CSI and the Second Coming
I spent the day before Easter doing two things that I rarely do: listening to fundamentalist Christian radio and watching episodes of CSI, the popular crime drama.
The experience brought home a weird, and probably permanent, dichotomy in American culture.
On the one hand, millions of us tune in every day to listen to a portrait of the world that is starkly hostile to most of the basic conclusions of modern science.
While driving, I heard various preachers offering what they viewed as factual evidence that the earth is only a few thousand years old.
Evolution? A fable cooked up by delusional scientists. Geology — obviously misguided.
One sermonizer laid out a detailed argument for the notion that the Second Coming and the end of all things earthly will occur on May 11, 2011.
The logic and methodology of this approach to understanding the world is, literally, Medieval.
It begins and ends with the conviction that the Bible is unequivocally factual. It is science as well as theology.
Anything that we observe which seems to contradict the texts of the Holy Book must, by definition, be false.
While this fundamentalist view permeates the radio waves, a very different culture can be found in the episodes of CSI.
On the wildly popular television whodunit, scientists are sages.
Their methods and techniques — all products of the secular Enlightenment — are raised to almost mythical status.
They sort infallibly through the world’s complexity.
They are intellectual, fearless and operate with a Sherlock Holmesian clarity. Their goal is nothing short of Truth.
This conception of how science works is nearly as fabulous as the stories told on Christian radio.
Of course, the makers of CSI don’t pretend that they’re offering a straight story — the show is, after all, fiction.
But I wonder how many television viewers understand the distinction.
I also wonder how many Americans manage to live in both of these worlds simultaneously.
There must be millions of us who listen by day to radio preachers, who claim that science and its foundational thinkers are deeply misguided.
And then we tune in faithfully to watch those same scientists raised to the status of heroes as they corral the bad guys.
Sometimes, it seems like these two outlooks can’t possibly co-exist in one head, let alone one society.
But we’ve been muddling along together, scientists and preachers, at least since the Scopes trial, and probably much longer.
Your thoughts? Comment below.
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I have a pair of hearing protection radio headphones that I wear at work sometimes. The tuning is terrible. I tune in to NCPR then turn my head a little and get a classic rock station then move a step and get a christian radio station, and there are a surprising number of christian radio stations now. They often seem to relate in in strange, surprising, and humorous ways. The other thing I've noticed is that christian radio stations seem to tune in, on average, better than secular stations. Could that be evidence of a higher power at work?
One of the problems with todays society is we believe what we see and hear explicitly. I have attended numerous postmortems and never once was a post conducted in a dark room nor did I ever do a crime scene investigation by flashlight. The good Lord let man develop the light switch for a reason. IOW- just 'cuz it's on TV or radio doesn't make it "gospel".Faith is a funny thing. While I have a very strong belief in a higher power and was raised Baptist there is no way I can stomach radio or TV televangelists. While some may be sincere, many smell like politicians that never got elected.I say let faith alone Brian. It's a very personal thing and whether you're a strict fundamentalist or a Unitarian or a Buddhist, as long as you try and be a decent person whose business is it what you believe or listen to?
Contrary to the way many use it the word "gospel" does not mean something is truth or factual. It actually means "good news". A thing accepted on faith can seem like good news. Sort of like being told "The check is in the mail" without it necessarily being true.
Bret – I enjoyed your comments. There are two reasons that I won't leave faith alone.First, it's fascinating – a topic I find myself thinking about a lot.Secondly, people of faith are incredibly powerful in our society, both in the North Country, nationally and internationally.–Brian, NCPR
But Brian, you poke fun at both faith and CSI equally. One is a fictional account of criminal investigators, the other……what am I to think? It comes across as sort of disrespectful and loaded.
Of course the problem is consistency. As a Catholic Christian I don't go in for the 6000 year old earth, anti-evolution beliefs, we accept evolution as a process from God. However today I celebrated the physical resurrection of a man I believe was God's Son born of a Virgin. I mean I really do literally believe that; and that is certainly just as totally impossible from current scientific understanding as a 6000 year old earth, so who am to criticize the Protestant fundamentalists or for that matter the secular scientists? We have to be together on this earth. One thing I do know is that I am supposed to love everyone regardless of if they agree with me on any issue and that if I expect grace from God for all of the crap I have done in my life, I better not be passing out the judgment on anyone else.
Bret – I wasn't poking fun or being disrespectful. I was commenting on actual things that I heard on Christian radio and actual episodes of CSI. The fact that these two radically different world views are both very popular in the same society strikes me as fascinating, but not particularly humorous.–Brian, NCPR
Brian:The fact is that the world may be only 10,000 years old, and evolution is bunk.A good percentage of the world sees you as living in the world of make-believe.We'll just have to go on differing, cause I can't convince you and you can't convince me otherwise.Won't be too long before either the second-coming of Christ, or our own demise. Either will cause us both to have a new perspective on things.
"muddling along together, scientists and preachers, at least since the Scopes trial,…"Yes, Brian, as you say, since much longer. And in the same heads. Newton comes to mind. Charles Darwin was quite religious, too, and Gregor Mendel, whose peas basically proved Darwin right, was a monk.
Okay Brian, if you didn't intend it that way, fine. It just read that way to me.I am a religious liberal. I figure a persons faith is their own business, be it Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Mormon, Shinto, Gia, whatever. As long as a person has some faith in the thread of humanity that binds us all there's still hope for us.I will never understand the concept of going to war over religion. It makes no sense to me. Same for those that say only "their" beliefs can possibly be true, whether it's a particular religion or denying God, by whatever name, can exist. How can you deny the possibility of something we can't hope to comprehend?
"The fact is that the world may be only 10,000 years old, and evolution is bunk." I'm hoping that this was written tongue-in-cheek. The facts have shown that the world is much, much older than 10,000 years. The facts have shown that evolution is….well, a fact.CIS is a fun show to watch, as is House. Most of what they show is based on real science. They just seem to make things happen a lot faster than they actually do.
Bret,I don't always agree with you, but am with you on this. Religion is a matter of personal faith. And if it is, indeed, "faith", why are so many so sure their's is the "correct" one. We cannot "know" and should leave people alone to manage their own relationship with their own god.
Like Bret said about comparing religion and CSI – One is a fictional account of criminal investigators, the other……What if 2000 years from now, after civilization is wiped out by nuclear war, someone finds a copy of a CSI episode? Would they know its fiction?
There are those who listen to fundamentalist Christian media preachers and accept their theories at face value, just as there are those who watch an episode of CSI and assume a crime can be solved without the shadow of a doubt in the span of 50-whatever minutes. But beyond those who do so, there are many, many more (at least I hope there are) who are either skeptics of both science and religion, or simply find a way to live a life of balance between the two. I always end up hoping that the fundamentalists in religion (and politics, for that matter) will flare up and burn out quickly, and more reasonable discourse and open minds will win out in the end.Thank goodness Fundamentalist Radio isn't the only choice on the dial, and thank goodness CSI isn't the only show on tv (as much as both seem to try).
Anon 2:23 makes an interesting point.I envy those who have faith. I was raised Catholic but never really believed. I am a skeptic by nature. Now that I have kids and have loved ones passing or passing on soon, I really wished I believed there was more. I go to a Catholic church with my wife, who is somewhat skeptical of Catholicism,, but has faith that there is more to this world. I Cannot get over the fact that we put so much faith in an old book, which has some pretty outlandish stuff in it and may have been intended to be a work of fiction or deceit. I do like the public radio show Speaking of Faith, which often interviews scientists about their faith. Last week they had two Roman Catholic priests who are astronomers. Even they said they sometimes question their faith. They said something like Faith is faith because we don't know with 100% certainty that its true.
Faith and belief are really two different words.Faith, basically, is trust. Belief is what you do when you don't know.Humans have a strong tendency to fill in the blanks of knowledge with belief. At one time we believed the Sun went around the Earth. Now we know the Earth goes around the Sun.By the way, not believing there is a God is a belief, just as believing there is a God is a belief.Since Evolution has been brought up here, here are my two cents.I do believe there is a God, a Creator who has always created and will always create.Therefore, in my belief, there have been an infinite number of Universes prior to this Universe and there will be an infinite number of Universes after this Universe.Pretty amazing, yes?When it comes to talking about God, I think we have a tendency to view God as simply a large version of a human being. If that isn't vanity, I don't know what is.I believe God is much more than we can ever imagine.I base this on two lines from the Old Testament.One, when asked who He was, God is proposed to have said, "I am who am."Two, when Job complained about all the bad things that had happened to him, considering Job was a pretty decent fellow, God replied, "My thoughts are not your thoughts. My ways are not your ways."
Brian wrote:"There are two reasons that I won't leave faith alone.First, it's fascinating – a topic I find myself thinking about a lot."Thinking about faith is like thinking about love. We can think about it a lot, but we only begin to understand as we open ourselves to it.Brian, perhaps Someone is inviting you to do just that.I can't speak for other traditions, but the Christian experience is that faith grows — and is tested! — in community. Making time for private prayer, Bible reading, a study group, Sunday worship, meeting with a mentor-in-faith can be terribly inconvenient. But then making time for anything worthwhile requires commitment.Other traditions have their disciplines, too, such as the five pillars of faith of Muslims.No matter how much we think about swimming we only learn to swim by getting in the water. To grow in faith we immerse ourselves in the wisdom and practices available to us.Faith doesn't provide certitude, but opens oneself to insight, strength, and a marvellous adventure. Some doubt remains, and it can be a growing edge of faith.Nor is faith opposed to science. The Cambridge particle physicist and Anglican priest, John Polkinghorne, has written extensively about this.
George -I agree that faith and science are not mutually exclusive. Other commenters have noted the frequent contributions to science made by believers of various faiths. I recently read a fascinating article called The Indian Clerk that traced the Hindu influences on mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan — who credited much of his work to his family diety, Namagiri of Namakkal.Another fascinating work in this vein is Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers, which points to the mystical influences that led to many of the great discoveries of physics and astronomy.Regarding my own influences, I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian church, was later an altar boy in the Episcopal Church, then I spent time in a Buddhist monastery in Malaysia.–Brian, NCPR
As an atheist I often feel I have to keep my opinion to myself because people of faith are often offended by the concept, as if my belief or disbelief is a personal affront to them. Belief is a personal thing and it isn't my business to change anyone elses' belief. Here is the question, since there is no real proof that some "higher power" exists why do we feel such a higher power is necessary? And why do people who believe in a God feel the need to prove there is one? If you believe in him and it makes you feel good then he is real to you, great.Science on the other hand is simply a systematic way of understanding the world or Creation. An Islamic scholar once said to me that everything has been revealed and that science is simply the means of unfolding that revelation. Seems sensible enough. The conflict between science and religion only seems to exist in the minds of those who insist on the literal truth of whatever particular document they believe in. I don't mean to offend here but that seems a particularly simple-minded and dull understanding of existence, an understanding which limits the potential of the particular god they themselves believe in.I can go along with the "I am that I am." So am I, and when I am done I wont be. It is perhaps the scariest belief that a person can hold, at least the way I see it. It is my belief that fear of loss of existence is responsible for the concept of religion; the idea that we must have some greater purpose in the universe or else our consciousness is meaningless. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary I am content to believe that it is all simply and accident. But that accident has rules which are fun, and useful to try to understand. Aren't we lucky to be able to perceive it all for a short time? (I must correct myself here because it isn't luck at all, it is simply a fact of existence. The fact that I exist and have consciousness has a 100% probability of happening because, in fact, I do exist and etc. Saying "aren't we lucky" is just a figure of speech)
Knucklehead,I enjoyed reading your latest comments.How many people know that the Jews, for the most part, did not believe in an afterlife until a couple of hundred years before the birth of Jesus. This is why they tended to believe a good person was rewarded in this life and a bad person was punished in this life. Before coming to believe in an afterlife, they could not imagine God punishing good people and rewarding bad people in the here and now.It was this belief that so upset Job when his life went down the tubes.
Knuckle head said- "There is the question, since there is no real proof that some "higher power" exists…"The problem is there's no real proof a higher power doesn't exist either. There's no real evidence that a lot of what we "know" is true. A couple years back the headlines told of "proof" of some subatomic particle based on the lack of something else on a recording of some experiment. How is faith in that being true or being evidence any different than having faith that a higher power, something completely beyond our limited comprehension can handle, might well exist? I don't believe the Earth is actually only 6 or 10K years old. I don't believe the Bible or any other religious text is literally "as it happened". The general lessons in the Old Testament are what matters- it's a rule book on how a society can survive, perhaps inspired by that elusive higher power, perhaps not. The New Testament I believe contains more lessons and the message that if you want a pleasurable afterlife (no proof it doesn't exist) then you'd better mind your manners and toe the line while you're still kicking. I do believe Jesus was Divine, but what "Divine" really means…I'm not sure anyone knows. I''m no more inclined to try and change your belief than you are to change mine. I just think it should be understood that the atheist lack of belief in a higher power becomes a "faith" in itself after some time. I'm also of the opinion that many of the atheists I've come in contact with over time tend to have some rather large egos, that they lack humility and seem to look down on those who accept there may be something beyond the mortal plane. I don't know if all atheists are like that, but every one I've been around, and that's 35-40 and some I was in contact with for decades, had a real problem with the concept of "judgment". That seemed to be the big issue, that their decisions might come back and haunt them. I dunno, maybe it's just those I met.Either way,I'm not of the opinion killing people who think differently than I do is the right way to do things. If we could take the power and money out of both religion and politics we'd probably have a much better world.
Thanks Pete, and thankfully I haven't a fraction of the problems of poor Job. Bret, maybe your perception that all atheists have big egos and they are looking down on you is a product of the way you deal with atheists. Of course there is no way to prove that God or an afterlife do not exist. They are matters of faith. They need no proof. Do not taunt the atheist and he will likely not taunt you. Buy the atheist a beer sometime, most atheists like beer. But don't offer him a burger; he's probably a vegetarian too.Science can explain everything that is explicable. Religion is there for everything else. And Brian,"Geology–obviously misguided." I have heard a fundamentalist explanation for the fossil record. Apparently the idea is that during the great flood all of the animals and plants were swept up and drowned. When the waters calmed their bodies began to sink. The heaviest animals, dinosaurs and such sank first, followed by mastodons saber-toothed tigers etc. When the waters receded we were left with the fossil record and stratified rock.
The thing I keep in mind or try to at least is that beliefs are often fluid over our lifetime.When I talk to people they often say well I was raised this way and I used to believe this, then I didn't believe anything and now I do believe this and so forth or the other way around or whatever.So for all I know the atheist I am speaking to today will be the Saint of tomorrow (or vice versa).
Actually Knuckle Head it was more the way they dealt with me. Calling someone with faith, and I quote, "…too stupid to know any better" really doesn't work well towards frank discussion and honest debate.