Chapter Four: A Message from Pastor Dan

I felt like this chapter did a good job of explaining how religion and science can coexist (if not peacefully, at least on a detente basis). Science has often been cited as the tool with which to eliminate religious superstitions, but such beliefs (unfounded or not, depending on your POV) persist. The organized Christian Church has always had an adversarial role with science, especially when Catholicism was the one body of worship. But today's church leaders continue to rail against science, offering "intelligent design" as a religious alternative to evolution.

The overall message of this piece was more tolerance for those who disagree with you, no matter which side of the creation/evolution debate you fall on. That's something that is too often overlooked in our either/or society (a byproduct of 9/11, in many ways; either you're with us, or you are against us).

The capacity to wonder where we came from, and to invent elaborate systems of faith to explain said origins, is what makes us different from the animals (unless chimps have an underground "church of the banana-provider" that I don't know about). We can't help but wonder what our purpose is, if any. The thought that we could have no purpose at all, that things happen randomly, is both attractive and frightening to our collective imaginations. The article says that it's okay to wonder, and that there's nothing wrong with constructing a "creation myth," whether it's based on scientific reasoning or religious ideology. The harm comes when we don't allow for the possibility of "the other" in our defense of what we believe.