Today’s featured entry from the Vatican Observatory Faith and Science pages:
“Adam’s Ancestors” (CLICK HERE for it)
Adam’s Ancestors is a story about a dark side of science and religion. (Guy Consolmagno and Christopher M. Graney of the Vatican Observatory touch on related material in their new book, When Science Goes Wrong: The Desire and Search for Truth.) Adam’s Ancestors traces the trajectory of the theory of the “pre-Adamites”: humans, or human-like beings, that were supposed to have possibly existed on Earth but that were not descendants of Adam and Eve. The theory of pre-Adamites arose as an attempt to explain the widespread distribution of people on the Earth (people of differing appearances, speaking differing languages), and also to explain certain portions of the book of Genesis. Thus, both science and religion are involved in the story. Livingstone does not censor the various people who speak on this idea, so the reader of Adam’s Ancestors must be prepared to encounter, for example, nineteenth-century scientists who argue that this or that race of people are actually not people at all, but rather animals. (CLICK HERE to continue)
The Faith and Science pages (F&S) are a unique resource on the web. The material in F&S is stuff that you will find nowhere else (or at least not without a lot of digging). Featured areas on F&S include “History of Church and Science”; “Church and Science Today”; “Science and Scripture”; “Science, Religion & Society”; “Life in the Universe”; “Cosmology”; and more. The level of the F&S material ranges from being accessible to all audiences, with even some material oriented toward young readers, up to material for university specialists.
The F&S pages, like this blog, are made possible by the Vatican Observatory Foundation (the Vatican Observatory’s US operation that operates the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope, or VATT, in Arizona). CLICK HERE to support the F&S pages, this blog, and the operation of the VATT.
