Some science lessons happen outside of the regular classroom or science laboratory. I was at the barbershop the other day getting smartened up for the new school year. My eastern European barber didn't take very long to work out that I am a science teacher, or he may have remembered that from a previous visit. 'I have one question,' he told me. I made a bet with myself that there would be more than one.
"How were the pyramids built? Surely it was aliens, as they are just too good?"
Now I've not had this come up in class, but I have heard this sort of thing before. As there were no other colleagues or customers, I was up for both fun and some gentle exploration. I also realised I was already back in my day job, as his English was good enough to ask the question, but not to cope with me throwing fancy words at him.
"Why would you think such a thing?" I asked. Sure, the Great Pyramid is a big pile of stones, some over 50 tons in mass, though most of the 2.3 million stones are 'only' 2.5 tons. I boosted his ego by saying that he'd fit right in with the Egyptian workers with their big muscles and big brains, to work out how to cut and carry those stones in a logical order from quarry to rock pile using rollers and ropes and machines they could make from timber, stone and perhaps copper or alloy tools. The most important point is that the fertility of the Nile delta was so extraordinary that the farming population are thought to have had nothing much to do for six months of every year for under three decades, so they talked themselves into building a monstrous construction of limestone and granite. These days there's Lego. Historical researchers seem to think that as few as 10 000 men could have done this work and finished the largest pyramid within their lifetimes. But the construction was nothing to do with Charlton Heston or Israelite slaves, or slaves of any other sort. Skilled work isn't done by slaves.
While admitting that this is still a highly demanding undertaking, with significant costs to human health and wellbeing, it was not at all beyond possibility or reasonable belief. A simple channel dug around the site can provide a water trough that acts as a very precise level for the measurements that were required. There are further mysteries to solve in our understanding of exactly how this mammoth task was carried out, but it was not a superhuman accomplishment.
There was a short pause as my busy friend pivoted to work at the other side of my head.
"OK- another question."
I knew there would be more.
"Is the earth flat or ... round?" We progressed from 'ball' to 'sphere' in raising the vocabulary to an analytical level.
We were still alone, so I went for his funny bone. "Have you been watching the cable channels at 2am after too many beers? Is this just barber shop banter, or are you for real?" Now I can only take what he said in reply at face value. Though he chuckled at the imagery, he gave me to understand that he was serious, though he had been watching some such programme.
The Artemis 1 manned moon test was aborted last week, and the second was also unsuccessful, showing that the propellant leaks weren't fixed, but I went back to Apollo. "Do you think that 12 men went to the moon when I was a boy in the 1970s, or do you think that was that made up in film studios in Hollywood?" "I don't know," he began but after some consideration, he conceded that these journeys were real, so I didn't need to point out that the Soviets would have called it out if the Americans had faked it. Perhaps he was just going along with me, though I continued to be a little nervous about my powers of argument as he was holding those sharp clippers very close to my ear. "What shape did they see the Earth was?" "Can you see all the countries around the world as it turns?" He agreed that our planet does indeed appear to be round, and that this is not a flat disc, but a spinning ball. My strategy of taking a distant and more objective view, to see that the moon is not just round but spherical, and that this viewpoint makes it possible to see the spinning and very spherical Earth unsupported in space, seemed to have paid off.
I made a little effort to say that this understanding of the true nature of the shape of the Earth, its rotation and our grasp of the insights of Isaac Newton made this sort of extra-terrestrial travel possible, with Space X recently placing a Tesla car into orbit beyond Mars, but he wasn't done.
When I tell my older students about Russell's teapot I deliberately mix it up with the quip about the usefulness of a chocolate teapot. The outspoken atheist simply invoked a regular china teapot in his analogy, as summarised above. So I ought to quote him accurately. But the key point is this. I do not believe there were any stray kitchen utensils orbiting in the solar system in 1952 when Russell wrote his article, though there is plenty of space junk up there now. Nevertheless, I do support and promote that there is a particular God who is supernatural and transcendent, and also immanent in nature, both sustaining the cosmos and capable of exercising agency within it. Such activity would generate evidence, some of which should be discernible, and some of that within the boundaries of science, at least in principle.
However, Russell was mistaken. Firstly, he implies that belief in a supernatural deity is of the same sort as accepting the hypothesis of a very small (and therefore, for us, invisible) teapot in orbit around the sun between the orbits of Earth and Mars. Why is this an error? Simply because it limits the conception of deity to that of an object within this universe, and one that is necessarily visible in some quality and dimension observable by means of science.
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