Reading Through 2014; and Some Comments on Consolmagno's "Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?"

After completing my graduate degree coursework in September 2013, I decided to use 2014 to catch up on my reading for fun (instead of primarily for assignments)!! One of my year-long goals was to read at least one book per two weeks. I am now in the midst of my twenty-sixth, so...CHECKMATE! ;) I even caught up on a few classics I'd never had time for. Overall, I'm very satisfied with my year of reading.

Here are the books I read this year:

1) The Long Ships by Frans Bengtsson
2) A Better Atonement by Tony Jones
3) The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
4) The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
5) Dorothy Parker: Complete Stories
6) Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
7) Wicked by Gregory Maguire
8) Something Other Than God by Jennifer Fulwiler
9) Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
10) Three Lives by Gertrude Stein
11) The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
12) Miracles on Maple Hill by Virginia Sorensen
13) Southern Living: Easy Gardening (Spring 2010)
14) Russian Fairy Tales
15) The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
16) Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh
17) Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
18) World Systems Analysis (Okay...this one was for a class....) by Immanuel Wallerstein
19) Democracy and Social Ethics by Jane Addams
20) Mission at Nuremberg by Tim Townsend
21) Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit by Joel Chandler Harris
22) Hollow City (Miss Peregrine 2) by Ransom Riggs
23) The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Pat Rothfuss
24) The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion
25) Outlander... Diana Gabaldon
And the one I am reading now: 26) Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial? by Guy Consolmagno and Paul Mueller

I linked to the ones I blogged about while reading - relatively few! I actually blogged twice, though, about both Anna Karenina and Mission at Nuremberg. I think Mission at Nuremberg was my favorite of all. The Miss Peregrine books were really cool, because they were inspired and illustrated by old black-and-white photos found at thrift shops. What a great writing prompt, eh?!

The one I'm reading right now is pretty great, too. Written by an American research astronomer and planetary scientist at the Vatican Observatory, it examines various questions by lay Christians regarding the intricacies of the relationship between faith and science.

Right now I am on page 56 of 286. The authors have been having a discussion about religious fundamentalists who insist on a literal interpretation of Scripture...and also scientific fundamentalists who also insist on a literal interpretation of Scripture, and dismiss it altogether based on its incongruity with scientific discoveries.

"After all, what is a 'fundamentalist' but someone who has a flattened, one-dimensional view of the subject, and who thinks that if his view of the universe is true, then necessarily all other views must be false? When you think that the 'fundamentals' are all that's important, or that knowing the 'fundamentals' is enough by itself, it's like seeing only the dots of paint in Seurat's [pointillistic] painting [Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte]." --Consolmagno

"And, what is worse, it leads you to try to use the 'fundamentals' of one topic to solve te issues of a different topic. You're using the wrong tools to try to answer questions they were never designed for. It's misguided to ask whether the Big Bang theory would provide evidence for or against a scriptural story of Creation; the Big Bank Theory is a scientific theory, concerned with physical causes that are proximate and contingent. And it's wrong to ask whether a scriptural story of Creation would provide evidence for or against the Big Bang theory; scriptural stories of Creation are concerned with ultimate origins and with humanity's personal relationship with God. Those are the wrong questions for the tools at hand." --Mueller

(The authors then begin a discussion of what are the right questions.) They have already talked about the progressive development of discovery, both in science and theology, and point out the necessity of living in tension knowing all things have not yet been discovered, and so Christians must have faith in the ultimate unity of truth. (I'm sure you've heard the saying "all truth is God's truth." This idea expresses the same sentiment.)

This semester in my Macroeconomics class I learned the fallacy of composition, which states that it is a fallacy to assume that something is true of the whole just because it is true of one or some of the individual parts. In other words, because an economist understands the microeconomics of a situation, he or she does not necessarily understand the macroeconomic picture. For instance, the real estate market in Iowa does not necessarily reflect the state of property values or trade in the nation as a whole.

Just so, scientific discoveries can enlighten how we interpret Scripture, just as scriptural understanding can help us interpret scientific data to discover things about the God whom we believe created the universe. Advances in neither, however, cancel out the validity of the other discipline as a whole. If there are differences, we must hold our rationality and faith in tension and believe that ultimately, each will be fully revealed in such a way that neither conflicts with the other.

I trust in the ultimate unity of truth.