Insights from Old Notes

I have been going through old notes and papers from thirty years ago, when I was still religious though not a creationist, and recycling most of them. I figured I should either develop them into a larger framework of understanding or get rid of them. Some are individually useful. I should make them available to other people. Here they are:

• One major difference between science and religion is that science insists on explanations, not just categories and labels. For example, water molecules cohere together, and this is responsible for many aspects of our natural world. But why are water molecules cohesive? A religious person might just say, God made it so. A pseudoscientist might say water molecules have the property of aquosity. But science can explain cohesion of water molecules: hydrogen bonds.
• Did Jesus take a scientific approach toward the natural world? Partly. The first step in scientific inquiry is to be quietly observant of nature. Jesus did this, as you can read in the Sermon on the Mount. But then he went in an unscientific direction. Instead of using his observations as the basis for hypotheses, to explain them, he built metaphors from them. Still, his close observations made him more scientific than many philosophers who just thought about what the natural world should be like.
• The Bible is like DNA. (When I read this old note to myself, I had a negative reaction, but read on.) The 66 books of the Bible are like chromosomes. There are some useful genes scattered in the DNA which, while of historical importance, is not useful. A lot of the Bible is not very useful. But some of the verses have significant insights, and these are the ones that get transcribed and translated and put to use. Now you have had your daily intake of metaphor.
• The Bible describes a lot of miraculous acts. But what is a miracle? In Genesis 1, God says, let there be light. It dies not say, God created light out of nothing, nor does it say that there would have been light anyway. The idea I got from reading this was that the existence of light was a possibility within the laws of nature, and that God unlocked this possibility. This makes God sound like a cosmic Einstein.
• Finally, there are lots of parts of the Bible that, fundamentalist assertions aside, cannot be taken literally. One example is from the very end of Genesis 1, where God “rested and was refreshed.” This is an image of God left over from very ancient times, and is inconsistent with the image of an infinitely powerful—and tireless—God found in later scriptures. Also, First Kings 18:20 says that “all Israel was there,” which could not have been true. Every single person in Israel was at that one location?

Rather than to just throw away these insights, I wanted to make them publicly available, for whatever use they might prove to you.