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Why would someone put dill pickles in their ice cream or “intelligent design” books in the science section of a book store Biologists Helping Bookstores

Rather then take the usual route lets put it this way. The native American Sioux have several creation myths. One in particular comes from a Sioux medicine man named Leonard Crow Dog who in the 1980s had a vision during a kind of meditation or spiritual quest. Leonard wrote,

This story has never been told. It is in no book or computer. It came to me in a dream during a vision quest. It is a story as old as the beginning of life, but it has new understandings according to what I saw in my vision, added to what the grandfathers told me—things remembered, things forgotten, and things re-remembered. It comes out of the World of the Minds.

Some people say we are descended from Adam and Eve, but there was no Adam or Eve in our creation. Some people try to tell us that we were born with the burden of original sin, but that is an alien white man’s concept. Sin was not in the mind of the universe of our creators or the created.  (emphasis mine)

Beautiful, interesting and poetic, but not fit for the science section. It lacks rationalism.

Science and the Islamic world—The quest for rapprochement 

Islam’s encounter with science has had happy and unhappy periods. There was no science in Arab culture in the initial period of Islam, around 610 AD. But as Islam established itself politically and militarily, its territory expanded. In the mid-eighth century, Muslim conquerors came upon the ancient treasures of Greek learning. Translations from Greek into Arabic were ordered by liberal and enlightened caliphs, who filled their courts in Baghdad with visiting scholars from near and far. Politics was dominated by the rationalist Mutazilites, who sought to combine faith and reason in opposition to their rivals, the dogmatic Asharites. A generally tolerant and pluralistic Islamic culture allowed Muslims, Christians, and Jews to create new works of art and science together. But over time, the theological tensions between liberal and fundamentalist interpretations of Islam—such as on the issue of free will versus predestination—became intense and turned bloody…

Like many articles the author takes some general truisms and works from there. When one says Islam you’re talking about approximately one billion people, just as when one says Christians and goes off on some proposition they’re talking almost a billion people. So general trends are the point. It does seem to be true that just as there are fundamentalist Christians that seem to be in struggle with modernity the same is also true of many Muslims. At some point push will come to shove and those fundamentalists will have to accept some concessions about their interpretations of the Koran, just as most of Christianity had to do during the Age of Reason. It might not seem like it some days, but reason is winning. The Holy Roman Empire didn’t accept the Copernican view of the heavens overnight, but it did eventually win.

prague bridge at twilight