Brooking No Debate: Scientism, Crowbars, and Bats

The late Stephen Jay Gould at Harvard used to describe religion and science as occupying “non-overlapping magisterial authority,” or what he called NOMA. That is, science and religion occupied different “domains,” or areas of life, in which each held “the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution.”

There were many problems with Gould’s approach, but at least a lack of respect for religion and religious people wasn’t one of them. Not so with some of today’s scientists.

The New York Times reported on a conference recently held in Costa Mesa, California, that turned into the secular materialist equivalent of a revival meeting.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg told attendees that “the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief.” According to Weinberg, “anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.”

Another Nobel laureate, chemist Sir Harold Kroto, suggested that the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion be given to Richard Dawkins for his new book The God Delusion.

Continuing the theme, Carolyn Porco of the Space Science Institute called for teaching “our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty.”

In case you were in doubt about which worldview would inform this “catechesis,” she then added: “It is already so much more glorious and awesome—and even comforting—than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.”

Attempts at a Gould-like détente between religion and science didn’t sit well with this crowd. A presentation by Stanford biologist Joan Roughgarden on how to make evolution more acceptable to Christians was disrupted by Dawkins himself who called it “bad poetry.”

After a while, the rancor and stridency got to be too much for some of the attendees. One scientist called it a “den of vipers” where the only debate is “should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?”

Another, physicist Lawrence Krauss, chided them, saying “science does not make it impossible to believe in God . . . [and] we should recognize that fact . . . and stop being so pompous about it.”

Fat chance. What’s behind all of this animosity? It is a worldview known as “scientism,” the belief that there is no supernatural, only a material world. And it will not countenance any rivals. It is a “jealous god.”

As Weinberg’s comments illustrate, it regards any other belief system other than scientism as irrational and the enemy of progress. Given the chance, as in the former Soviet Union, it wants to eliminate its rivals. It is no respecter of pluralism.

But this really exposes the difference between the worldviews of these scientists and Christians. We welcome science; it’s the healthy exploration of God’s world. The greatest scientists in history have been Christians who believe science was possible only in a world that was orderly and created by God. We don’t rule out any natural phenomenon.

The naturalists, on the other hand, rule out even science that tends to show intelligence, because that might lead to a God. Now, who is narrow-minded?

It is a sacred poem on creation, an allegory, not a (science book believers never said it was, it is a historical document given by God, true to the last word).

Wow!

So this statement made by God,

John 1:
1: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2: The same was in the beginning with God.
3: All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.

is incorrect by your words. As it is read the words in the Bible are God, if you read the Bible he is truth, there for by your belief God is lying to us that the earth is Billions of years old and man actually can from slim in a mud puddle which eventually evolved into Adam and Eve.

Now understand that your belief totally contradicts Genesis, because in Genesis it clearly states that everything reproduces after its own kind...Which by the way is exactly how it is and never has been any different.

Science is real,when it contradicts God or the word of God it is of the Devil (the author of confusion)...Because those who believe the Bible is the living word of Jesus do not accept a hypothesis that can never be duplicated or produced does not make them unbelievers of true science.

You misread that text. The Bible is not The Word, logos.
The Holy Spirit is The Word.
Wisdom, who speaks in the book of Proverbs, is The Word.

John is not writing about the Bible in that passage. There was no Bible other than the Greek and Hebrew Old Testament at the time. He's writing about God, and saying that Jesus is the Word who became flesh, and is therefore God.

Your statement "The words in the Bible are God" makes a graven image out of the Bible, an idol. The Bible is not God. God is God. Men wrote the Bible inspired by God, but that inspiration is not at all the same thing as John being God, nor the product of his pen being God.

This is really the dividing line between Protestant and Catholic Christianity since the mid-1500s.

And it is why Catholicism does not have a problem with evolutionary science so long as evolutionary science does not assert theology. It is why Fundamentalist Protestantism cannot accept evolution. It is also why Catholicism and Fundamentalist Protestantism can only tolerate each other in silence, but cannot agree on basic theology. You just wrote that the Bible is God! To Catholic eyes and ears, that is pure idolatry, the worship of a graven image. The Bible is absolutely not God, not in any sense. It is inspired by God, yes. A man is actually made more directly by God than the Bible is, because there were no human hands standing between God and the product the way there is with the Bible. We would be wrong to worship any particular man (other than Jesus) even though every man is the product of the direct handiwork of God. And we are absolutely wrong if we go so far as to worship the product of human hands, the Bible, inspired by God though it may be, as though IT were God.

It's a book. An instructive, useful, helpful, wonderful book. But it is not NECESSARY to the faith. Indeed, Christianity survived and thrived and grew for centuries without one. The Bible is written tradition. Important tradition. Sacred tradition. The inspired word of God. But it most absolutely is not in any sense The Word. The Word is GOD. The Bible's just a book. Not God. A man is closer to God than the Bible is, because a man is the product of the hands of God, but the Bible is the product of the hands of man inspired by God. One step versus two steps of separation.

It's important not to denigrate the Bible, of course, but it's absolutely impossible NOT to denigrate the Bible when speaking to someone who makes the BIBLE - a mere BOOK, a tradition, a secondary product of the Christian Church and Jewish Temple - into GOD! Of course anything that puts the Bible in its proper, secondary, subordinate, traditional, helpful-but-not-strictly-necessary-at-all place (literacy is not and never has been a prerequisite to salvation, but it IS a prerequisite to being able to decipher the first word of any written text like the Bible) is going to sound like blasphemy to someone who says the Bible is God!

You've nicely framed the issue, and you're right: a natural scientist really CAN'T be a fundamentalist Christian. There is no reason at all why he can't be a Catholic. And indeed, the guy who proposed the heliocentric solar system model, Copernicus, was a Catholic monk, and the guy who discovered genetics, Grigor Mendel, was also a Catholic monk. Galileo, who was also a Catholic brother in the employ of the Church, didn't get in trouble for repeating what Copernicus had already said (Copernicus certainly never got into trouble). Galileo got in trouble because he asserted scientific truth as higher than divine truth. That is obviously absurd, and is a different form of idolatry (calling dumb matter God) from what you propose (calling a book God...Jeez...!)

Catholics can have a beef with science if they want to take Genesis as literally as you do. They are not prevented from doing so by the Church. There are only about 15 passages in all of Scripture that the Catholic Church has ever REQUIRED Catholics to believe a certain way, and the only aspect of Genesis that Catholics are REQUIRED to believe is that there was indeed some moment in which there was the first intentional sin, Original Sin in the Catholic verbiage. That Adam and Eve may have actually been the first exemplars of homo australopithecus as opposed to homo sapiens sapiens, and the flood story of the Bible a distant preserved memory of the flooding at the end of the last ice age which did indeed inundate much of the world, but certainly didn't cover the top of Mt. Everest...Catholics are free to think whatever they want about this, because it's not important to salvation WHAT people believe about anthropology. What is important is that there is actually an intelligent, purposeful, creator God (HOW he went about creation is interesting to speculate on, and the ancient Jews certainly did in their legends, recorded in Genesis, but it is not necessary to salvation), there is sin, good and evil, and God became flesh in Jesus, literally, and salvation from our sins is found in following him. THAT is what is essential in the Bible.

Given that no agreement is possible on the degree of authority of the Bible, with Catholics me calling it a book inspired by God and you calling it God!, the best we can do is to understand that we each think the other in severe error, and yet can hope for the salvation of our souls through Jesus Christ. We must part in disagreement about science and about the Bible, because there is no way to rectify two fundamentally different theological views of God. But we can part in peace. So, may the peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be upon you for all of your days, Amen.

You make a veiled threat about the mods about personal attacks, yet you just machine gun fired against half of the posters here. Don't spray your diatribe and not expect others to answer; you're beginning to sound like a commissar...

He's very touchy since a lot of the pro-science folks here have been banned by the moderators, following a series of flare-ups on the crevo threads.

The crevo threads usually started as a general-interest biology or science thread posted by (the now departed) PatrickHenry. Within the first couple of dozen posts, the thread would be overrun with Biblical literalists, arguing with both scientists and Dawkins acolytes. (There is some overlap of fundamentalist and Biblical literalist evangelicals in the conservative movement, just as there is some overlap of atheists and scientists.) Feelings ran high. The result was usually akin to dropping a large hunk of elemental sodium into a toilet.

One of the threads where this came to a head can be found here.

Usually the threads would end up like this:

Full Disclosure: Most of the banned posters have migrated to another site called "Darwin Central". There appears to be a lot of mutual lurking between the sites.

NO cheers, unfortunately. I wish things could've been handled more amicably.

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