Not a theory but this should differentiate you from others.
EMOR: Cohanim and The Illusion of Death
| In his book on the laws of mourning ("Gesher Hachaim"), Rav Tokachinsky related the following parable in order to explain the Jewish view on life after death: Twin brothers, fetuses in their mother's womb, enjoy their carefree life. Their world is dark and warm and protected. These twins are alike in all aspects but one. One brother is a 'believer' - he believes in an afterlife, in a future reality much different than their current, tiny universe. But the other brother is a skeptic. All he knows is the familiar world of the womb. Anything besides what he can feel and sense is an illusion. The skeptic tries to talk some sense into his brother, he warns him to be realistic, but to no avail. His brother naively insists on believing in an extraordinary world that exists after life in the womb, a world so immense and fantastic that it is transcends their wildest imaginings. The months pass, and the fatal moment arrives. Labor begins. The fetuses are aware of tremendous contractions and shifting in their little world. The freethinker recognizes that 'this is it'; his short but pleasant life is about to end. He feels the forces pressuring him to go down, but he fights against them. He knows that outside the womb, a cruel death awaits, with no protective sack and no umbilical cord. Suddenly he realizes that his ingenuous brother is giving in to the forces around them. He is sinking! "Don't give up!" he cries, but the innocent one takes no heed. "Where are you, my dear brother?!" he calls out. He shudders when he hears his brother screaming from outside the womb. His poor brother has met his cruel fate. How naive he was, with his belief in a bigger, better world! Then the skeptic feels the uterine muscles pushing him out too, against his will, into the abyss. He screams out ... "Mazal Tov!" calls out the doctor. "Two healthy baby boys!" |
Thanks. I like that story. I haven't heard it in a long time.
But I feel like I've come full circle. About a year and a half ago when I registered on FR, I kept trying to say that this argument seems to keep cycling because Creationist/ID'ers want to talk about theology, whereas evos want to talk about science, which in my mind is a lower level knowledge.
When evos talk about species they want to talk about what things look like and the current guesses about them. Creationist/ID'ers want to start from a faith-based world view and work back. While science can be informed by faith (many big time scientists were), the knowledge involved still needs to proceed from what can be observed and/or demonstrated.
A perfect example of what goes wrong when science is narrowly based on scripture is the Arab world. While they were able to briefly make use of knowledge absorbed from conquered civilizations, they never really went anywhere with it. They are now almost completely dependent on others for technology.
Given the tendency of religious factions to splinter (250 Christian churches in the US alone), its makes sense to me to allow science to be the low level exercise it is and allow people of faith to participate in it. We are already at a point where embryos can be designed in vitro and implanted into a woman to be grown. Within the next 50 to 100 years, there will be a lot of very strange possibilities for what can be done with people and its imperative that people of faith participate in this process, otherwise anything can happen. Most of it bad.
By opting out of the scientific process, people of faith will be unemployable in many areas of science and be isolated from a decision making role.