Indian Hoof Prints Few things in this world baffle me more than the widespread confusion over the

connection between science and religion (or more accurately, the lack thereof). There exists open conflict between those who believe in His presence and those who believe in His absence. But make no mistake, these are both BELIEFS. One is no more scientifically valid than the other. However, explaining this perspective to someone from either extreme is rarely met with understanding, and serves only as an affront their beliefs. It seems we have become wrapped up in a battle between fact and conjecture, when ideally neither side would ever know the other existed. After much pondering and a few glasses of inspiration, I came up with the following analogy. Perhaps it will increase your overall understanding of the diversity of opinion all around you. Perhaps it may only serve as a good story. Perhaps Im about to waste 10 minutes of your time. Imagine it is 60 B.C., and you are a native of what is now known as North America. Your community hunts for its food, and you possess what might be called expert tracking skills. You can judge a deers speed and distance on nothing more than a hoof print, and you have an innate understanding of migratory patterns. Your people have survived and flourished because of their ability to find and kill live food. Now, imagine your community has built a ship capable of crossing the Atlantic, and you are a passenger on the first ship. After a long and arduous voyage you land safely, make camp, and then one of two things happens: A) You find a hoof print in the mud. But this is no deer hoof; whatever made it must have been twice as heavy, and the print is large and round. Thinking to yourself What could this be? you follow the trail. You see no antler markings on nearby trees, and no white fur left on tall weeds. The droppings are relatively massive, and the hoof prints tell of a constant speed rather than short bursts of acceleration. Over the next few weeks, you spend all of your time tracking this animal, constantly finding new observations and building a more accurate picture of what the animal might be. You then die from a terrible infection caused by bacteria your body has never seen before. B) You find a local village and make friends with the people there. Once basic communication has been established, a nice girl tells you about an animal she calls a horse. Oh, they have such pretty hair, and long flowing tails, and they run like the wind, she says. They are beautiful, and majestic, and have four legs that move faster than anything youve ever seen! Your mind is filled with images of what you believe this animal looks like. You were told a few pieces of information, based on the girls perception. They run. They have hair. They have four legs and a tail. You bring this information back to your community, and it immediately becomes the topic of almost every conversation. The artists paint pictures of it, although most of them look like large deer with hair. The philosophers argue about its purpose. The businessmen all see it performing different functions, and the shaman simply says you must respect it. You then die from a terrible infection caused by bacteria your body has never seen before. In both of these instances, you are presented with a being you do not understand. And, in both instances, the being does actually exist. But the first scenario is science: you made a novel observation and set out to find out all you could about whatever caused it. The second scenario is religion: you BELIEVED the story you were told about a being you have never seen evidence of. Your brain then created the missing pieces to

give you a personal perception of what the horse might be. While both sides in this instance are correct (there really are horses, really!), they took two different approaches to understanding the same being. Approach A began with an observation, and all data compiled toward a final thesis was created by further observations. The being was then understood as the sum total of all observations. Approach B began with information communicated to you by an outside source. You chose to believe that information, and then set out to find evidence to support your belief. Approach B is then intrinsically unscientific; you cannot be an unbiased observer when the entire project is based on a pre-conceived notion. As a scientist I tend to believe only what I can prove every time, and pigeon-hole the rest into theory. And any true scientist knows that you cannot disprove the existence of something whose identity is variable. Dont believe me? Disprove dragons. Go on, Ill wait. Find proof that dragons never existed. Reptiles exist, right? Dinosaurs existed, right? There were flying dinosaurs, right? It isnt really that big of a leap. Hell, there might have been pink and fluorescent orange dragons wearing jeans with rhinestone patterns of monkeys on them. Prove they didnt exist. You cant. I dont believe in them personally, but Ive been wrong before. And that is the problem with mixing religion and science: you cannot base a theory around something that cannot be disproven. And you cannot know something which you do not know as fact. Science attempts to explain how, and religion attempts to explain why. The two explanations have very little to do with each other, and should exist in harmony rather than competition. Charles Darwin was a devout Christian. He wrote an entire book based on observations he made of the world around him, but was hesitant to publish it because of the effect he thought it would have on the Christian world. In his mind, his findings would be misconstrued as evidence that God does not exist, although he knew this was entirely incorrect. He knew the difference between fact and belief, and never once did he question his own faith even after finishing The Origin of Species. It was in fact his wife who convinced him to publish his findings, on the grounds that any true Christian would see the theory of evolution as an explanation of how Gods world works. Evolution does NOT run contrary to the theory of creationism. Instead, it attempts to explain exactly how Gods world works in a way that we can understand. Gods greatest gift to man, aside from eternal salvation, was the ability to understand the way His world operates. To disregard this attribute in favor of centuries-old dogmatic belief structures is no different than spitting in the face of God. Yes, you gave me a brain, but I refuse to use it. This statement is humanity deciding to bury its talents in the sand. God WANTS you to understand His world, or He would not have given you the capacity to do so. It holds then that one of the greatest forms of praise we can give is to use our brains to gain a working understanding of Gods world. Knowledge is not the destruction of faith; rather, it should be the cornerstone upon which our collective faith should be built.