Nothing in the only part of scripture that we believe was written in God's own handwriting, the Ten Commandments, actually addresses when the earth was created. Nor do those rules define how Humans were actually arrived at as the pinnacle of his creation. It seems simple enough. Anyone arrogant enough can claim to see meanings in the smallest elements of scripture that support some contention they presume to impose on the rest of us.

In any case the natural world is the natural study of young humans. It is how we treat the first glimmerings of curiosity about the sensory input they receive that defines a child's learning experience. We all have to learn to interpret the natural world. Parents who know that give their children encouragement in their natural urge to explore and experience the world.

The place where we live plays a large part in that experience but even in a city nature is the object of youthful curiosity. Birds, roaches, ants, mice, rats, pets and other living things are always around even in the starkest environments. Children will learn how to relate to the natural world based on how they are taught to deal with it. Curiosity encouraged becomes the light of reason in every human I have ever met.

Looking, listening, experiences gained by touching are not learned behaviors; they are as natural as breathing. You can teach children to not do any or all of them if you really work at it, some parents do that, it is part of a peculiar family culture. In some cases that familial culture defines boundaries so rigid around children that they forget what we all know when we are born, that our senses are great tools for learning about the world around us.

At the very heart of science, one of the greatest of human inventions; is the basic rule that observations must be tempered with skeptical analysis. Truth is not in our observations but in our ability to predict what will be the next event in an observable chain of events. Without the ability to use theory to predict outcomes observation is only a method of providing stimulation. Knowledge of the world requires that we explain experiences in a way that allows us to predict future experiences accurately.

It is possible to be amazingly intelligent, completely clever and abysmally ignorant all at the same time. Faith all too often in human experience has been used to trump wisdom, knowledge and even provable events that have already occurred. I am never surprised when it is used to demolish predictions about outcomes that can be proven only if you examine the world really carefully.

Today faith is called into play to demolish: Archeological analysis of physical evidence, evolutionary analysis of the natural world around us, meteorological analysis of the human impacts on climate, and even to restrict the opportunities of medical research in areas related to studying the human genome.

Science is not the natural enemy of faith in God, but faith is increasingly choosing a role casting itself as the enemy of science. That is a sad and unnecessarily destructive role for such a beautiful human experience as faith to play in our lives. Faith, cast in opposition to science can force people to choose between the two. That damages the roles of both science and religion in human life.

The unfortunate fact is that an anti-science role for faith is being promoted more now that Religion has decided to come out of the closet and demand a place in government for itself. Not content to permit it to play its traditional role in electoral politics; religious politicians have seized on faith as a source of political power. Faith is increasingly becoming a tool of politicians who use it to manipulate their constituencies. In turn those constituencies have demanded that those politicians deliver laws subscribing to the tenets of their faith. This requires limiting the behavior of others in ways that are peculiar to that particular religion, something that was intended to be proscribed by our Constitution.

If life has taught me anything it is that equilibrium, balance if you would choose another word, is fragile. Balance is how nature keeps itself from chaos, a state where anything can happen and the worst possible thing often does. The mathematical analysis made possible by something called chaos theory demonstrates one thing for certain. Once equilibrium is broken the world can change dramatically and usually unpredictably in a short period of time. That the future will not be like the past is certain, how it will differ is the issue. Unless we know the outcomes dictated by our collective actions we can hardly plan for the future.

Many people have come to the conclusion that the future is divinely foreordained. Logically therefore, any human actions toward the environment are insignificant and nothing is proscribed. If God is coming to judge us all and save the best among us what does it matter if the world is damaged by human actions, it will end soon anyway? That amounts to a portrayal of faith as an excuse for any destructive behavior toward the world we live in without limits of any kind being placed on us by God. My God is not that kind to desecrators and polluters, but theirs seems to be, how quaint!

Science is increasingly warning us that we can destroy the world's ability to support human life. The nature of life is that it is persistent. Life will exist wherever it can find a foothold in our universe, which is a very big place all by itself. Human life is another thing entirely.

Our species depends on a stable environment to a great degree. Our survival as a species is not assured if we change the world without considering the impact of those changes first. The limits of current human knowledge are serious enough taken by themselves to cast doubt on our future viability. Denying the faint levels of knowledge we have attained at great effort, by those who study climate for example, is foolish in the extreme. Politicians who depend on the votes of those who profess religion by denying science are quite possibly turning themselves into tools of our civilization's demise.

Drought is one of the likely outcomes of global warming. Precisely where it will strike and when is hard to predict. Analysis of past periods in time when the earth was warmer can give us a clue about the future. How climate will change if we fail to reduce our continuing impact on the equilibrium of the oceans and atmosphere can be modeled by computers. Those models can only show probable outcomes so they are easy enough to denigrate by people with mixed agendas.

Right now the impact of our energy companies on our national politics rivals that of faith-based voters. The energy companies depend on fossil fuels to increase their concentrations of wealth and to maintain their place in the world. Those who work at the energy industries depend on them for their living. They are not going to rein in their impact on the environment as long as they can justify it as a mere cost of doing business.

We have no national policy on energy that matters in regard to global warming. The effort being made by the President to pass an energy bill is largely pointed toward maintaining the status quo. That will not produce results that will save our climate from destructive change. This is aided and abetted by a coalition of religious voters who doubt the efficacy of science because it challenges some of their beliefs. Perhaps man is not as rational an animal as our founders believed him to be. Meanwhile the Wren is tuning up and my cat has attained dominance in the battle for my chair. God bless and keep you all safe today. I'm going to listen to my birds and watch my cats try to lure them into their reach.