Tuesday, February 06, 2007

To each his own

His own interpretation that is.

CNN - Ancient boy's skeleton sparks evolution debate
"I did not evolve from Turkana Boy or anything like it," says Bishop Boniface Adoyo, head of Kenya's 35 evangelical denominations, which he claims have 10 million followers. "These sorts of silly views are killing our faith."
[. . .]
Against him is one of the planet's best-known fossil hunters, Richard Leakey, whose team unearthed the bones at Nariokotome in West Turkana, in the desolate, far northern reaches of Kenya in 1984.

"Whether the bishop likes it or not, Turkana Boy is a distant relation of his," Leakey, who founded the museum's prehistory department, told The Associated Press. "The bishop is descended from the apes and these fossils tell how he evolved."
[. . .]
Followers of creationism believe in the literal truth of the Genesis account in the Bible that God created the world in six days. Bishop Adoyo believes the world was created 12,000 years ago, with man appearing 6,000 years later. He says each biblical day was equivalent to 1,000 Earth years.
What neither one of these men are willing to acknowledge is that they are both engaging in interpretation. They are both taking information and understanding it in the way that makes the most sense to them. Neither one is dealing with indisputable, empirical fact. This is not 2+2=4. There are missing links in anthropology. It is an interpretation to say that one biblical day in the creation story is 1000 years. We don't know. We all put our faith in something, even if that faith is in science, it is still, to some degree, an act of faith.

No comments: