The Bone of Contention

The quote that got my sister's Bible toting friend all worked up was this:

"In my searching, I have arrived at the opinion that Christianity has an unblemished record of utterly failing every legitimate scientific challenge to its claims since Galileo peered into the night sky." Nathan Phelps, son of Westboro Baptist Church leader Fred Phelps

And in re-reading it, I can't find a single flaw in Mr. Phelps' logic. Whenever religions, Christianity in particular, and science find themselves at odds, sooner or later, science wins out.

You can pray over Brother Darryl's physical affliction or you can rely on science based medicine to effectively treat it.

You can dogmatically say that the Earth is the center of the universe or you can see the Earth as the tiny, fragile speck of space dust it is and marvel in its rarity and fragility.

You can say that a single page of text trumps all scientific evidence and that man is the result of a whim of some supreme being or you can look at that evidence with an open mind and a skeptical eye and see that grand web of life that arose on Earth to see the marvelous interconnectedness of that life and how rare and precious each species is.

The point is this: science doesn't make our universe any less grand. In fact, the revelations of science have shown us what a truly incredible cosmos we occupy.

I have a fairly thorough understanding of optics on the quantum level and the mathematics of refractive indexes.

And I think rainbows are pretty.