{"id":991,"date":"2009-05-28T09:21:21","date_gmt":"2009-05-28T13:21:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.therowboat.com\/?p=991"},"modified":"2009-05-28T09:21:21","modified_gmt":"2009-05-28T13:21:21","slug":"religion-and-science-sitting-in-a-tree-%e2%80%a6-in-vatican-city-%e2%80%a6-with-a-mysterious-pentagram-carved-into-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/2009\/05\/religion-and-science-sitting-in-a-tree-%e2%80%a6-in-vatican-city-%e2%80%a6-with-a-mysterious-pentagram-carved-into-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Religion and Science, Sitting in a Tree \u2026 in Vatican City \u2026 with a Mysterious Pentagram Carved into It"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"angels-demons-movie-poster\"For one who knows anything about the stuff in Dan Brown’s novels, the temptation is do, of course, what many have already done: assemble a book-length catalog of all the hideous inaccuracies and abominable oversimplifications and gross assaults on whatever faith one happens to hold. When restricted to an article, perhaps it’s better to choose a particular, over-arching theme to harp on, which might at least instill a degree of suspicion among readers as they inevitably flock to ingest Brown’s next theologo-thriller (it, by the way, will be on the Masons). Whether in the form of a book or article, however, one thing can be certain: nowhere near as many people will read it as read Brown himself. Worse, by grafting onto the hype around his all-time bestsellers, one runs the risk of being better-known for this dutiful refutation than for any more brilliant or original concoction. One way or another, Dan Brown wins.<\/p>\n

So why did I bother writing this piece in today’s Religion Dispatches<\/em><\/a>? Well, how else could I get paid to sit on my couch all day reading pulp fiction and then, in the evening, rush off to Manhattan with a friend who’s the closest thing I could find to being a “symbologist” (he studies Freemasonry) to see the latest blockbuster? And I was lucky\u2014it ended up touching on a lot of my recent work on multiverse physics and evolution and the Templeton Foundation.<\/p>\n

Ewan McGregor portrays, to my knowledge, the first action-movie villain driven to his diabolical acts by an addiction to intelligent design theory.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"angels-demons-movie-poster\"For one who knows anything about the stuff in Dan Brown’s novels, the temptation is do, of course, what many have already done: assemble a book-length catalog of all the hideous inaccuracies and abominable oversimplifications and gross assaults on whatever faith one happens to hold. When restricted to an article, perhaps it’s better to choose a particular, over-arching theme to harp on, which might at least instill a degree of suspicion among readers as they inevitably flock to ingest Brown’s next theologo-thriller (it, by the way, will be on the Masons). Whether in the form of a book or article, however, one thing can be certain: nowhere near as many people will read it as read Brown himself. Worse, by grafting onto the hype around his all-time bestsellers, one runs the risk of being better-known for this dutiful refutation than for any more brilliant or original concoction. One way or another, Dan Brown wins.<\/p>\n

So why did I bother writing this piece in today’s Religion Dispatches<\/em><\/a>? Well, how else could I get paid to sit on my couch all day reading pulp fiction and then, in the evening, rush off to Manhattan with a friend who’s the closest thing I could find to being a “symbologist” (he studies Freemasonry) to see the latest blockbuster? And I was lucky\u2014it ended up touching on a lot of my recent work on multiverse physics and evolution and the Templeton Foundation.<\/p>\n

Ewan McGregor portrays, to my knowledge, the first action-movie villain driven to his diabolical acts by an addiction to intelligent design theory.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[38,21,16],"class_list":["post-991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-books","tag-office","tag-religion-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/991"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=991"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/991\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":993,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/991\/revisions\/993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}