Science v. Religion (Or Eve Rides a Theropod)

I guarantee you won’t find another girl in the Northern hemisphere whose bathroom reading section includes the novelization of the Star Wars trilogy, a March 1993 Playboy containing the notable interview with Anne Rice amid the dirty, dirty pornography (which I also look at), and Billy Corgan’s Blinking With Fists (albeit with personal revisions). A new addition to my heap in recent months has been a subscription to New Scientist magazine, the Christmas edition sidestepping Science v. Religion somewhat by including only a small section on what stem cell research means for the future of humanity and why Christian activist have their feet in their mouths or other places.

Pop Quiz Hot Shot: many of the Christian activists (and I won’t get into numbers because God knows I’ve failed mathematics too many times to be credible with numbers) holding up those sad little protest signs, you know the ones: “My baby is not an organ donor” or “Only God may give and take life” still don't have a Blue’s Clue what stem cell research involves beyond the literary propaganda handed to them by their church heads, i.e. They are aborting life and we don’t stand for that one bit. And maybe that's over-dramatic, but Heck, if I cared about life that much, I’d probably have their back. Scientists and the likeminded, however, don’t need that kind of mental roadblock because what they produce is high art, higher than God. Think: beyond Dan Brown’s character Leonardo Vetra in the novel Angels & Demons, there hasn’t exactly been a whole swack of holy scientists real or fictional bent on reconciling faith and science (I read moderately, so if there is another example dangling in front of my face, do inform me. I like to be clued-in on life.) Scientific fact and the Christian Holy Book don’t exactly melt together; but heck neither do dinosaurs and the story of Genesis (and I promise an amusing picture depicting exactly that by the end of this entry.) Wait, what happened to the pop quiz?...

Alas, one great 2 am, soaking my popsicle toes in the sink basin (low blood pressure = cold feet), I flipped through the NS Christmas edition to find a lengthy article on Mary Stopes that I had previously overlooked. That brought back half a week of University where I actually learned something useful: years before dear Alfred Wegener argued his Pangaea/continental drift theory, Mary Stopes was already collecting samples and trying to lobby for a place on Robert Scott’s ship bound for Antarctica, one that would prove fatal for him and his crew, but one that would also produce plant fossils proving that all Southern continents had been joined in the past, aka. Gondwanaland.
Mary Stopes was a keen specimen herself: the article mentioned candid details about her love life and her obsession with a Japanese man twice her age who eventually faked leprosy just to get her off his back. Good riddance, because while NS chose to omit a fair chunk about the woman fossil crusader's later life, I didn't require a pick-axe to uncover what my professor had mentioned only in passing a year ago: that Mary Stopes was a dirty little eugenic campaigner. High and mighty was the woman who disowned her son for marrying a woman who wore glasses (that was a disease her son was apparently spreading to humanity through his children.) By golly! How long before they applied that theory to race? Not very: Germany held The World Population Conference in 1935 under Nazi rule— and Stopes attended it! *Sigh,* one person’s theory of eugenics is another person’s pretext for racial and ethnic cleansing.

All that hate aside, it’s nice to assume that we all came from the same place. I mean, I’m Catholic, so in theory I would believe that we are the progeny of the outcasts of Eden, right...? Ok, I’m not that naive because I also believe in scientific facts: scientists have determined that dinosaurs existed and that—no way José—were there ever humans and dinosaurs sharing dirt and air in the land before time.
Here is now my squaring off of those facts, a kind of happy medium that marries the Bible and the bones into what I hope will be many more fun drawings courtesy of my paint program. Enjoy!

Adam and Eve taming a wild bipedal, possibly carnivorous dinosaur.

~CMK