Science, Geology, and National Parks
Your Geosc 10 instructional team loves Science, Geology, and National Parks. We hope you do, too, and if not, we'll try to show you why we do. These “big-picture” issues are probably more important than anything we cover in this class.
Humans have always had a love-hate relationship with our “tools.” Cars are great, but getting run over by one isn’t. Television is great until you want to have a heart-to-heart discussion with someone deeply engrossed in a playoff game. Science collects the wisdom of the world’s peoples, experiences, and insights, then tests that wisdom repeatedly, revising and improving, to help us learn to understand and to do things we want. This may be humanity's greatest tool... but that also means that occasionally someone may not like it.
Sometimes, a person becomes unhappy when their idea loses to a better one. In the early 1600s, when Galileo advocated the idea that the Earth orbits the sun, Pope Urban VIII saw conflict with certain verses in the Bible (e.g., Psalm 93, “The world will surely stand in place, never to be moved”, or Psalm 104, “You fixed the earth on its foundation, never to be moved”; both quoted here from the New American Bible, although Urban VIII would have read them in Latin.) Some religious authorities of the time did not see any conflict between these verses and Galileo’s ideas, and the Pope had initially been at least somewhat open to Galileo’s ideas. However, the Pope eventually turned Galileo over to the Inquisition due to this supposed heresy, and the Inquisition forced Galileo to recant, sentenced him to house arrest, and banned his book and future publications. Fortunately for Galileo, the Inquisition did not have him tortured and executed. (It is an interesting question whether the problem was Galileo’s sun-centered view, or whether the Pope got mad because Galileo's book featured a dialogue in which the Pope's favored views were spoken by the "loser.")
The papacy subsequently decided that the reality of the Earth orbiting the sun did not undermine scripture, and astronomers could do their job while the religious leaders did theirs. Indeed, important scientific discussions have been hosted by subsequent popes.
It remains that sometimes conflict arises between some members of some religious or other groups and some aspects of science. In 2005, for example, the state school board in Kansas changed their definition of science, apparently to enable teaching in science classes of ideas that repeatedly have been rejected as being nonscientific by courts and scientific organizations. After a 2007 election that changed the membership of the school board, the board restored its definition that science is a search for natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us. We will have a chance to discuss these ideas later in the course because Kansas and other states have continued to fight over the issues. Such discussions have been ongoing for centuries and we can be confident that they will continue far into the future. Environmental and public health issues often face similar disagreements.
So, let’s look a bit more carefully at what science is, and isn’t.