caught somewhere between real life, simple faith, & raw emotion
Faith, Science, & Bad Religion
Many years ago I was in a band called Strongarm. We once filmed a music video in Southern California while we were on a summer tour. An interesting tidbit is that a director named Darren Doane. At the time, he wasn’t a Christian (he is now). Anyway, he rented the really expensive video equipment to film a Bad Religion video and used it to film our video the next day. So we shot ours for really cheap.
Believe it or not, the band Bad Religion (if you don’t know, they’re a really famous punk band) is still together. The singer, Greg Graffin, is an acclaimed Atheist who also got his Ph.D from Cornell University. He has recently written a book called Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science, and Bad Religion in a World Without God. Now, I haven’t read it, although I want to. I’m not going to lie and say it’s in my book cue. There’s already 10 there. But it sounds very interesting.
Here is an interview he recently did. He sounds like an interesting fellow. He makes a connection between evolution and punk rock, while in my book there’s certainly a connection between punk rock and my faith. Quite a difference. Here is an excerpt from the interview:
Punk rock and evolution seem, at first glance, to be worlds apart. Did similar things draw you to both?
I definitely was attracted to similar things in punk and science.They both depend on a healthy dose of skepticism. My science teachersalways encouraged their classes to “go out and discover something”because all scientific endeavors depend on observation andexperimentation. Through such pursuits anyone can find something new toscience, and if it’s truly novel, the entire edifice of science mighthave to be restructured. In this way, science is a constant challenge toauthority, and no scientist swells with too much hubris because sheknows that anyone might come along with some new verifiable data thatcan cause a revolution. The thread of culture that runs through theentire history of punk is also a dedication to challenging theauthoritarian. So, in this way i see a connection, and i feelcomfortable in both circles.
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If anything, I have always considered science to be anarchistic in nature.
I think you can take that either way. It simply has no regard (or shouldn’t) for pretense or have a hidden agendas. Today, the opposite is certainly the case.
I see what he’s saying but it’s a bit of stretch to see science as anti-authoritarian. Scientific “revolutions” happen so slowly because the proper way to develop theories is to test them over years and years, sometimes lifetimes. And sometimes you get nowhere. The idea that it’s revolutionary is kind of dramatic.
hey bro Bad Religion Singer’s name is Greg Graffin not Steve Olson