Hildegarde

Just before Thanksgiving last year, I went into a supermarket–well, what passes for a supermarket out here–looking for a turkey breast.  This was not turkey for Thanksgiving itself.  For that,  I get a whole turkey.  I think I had somebody coming for dinner, or something.  Whatever the reason, I wanted a turkey breast.

I couldn’t find one in the fresh meat section.  I went over to the frozen stuff and found a big pile of the things in that open, deep bin at the bottom.  I looked around among them, finally found one big enough to suit me, and grapped it by the looped handle of its mesh packaging.  

It was way down under a whole bunch of these things, and it was hard to get it to come out.  So I pulled, really hard.

And it came.

It brought five or so more of the things up with it.   They bounced out of the freezer case and onto the floor, except for one of them, which hit me square on the top of my left foot.

You ever get hit by a seven pound turkey breast on top of your foot?  It breaks about a million tiny bones, and there’s nothing the doctor can do about it.  You swell up.   You take a lot of ibuprofen.

But what really struck me about that incident was this:  it was exactly the kind of thing that occurs on some badly written sitcom, and when you watch it you roll your eyes and wonder how anybody could expect you to believe something like that.

I was reminded of that incident yesterday, which went like this:

I had a fairly important appointment at one fifteen, for which  I had to do a great deal of preparation.  Things had to be photocopied.  Other things had to be gathered together and put in order if I wasn’t going to sound like a complete idiot.

I really should have started prepping for this thing at least a week in advance, but of course I’d left it all to the last minute.  So, just to make sure I didn’t screw it all up, I got myself up at four thirty in the morning, had tea, got showered and dressed, got ino my car ad headed out

I got to the place I knew I could make copies just as the doors opened, ran around organizing all my stuff and getting the right number of copies of each, found a computer I could use and printed some stuff off that that also had to be copied, organized all my material, looked at the clock and realized it was almost one already.

So I jumped up and ran, jumped in the car, did too much in the way of miles per hour, found a parking space too far away from the door to be comfortable, locked up, ran some more, reached the door, and found it locked. 

Panicked beyond belief, I got out my phone and called the person I was supposed to meet…and was greeted with complete  bemusement.

Our appointment is for next week.

So, okay, you know.   On one level, this is just funny.  But it did occur to me that under no circumstances would I use either of these incidents in a novel.  I wouldn’t, because they just don’t sound “real” to me. 

I don’t know how this is possible, since both these incidents are thoroughly real.   They happened to me. And yet, somehow, they don’t feel entirely real even when I talk about them, and I know without even having to check that they would sound compltely fake in fiction.

I read something once that said that fiction has to be plausible, where life needs only to be possible. 

I suppose that would work well enough in this case, but I  still find the whole thing a little unsettling.

It’s not just that fiction, if it is to be worthwhile at all, should reflect the way we live now, and what we are–and please,  by that I don’t mean that you can’t have historical novels or fantasy ones.

It’s that I keep rememberingn that line from Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest:  it’s the truth, even if it didn’t happen.

It’s that I  keep remember another of Kesey’s lines, from his second novel, Sometimes A Great Notion.

Some things aren’t the truth even if they did happen.

So, let me start here–in general, I agree with Cathy.  What went on in Dover was not about making a religion out of science, in spite of the fact that some people claiming to be supporting the science side acted in their usual idiotic way.

I’ve got nearly twenty books about the incident and trial, and I’ve read the decision, and I think the judge was absolutely right.  It’s not that “just mentioning” intelligent design constituted teaching it, it’s that doing what they did the way they did it implied that a) evolution was not proven in a scientifically valid way and b) intelligent design had scientific validity.

Both those claims are false–they’re worse than false.  Think of what would happen if school boards insisted on doing something similar with, say, gravity.  Gravity is a theory with which some people disagree–

They can disagree or not, but gravity is science. 

I agree, too, that evolution doesn’t “proselytize.”  From the beginning, biologists and science journalists have been reacting to challenges from religious groups.  Evolution is the only theory that needs defending to the general public, because it’s the only one likely to be challenged on the local level by the general public.  If school boards were sticking disclaimers about geology into earth science textbooks, then there would be popular science books about geology.

(I find it interesting that there isn’t much resistance to geology in public schools, since the findings of geologist do just as much damage to a literal reading of Genesis as evolution does.)

I don’t know if science is compatible with a belief in God.  I’ve never believed in God, so I can’t tell.  I do know that science is not incompatible with most forms of Christianity and Judaism.  It was Aquinas who said that all truth is one and therefore there can be no contradication between one form of truth or another.  If you think you’ve found such a contradiction, and the scientific finding can be proved, the chances are good that you’re misinterpreting scripture.

But then, neither the Western Church nor the Eastern Churches have ever based their Christianity solely on the  Bible.  It’s various forms of Protestantism that have trouble with evolution, and even then only those forms of Protestantism that choose to take that particular account in Genesis literally.

The convoluted way I put that was necessary becasuse virtually nobody even in the most literalist Protestant denominations takes the entire Bible literally.  Ask them what Jesus meant when he said “Take, eat, this is my body…” and they’re quick to point out that that is jsut a metaphor.

All that said, however, the fact is that a number of the most prominent “New Atheists” are belligerent, dismissive and woefully ignorant of the traditions they’re supposed to be critiquing.  I’ve developed a morbid fascination with the columns of a woman named Shadia Drury, who writes monthly for Free Inquiry, probably the best of the atheist magazines on offer.

It’s not just that she parrots every silly misunderstanding on the Middle Ages on offer anywhere–that’s bad enough, but I’ve gotten used to it–but a couple of months ago she managed to misinterpret both Thomas Aquinas and Edmund Burke.   I’d be willing to bet that she’s having trouble with Aquinas because she’s reading him in translation, but Burke?  The English isn’t even all that archaic.

Oh, she almost managed to nearly completely misunderstand the ideas of John Stuart Mill, and therefore botched the intellectual history resulting from them.

And she’s got a book out about Aquinas.  I haven’t been able to look.

But although I’m going on and on about this woman because she’s been on my mind lately, the fact is that the kind of thing she does is not unusual.

Richard Dawkins does indeed say that if evolution is true, then religion isn’t–and he’s a biologist, not just a random popularizer, and the most famous face of atheism now writing.

Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and virtually every writer for Free Inquiry and The Humanist seems to think that “theocracy” means “any religious imput in government at all, including elected representatives who consult their conscience before voting on bills, if that conscience is religious.”

In the case of evolution, stuff like this is largely counterproductive.  Not only does it fan the flames of the real Creationists, it makes a lot of perfectly sensible people wonder if the science really exists to support evolution.

And evolution so defined–as having to do with “something coming from nothing”–does not have the science to support it.

Actual evolution does, but that’s not the same thing.