Bible
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The Scorpions of ScienceChristians say that their God is omniscient - all knowing. Well, if that's true, then how come God never mentioned the ancient giant water scorpion of Scotland? Go on and search through that so-called holy book, and you'll see there's no mention of it. For that matter, there's not even any mention of Scotland. God appears to have been ignorant of both.
Now, check out the much larger, ongoing testament of science. As of this week, the body of scientific literature has both Scotland and Scotland's ancient giant water scorpion. Fossilized remains of the creature, technically known as a hibbertopteroid, were recently found in Scotland's Midland Valley by Martin Whyte, who works at the University of Sheffield. The giant scorpion, which lived 300 million years ago, was over 5 feet long and three feet wide, and, as its tracks prove, could walk on land.
We know all this because, for centuries, scientists have pushed the boundaries of human knowledge, in spite of the resistance of religious orthodoxy. When powerful Church leaders insisted that all major geological formations were due to a single big flood, scientists decided that they would have a look for themselves, and found out that the Church was wrong. When armchair Christian philosophers speculated about the nature of matter, scientsts found ways to actually observe the nature of matter, and discovered ways to tell how long certain kinds of matter have been in their present state. While priests were content with the old explanation that the Earth was just six thousand years old and that all living things were created in a single week just as they are now, scientists collected fossils and studied patterns of inheritance and trekked across the Earth to find out more about living things, and came up with the fact-based theory of biological evolution.
So, now, because of centuries of hard work by scientists, we know that there once were giant scorpions living in Scotland. It's just one more chapter in the largest book ever to be written - the book of scientific knowledge. That book contains millions of wonders, like giant Scottish scorpions, that never could have been revealed through the relatively tame visions of religion.
The book of Christian religion in particular seems stuck. Although the book of science can now be amended to include extinct giant water scorpions from the British Isles, the holy book of Christianity can never include the information. The Bible, which during medieval times seemed the largest source of information possible, has atrophied from lack of revision. No one can add a new book to the Bible that includes anything about giant water scorpions, because the essence of the Bible is that it finished. The Bible is not a living book any more. The Bible is dead.
This is the difference between the outlook of Christianity and the outlook of science. The people who worship the Bible claim that the most important information about the world was revealed over 2,000 years ago, and since then, nothing worthy of note has happened. Scientists, on the other hand, recognize the insights of the past, but are open-minded enough to try to improve upon past knowledge. Scientists don't claim that the most important aspects of human discovery were all done thousands of years ago. Scientists say that, as long as we are working to discover more about our world and ourselves, there is much of worth left for us to learn.
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