September 2018 Newsletter
In this Clergy Letter Project update, you’ll find the following six items:
- Evolution Weekend: Now More Than Ever;
- Astrobiology News for September 2018: Mars Revisited;
- AAAS’s Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion;
- The Clergy Letter Project Speaks Out on Behalf of Children;
- Noah’s Flood and Intelligent Life in the Galaxy; and
- Evolution Under Attack in Arizona.
1. Evolution Weekend: Now More Than Ever
We are living at a time when alternative facts are competing with actual facts, when opinions count as much as, and often more than, data, and when many in the religious community seem willing to condone immoral behavior because, in their minds, the ends justify the means. We are living at a time when it appears to be acceptable to attack others for their religious beliefs, for the color of their skin, for whom they choose to love, and for the simple fact that they don’t have economic power. Many of us know we are better than this. Many of us know that our religious beliefs have taught us to act differently while our scientific understanding has demonstrated the importance of appreciating the realities of the natural world.
Indeed, in many situations, religion and science have come to the same conclusions. They certainly have with respect to how we should treat others, how we need to care for the natural world and how easy it is to do irreparable harm to children.
The theme of Evolution Weekend 2019, The Confluence of Religion and Science, addresses exactly this point. This is a lesson sorely needed in the world at this particular moment and thus I hope that many of you opt to participate in Evolution Weekend 2019. Together let’s help bring some rational discourse to the public and by so doing let’s change the course of history.
_____ Yes, I plan to participate in Evolution Weekend 2019 (8-10 February 2019). Please add me to the growing list of participants.
Name of Congregation (or other group):
Location:
Your name:
As I’ve said so often, participation can take place any time in the temporal vicinity of that weekend if you have a conflict and participation can take any form you deem appropriate. What’s more important than timing or any specific activity is that we raise the quality of the dialogue about the relationship between religion and science.
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2. Astrobiology News for September 2018: Mars Revisited
In this month’s Astrobiology News, Clergy Letter Project consultant and Adler Planetarium astronomer Grace Wolf-Chase discusses an exciting event scheduled for the Library of Congress and intriguing research results in the search for water and life on Mars.
As I write this, the “Becoming Interplanetary” event, which will be held at the Library of Congress on September 27th, is only one week away! You can now find the schedule and the list of exciting and ethnically diverse speakers and performers, representing equally diverse disciplines from the sciences, arts, and humanities, on the Decolonizing Mars website.(1) You can read about them under each of the three “beats:” The Right Stuff; Mars on Earth; and Alternative Futurisms. The event will be recorded and accessible after the conference, and may also be live-streamed, so I encourage you to keep checking the website if you’re interested in this topic! This event will be the beginning of what I’m sure will be an ongoing public conversation regarding human exploration of Mars in coming years.
The more we learn about Mars from remote observations, the more intriguing this world becomes. This summer, researchers found evidence suggesting a subsurface, liquid water ‘lake’ on Mars, in data acquired with the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding (MARSIS), a radar instrument on board the Mars Express orbiter.(2) MARSIS sends pulses of radio waves down to Mars – some bounce off the surface, but others can penetrate up to 3 km below the surface. The patterns and strength of the reflections provide information on the composition of different layers below Mars’s surface. The suggested cold, briny aquifer under Mars’s south pole resembles bodies of water found under kilometers of ice in Greenland and Antarctica.
Although compelling, the evidence isn’t conclusive, but it does provide incentive to search for other subsurface lakes, particularly at lower, warmer, latitudes. Searching for possible life in subsurface bodies of water on Mars would be a far more difficult endeavor, requiring drilling through more than a kilometer of ice. In any case, remote observations provide tantalizing clues regarding Mars’s wetter past, and raise the as-yet-unanswered question, does some form of life exist on Mars today?
Until next month,
Grace Wolf-Chase, Ph.D. (gwolfchase@adlerplanetarium.org)
1. https://www.decolonizemars.org/becoming-interplanetary/
2. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/liquid-water-spied-deep-below-polar-ice-cap-mars
3. AAAS’s Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion
Like The Clergy Letter Project, one of the main goals of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion (DoSER) is to facilitate “communication between scientific and religious communities.” They have two opportunities that might interest you. First, you might want to sign up to receive their free newsletter. Second, you might want to sign up to participate in their “Engaging Scientists Network.” You can learn more about both and sign up for both by going to their registration site.
4. The Clergy Letter Project Speaks Out on Behalf of Children
As I’ve reported previously, in response to an overwhelming vote in favor of doing so, The Clergy Letter Project has publicly taken a stand against separating immigrant children from their parents. Our position was based on both religious and scientific reasoning demonstrating one of the central tenets of The Clergy Letter Project, that religion and science can lead us to the same conclusion.
Although the separation policy has been (largely) abandoned, the United States government is now attempting to vacate a two decade-old legal agreement that limited the time children could remain imprisoned. As I discuss in a new essay, religion and science again come together and teach us the same thing: this policy is unjust and unsound.
For those of us in the United States, the policy is being promoted in our name and unless we take steps to combat it, we are complicit in its implementation.
5. Noah’s Flood and Intelligent Life in the Galaxy
Larry Collins, a member of The Clergy Letter Project’s list of scientific consultants has brought two interesting articles to our attention. The first is his latest piece published in the Skeptical Inquirer. His title, “Biological Reasons Young-Earth Creationists’ Worldwide Flood Never Happened,” explains the article well.
The second is a piece by John Gribbin that was published this month in Scientific American entitled “Are Humans Alone in the Milky Way? Why we are probably the only intelligent life in the galaxy.” Larry described the article as “extremely cogent” explaining that “It conveys truth in a powerful way and convinces me that there must be an intelligent creator God behind it all. There are too many implausible coincidences to make it otherwise. Unlike false science offered by scientists at Answers in Genesis, who say that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that the sedimentary rocks and their fossils in the Grand Canyon were deposited by a worldwide flood 4,350 years ago, John Gribbin presents a logical understanding of life’s and the universe’s origin over billions of years. John gives ‘good science’ instead of the ‘bad science’ which 38 to 46 percent of the adult population in the U.S. have been led to believe.”
6. Evolution Under Attack in Arizona
Our good friends at the National Center for Science Education have published a report discussing ways that evolution is under attack in Arizona. As they note, the pressure is coming from state “Superintendent Diane Douglas, who is on record as advocating the teaching of ‘intelligent design’ alongside evolution and as disagreeing with the rulings that prevent it.” The full report is well worth reading.
To those of you who are celebrating the Jewish New Year, I wish you a healthy, happy and productive 5779. L’shana tova tikatevu!
Finally, as always, I want to thank you for your continued support and as I do every month, I urge you to take one simple action. Please share this month’s Newsletter with a colleague or two (or post a link via any social media platform you use) and ask them to add their voices to those promoting a deep and meaningful understanding between religion and science. They can add their signatures to one of our Clergy Letters simply by dropping me a note at mz@theclergyletterproject.org. Together we are making a difference.
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Michael
Michael Zimmerman
Founder and Executive Director
The Clergy Letter Project
www.theclergyletterproject.org
mz@theclergyletterproject.org