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Worldview Watch issue #81   posted 7 /10 /2025    Rocks, Religion, Romance

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in the news: the two part column that follows below was supposed to be published on back-to-back Sundays, July13 and July 20, in the Prescott Arizona Daily Courier as part of an ongoing "Science Works" column written by Stephen Cook. Alas, editor TW refused to run it, saying the column would "piss off, unnecessarily, half or more of the readers. " And that he was terminating Cook's contract.

Interestingly enough, this decision was made (July 8 2025) nearly 100 years after the start (July 10 1925) of the famous Scopes trial, in which the defendant was charged with violating a state law and teaching human evolution, instead of biblical creationism, in public schools. One likes to think that in the last century the cumulative efforts of countless professional science educators like Cook would have made discussion of evolution in newspaper columns less controversial?  Sadly, in today's Prescott Arizona—where apparently last century's narrow-minded prejudices are entrenched—that appears not to be the case. With this heavy-handed censorship, Cook feels TW is choosing (blissful?) ignorance for Courier readers over thought-provoking knowledge and essentially telling the Prescott progressive, thinking community that their views and needs are not valued.

Sadly, Cook now feels his year-long attempt to get constructive, thought-provoking dialogue going was not time well spent. Likewise, he feels his efforts to get people in a rather conservative small town to "think globally, but act locally" met with more hostility than receipt of "feel good" rewards.

worldview related analysis by Stephen P. Cook, Managing Director, project Worldview

Worldview themes and  corresponding choices associated with what follows are:  

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Rocks, Religion, Romance—Part I     

 For the past year as a Courier columnist I’ve had this concern: many read my column Sunday morning, head to church and don’t connect these activities because my columns haven’t covered this science and religion territory. This column and the next one will rectify this—using rocks and stories associated with them. To liven things up, I’m including stories with romantic aspects. 

 Back in 2007, on the way to drop off my step-daughter Alida at Friendly Pines Campground, Prescott’s iconic Thumb Butte presented itself. Very much in love with this girl’s mother, and committed to helping with home schooling, seizing a teachable moment I playfully asked,  “What do Thumb Butte and Alida have in common?” Answer: “One is a volcanic neck, the other is a pain in the neck!” Alas, based on what I recently learned, I now know I was wrong.   

Thumb Butte is not a volcanic neck, something created when molten rock hardens inside a vent on an active volcano. So said Yavapai College retired professor Beth Boyd to roughly 250 people attending a June 26 “Thoughts on Thumb Butte: A Geological Journey” presentation. Her talk show-cased the scientific method: with potassium—argon radioisotope dating establishing a 14.79 million year old rock age, magnetic field related data establishing lava flow direction, and geochemical analysis distinguishing it from basaltic lava. And, after testing of various hypotheses, concluding that most likely Thumb Butte is just a thick pile of very old lava.  

 The evening included an announcement, by the sponsoring Natural History Institute, of a September multi-day Grand Canyon field trip— devoted to the amazing story that its rock layers, like pages of a book, tell.  Unlike Prescott area rocks, Canyon upper layers are all sedimentary, varying in thickness and depositional environment. The Coconino Sandstone, the youngest, can be traced to a desert sand dune / winds blowing small rock particles environment of 275 million years ago. Only with the oldest rocks at the bottom—the Vishnu group —were metamorphic processes involved. Metamorphic rocks result when heat, great pressure, and / or chemically active fluids (like water) act on rocks over a long period of time to transform them—both in texture and composition. Limestone is thus changed into marble; granite becomes gneiss.  These lowest (basement) rocks are truly ancient: 1.84 billion years old.  

September also brings an annual one-day event: the “Fall Creation Tour of the Grand Canyon” led by Russ Miller. The religion-based / anti-evolution story Russ tells about Arizona rocks is quite different from Beth’s science-based story. As Russ puts it, “After I saw observable science doesn’t support Darwinism or old Earth beliefs I realized these false teachings are undermining the world’s faith in Jesus Christ.”  My reply: the observational evidence supports “old Earth” and to claim God / Noah’s biblical flood created the Grand Canyon a few thousand years ago is nonsense.

 Many years ago Judge William Overton, in an Arkansas case pitting teaching evolution vs. teaching creationism, distinguished between science and religion. He wrote, "A scientific theory must be tentative and always subject to revision or abandonment in light of facts that are inconsistent with, or falsify, the theory.  A theory that is, by its own terms, dogmatic, absolutist and never subject to revision is not a scientific theory."  Religious structures are rigid—built more on wishful thinking and faith, than evidence.  Scientific frameworks are flexible—evolving so that the fit between their description of reality and reality itself, gauged by predictions they make, steadily improves.     

Creation “science” represents an ignorant, arrogant insult to geologists. Furthermore, its narrow-minded focus shields people from the “Great Story” —beginning 13.8 billion years with the “Big Bang”—and “an evolutionary understanding [that] can enrich one’s faith.” So says Michael Dowd in his 2007 book Thank God for Evolution. Of its author, Nobel Prize winner in Medicine Lee Hartwell said, “At last someone who understands that all of reality is sacred and science is our method of comprehending it.” I call on Russ Miller to read this book, and change the story he tells!

Subtitled “How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World,” the book had a romantic origin. As astronomy educator Brian Swimme put it, “The book should be made into a Hollywood film. An evangelical Christian preacher (Michael) and atheist evolutionary naturalist (Connie Barlow) fall in love, marry each other, and give birth to their stunning new vision that promises healing for so many.  If you love God, if you love the animals, if you love Jesus, if you love the flowers and Sun and Moon, here’s the book that will help you gather all these loves together.”

After reading this, I’m almost ready to believe “God is love”—which is where Part II of this column will pick up next week.  

Rocks, Religion, Romance—Part II      

I occasionally spend Sunday mornings at a Prescott church named after a rock formation: Granite Peak Universalist Unitarian Congregation (GPUUC.) As geologist Beth Boyd pointed out during her June 26 talk, while both are volcanic formations, Granite Peak is more than one billion years older than Thumb Butte. One weekly ritual at GPUUC involves sharing “Joys and Sorrows”—done silently by people coming forward and placing rocks in a water-filled bowl. Another is reciting the Covenant which begins, “Love is the doctrine of this congregation…”

 My last column ended by suggesting I was considering the notion “God is love.” Given my science background, many assume I’m an atheist. I’m not, though I don’t believe God is personally concerned with humans.  I do believe religion in general has enormous real world impact and accordingly warrants serious discussion. With respect to Christianity, I believe the world would be better off if people followed what the best evidence suggests were Jesus’ teachings… “What does that mean?” religious fundamentalists ask. Adding, “What He taught is in the New Testament.” If only it were that simple…

While my reading the Bible ceased by age 15, spurred by romantic interest in a woman named Cynthia, it resumed 25 years later after my first marriage ended. Cynthia had found Jesus—and told me our romantic involvement depended on my finding Him as well. Highly motivated, I followed her suggestion and read the Gospel of John (John). Alas, I found its portrayal of Jesus went far beyond the characterization of Him in New Testament gospels Matthew, Mark and Luke. Initial open-mindedness gave way to skepticism and suspicion its author had a hidden agenda. Cynthia was disappointed.

Years later, Princeton professor of religion Elaine Pagels’ book Beyond Belief—The Secret Gospel of Thomas validated my feelings. She says John’s author promotes his view of Jesus as God in human form—not just God’s servant as the other three canonical gospels suggest. Pagels argues it was written to counter views of Jesus like Thomas presents, and what those other gospels hint at. She says the most explicit support of Thomas urging people to find God within themselves is in Luke, where Jesus says, “The kingdom of God is within you.”

She notes Thomas portrays Jesus as teaching disciples to discover the light within them. This totally contradicts John, which has Jesus proclaiming, “I am the light of the world.” As Pagels puts it, “John never tires of repeating that one must believe in Jesus, follow Jesus, obey Jesus and confess him alone as God’s only son…Thus John’s Jesus declares that ‘you will die in your sins, unless you believe that I am he.’”

John challenges the other gospels’ characterizing Peter as the disciples’ leader. After noting Matthew quotes Jesus saying Peter would be “the rock” on which the new church was built, Pagels says John suggests one known only as “the disciple whom Jesus loved” was their spiritual mentor —implying this is the apostle John. Pagels notes that only in John is the disciple known as Thomas portrayed as “Doubting Thomas” and—as Pagels puts it—‘faithless’ “because he seeks to verify the truth from his own experience.” In other words, like scientists, Thomas was something of a skeptic!

Sadly, Roman authorities suppressed the Gospel of Thomas 1700 years ago. It never became part of the New Testament. Why? Though impressed by Christian emphasis on helping each other, the Golden Rule, loving your neighbor, even loving your enemy, Roman leaders like Constantine realized that, for an empire held together by fear and violence— not love—this “loving kindness” message was a threat.  Today, focus on salvation and obedience to what John promotes—essentially that unless you believe Jesus is God you’ll burn in hell—dominates Christian belief.

Accordingly, a 2021 Pew Survey reported 62% of Americans believe hell is “a place where people who have led bad lives and die without being sorry are eternally punished.”  Since I don’t accept the Bible as the word of God, I reject this belief and prefer a psychologically healthier one like “God is love.” I realize there’s no evidence for believing that—and  evidence of widespread hate often challenges doing so. But even if this is just “useful fiction,” I think we’d be better off if most people believed it. Likewise, belief in heaven can be healthy. I conceive of dwelling there in terms of, at life’s end, recalling and psychologically embracing the “highest high” / ecstatic moments of one’s life.

Finally, people should selectively read the Bible for comfort, its stories, and metaphorical, not literal, truth. We don’t need creation “science” explaining how the biblical flood created Grand Canyon rock layers. We may be comforted that the vengeful, bringer of floodwaters, mass murderer Old Testament God mellows out in the New Testament.  

Comments

from GM:  I read the two-part column on your website, and really liked it - it's engaging, thought-provoking, and something that would stimulate discussion between people (and with themselves!) about the nature of their religious beliefs and the role they play in society.  These are just the things that people SHOULD be thinking and talking about, instead of baloney conspiracy theories about cloud seeding and the U.N. trying to control our lives.

That said, I CAN see why the editor thought that parts of it would piss off many of the Courier's readers.  I DO NOT agree with his characterization of "unnecessarily," however.  It is precisely because the column is thought-provoking that some would be pissed off, and that's a good thing.  Perhaps upon reflection the editor would have wished for a more conciliatory tone that emphasized the value of religion and engaged with the reasons why cultures have all proposed origin stories that don't really have necessary roles in the core values of their religions.  Christian tradition has long emphasized the metaphor of "two books" of revelation - the bible and the natural world - and Christian theologians have traditionally valued both.  I suspect that reconciling them is what the book that you mention in your column is all about.  I'm also very familiar with people who value both; Hope College is openly Christian, but without really limiting discourse.  Even among the faculty in the Religion Department (which has a very prominent reputation for its scholarship), I don't know a single young-earth creationist.  This simply isn't an issue for intellectual Christians - most of them understand the history of scripture and the cultural milieu that produced it, and that it is literature.  And that it uses myth as a powerful tool, like much other literature does.  But - as I have discussed at length and over many years with some of my religion department colleagues - a lot of rank and file Christians are never encouraged to engage with their faith tradition intellectually, and clergy that do encourage it are often shunned by their congregations!  So even though a lot of clergy have engaged with these issues as seminary students, they're often afraid to do so with the people who employ them.  What a shame, right?  But anyway, that's why I think that the editor thought that people might be pissed off - precisely because engaging with such discussions is too often seen as a lapse of faith or committment.  And that is my own primary criticism of much of Christianity.  Failure to understand the real, historical nature of scripture and both the spiritual limitations and intellectual liberation that such an understanding brings. 

One other thought about the nature of science and what distinguishes (and limits) it - and this is something that I hammered into my students for decades.  Science is about explaining the natural world in terms of the natural world.  Explanations that invoke the actions of agents outside of nature - by definition, "supernatural" agents like deities - are by definition non-scientific.  That doesn't necessarily make such explanations wrong, but it does render them unscientific, and thus inappropriate for a science classroom.  Closely related is the historian and philosopher of science Karl Popper's notion of the "falsifiability" of scientific hypotheses.  If one cannot imagine how an hypothesis about the natural world could be found to be false with evidence from the natural world, it cannot be evaluated by science.  Supernatural ("outside nature") explanations are not falsifiable.  If we can just invoke God as an explanation for something, and not be able to - at least potentially - provide evidence that God did not do it - then science has nothing to say about such an explanation.  It is outside the realm of science.  Again, that in itself doesn't make it wrong, but it's unscientific.  And of course, for the cynic it does relate all such explanations to one another, as in anyone can make up any explanation that isn't falsifiable, and it is just as good as the explanations posed by religious traditions as far as science is concerned.  I'm thankful that you have been willing to engage people on an intellectual level, and as you know one of my life's continuing frustrations is that so many are uninterested in exploring their own religious beliefs from a broad intellectual perspective.  I think what you've experienced is at least in part blowback based on that disinterest and unwillingness, but in my book that's a badge of honor!

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