Before I get into my topic, let me apologize for a couple of things. I have been pretty quiet the last couple of months because of significant travel, one part of which I will share about at some length. I have been to Siberia, Brazil, two provinces of Canada, Colorado and Orlando, Florida (the latter was not for play, but for work). I have spoken to groups of pastors, church leaders, hospital administrators and scientists. Any one of these would be interesting but collectively it all flows into a blur!

The other area for apology has to do with the vagaries of the internet. My webmaster, John Miller, is as good as they come, but lately we have had an overwhelming flood of spam attacking the site, particularly the discussion boards. I am sorry for those of you who have gotten a flood of junk (I get it too). We have had more than a hundred junk messages from a dozen or so different (apparent) sources. John is not ignoring the problem and things would have been much worse without his diligence. But that’s the kind of world we live in today. Bear with us.

The trip I’d like to focus on is one of the trips to Canada. I attended a Geoscience Conference on the teaching Science in faith-based institutions. The conference was located at Canmore, Alberta, just outside Banff National Park. About 60 scientists of faith gathered there to explore how to teach science in faith-based universities and secondary schools. They let a couple of religion types along just to humor us, I suppose. I thought the tone of the conference was respectful and honest with regard to the scientific evidence and the standard model used to interpret that evidence. But it also offered some fresh and creative perspectives on the issues. In this blog I will summarize the activities of the conference and in future blogs, I will share some of the thoughts I presented at the conference (I read two papers and listened to perhaps 40 others).

The first day of the conference (July 28) was spent at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta, out in the prairie, away from the Rockies. Located in the middle of nowhere, the museum is one of the world’s best repositories of dinosaurs (most of which were found nearby), with many complete skeletons and even some samples with a bit of flesh and hide in places. It was very cool to be able to tour the museum with a student of biology who had been a docent at the Field Museum in Chicago and therefore knew what he was looking at most of the time.

We spent the weekend in Canmore, trading papers on various issues in science, religion and the intersection of the two. We examined the strengths and weaknesses of evolution as a scientific model and learned a lot about a variety of scientific disciplines that most of us, even the scientists, were unfamiliar with (DNA, genetics, paleo-geology, biochemistry, astrophysics, microbiology, the list could go on and on). But a major highlight on July 30 was a half day break to go hiking in small groups with scientists who exchanged expertise on the rocks, plants and landscape we hiked by. I went to Lake Louise and hiked up the mountain on the right side of the lake to visit a couple lakes much higher into the mountains. It was a good warmup for what I would have to do a couple of days later.

When the formal part of the conference ended on Sunday July 31, we hiked up into the Burgess Shale at the top of a mountain in Yoho National Park, British Columbia (Monday, August 1). The total hike was about 14 miles and 3000 feet of altitude (starting at nearly a mile high!). It was a physical challenge for us all, especially for me, being twice the age of some of my hiking companions. The goal at the top was the Burgess Shale, famous for fossils of ocean floor sea creatures easily findable at the top of a mountain a mile and a half above sea level! It was explained to us that the sea floor appears to have been thrust up to that altitude by the collision of two gigantic plates in the earth’s crust (British Columbia seems to have once been a large island that collided into the main plate of North America, the collision pushed up the sea floor to the top of the mountains). The Burgess Shale contains abundant fossil specimens of the famous trilobite, considered in the standard model the earliest fossilized creature.

On the last day of the conference, we played auto tag. The group split up into about a dozen cars, which all followed a prescribed route and made stops designated by GPS to find fossils in road cuts and observe geological features in the mountainous landscape. We traveled through Banff National Park all the way into Jasper National Park, ending the day’s drive at the massive Athabasca Glacier, which pours down out of the largest icefield south of the Arctic Circle. We noticed that the glacier had receded nearly a mile over the last hundred years, giving evidence that the climate of the northern hemisphere, at least, seems to be getting warmer.

Wish you all could have been there. If you have any questions about the conference, put them on the comment board below and I will do my best to answer them. Watch for a series of proposals over the next month on how to teach science responsibly in the context of faith. Feedback welcome.