Posted on 07/09/2009 6:45:37 AM PDT by Zionist Conspirator
What is portrayed as the debate between religion and science feels increasingly like watching the very bitter dissolution of a doomed marriage. The relationship started out all roses and kisses, proceeded to doubts and regrets, then fights and silences, a mutually agreed separation, and finally to curses and maledictions: I wish you were dead!
In a recent Wall Street Journal opinion article, cosmologist Lawrence Krauss declared the inconsistency of belief in an activist god with modern science. Krausss essay was the latest eruption of a vituperative argument going on in the scientific community over accommodationism.
Accommodationists hold that even atheists should present science to the public as an intellectual activity compatible with religion. Critics of this position include those like University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne, who lashes out at the accommodationists because, as he wrote in an essay in The New Republic, a true harmony between science and religion requires either doing away with most peoples religion and replacing it with a watered-down deism, or polluting science with unnecessary, untestable, and unreasonable spiritual claims.
On the accommodationist side, there are forlorn figures like science journalist Chris Mooney. In a new book, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (Basic Books), Mooney chides popular blogger and University of Minnesota biologist P.Z. Myers, an ebullient atheist, for publicly desecrating a Catholic communion wafer an incredibly destructive and unnecessary act, Mooney complains, exacerbating tension between the scientific community and many American Christians.
Anti-accommodationists like bestselling atheist biologist Richard Dawkins, meanwhile, charge the accommodationists with hypocrisy. Says Dawkins in a recent documentary, They are mostly atheists, but they are wanting to desperately wanting to be friendly to mainstream, sensible religious people. And the way you do that is to tell them that theres no incompatibility between science and religion. The debate seems to come down to whether religious people are potentially useful idiots, or simply idiots.
Of course, it wasnt always like this. The origins of modern science, from about 1300 onward, were overwhelmingly religious. Isaac Newton regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty, in John Maynard Keyness phrase. Scientists from Copernicus to Kepler, Boyle, Linnaeus, Faraday, Kelvin and Rutherford all sought to understand God through His creation. Because nature was the product of a mind acting freely, it made sense to them to try to understand that mind through its actions.
In his new book Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperOne), my Discovery Institute colleague Stephen Meyer writes about his days as a Ph.D student at Cambridge University, contemplating the entrance to the great Cavendish Laboratory where Watson and Crick elucidated the structure of DNAs double helix. In 1871, Christian physicist James Clark Maxwell had instructed that the great door be ennobled by an inscription in Latin from the book of Psalms: Great are the works of the Lord, sought out by all who take pleasure therein.
On a crash course with this tradition, however, was the Enlightenment narrative, with its insistence that science is destined to push religion to the margins of intellectual life. A turning point came with the triumph of Darwins evolutionary theory, purposefully excluding God, over the evolutionary thinking of Darwins contemporaries, including such scientific allies as Charles Lyell, Asa Gray and Alfred Russel Wallace, who saw a role for divine creativity in lifes history. In another new book, The Darwin Myth: The Life and Lies of Charles Darwin (Regnery), Benjamin Wiker tells this story well. With Darwins victory, envisioning a universe without design or purpose, God seemed on the way to being banished from scientific thought.
Over the ensuing century and a half, tension built as the logical consequences for religion became harder to deny. Yet a détente was generally upheld. In 1999, Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould summed up its terms as a kind of truce under the acronym NOMA, or Non-overlapping magisteria.
In this view, science and religion occupy totally separate realms of inquiry. Science is about facts, about reality, while religion is about values. Religion should be respected if it makes no claim to describe anything real and agrees not to challenge any idea accepted by most scientists.
Yet even the terms of NOMA are now being withdrawn. Today in academia, a believer like Evangelical Christian genome scientist Francis Collins, or like Catholic biologist Kenneth Miller at Brown University, can count on being ridiculed by the anti-accommodationists. In academia, where reputation is everything, you would not want to be an ambitious young scientist in their mold.
This is despite the fact that both men strenuously deny that there can be any empirical evidence of Gods creativity in nature. Still faithful to NOMA, they affirm that the history of life could have produced intelligent creatures very different from human beings for God to enter into a relationship with. Perhaps a big-brained dinosaur, or a mollusk with exceptional mental capabilities, as Miller has speculated, surrendering the basic Judeo-Christian belief that the human face and body mysteriously reflect the image of a non-corporeal God.
That may sound as if weve come to a final parting of the ways between science and religion. However, it all depends on what you have in mind when you speak of science.
Must religion indeed accommodate any scientific idea even if the idea is wrong, even if its bad science, ideologically motivated in its origins, intended to explain nature specifically with the view of keeping God out? If thats what science requires, then of course there can be no reconciliation.
But remember alongside the secular Enlightenment view of science, there runs a parallel tradition, seeking to explain nature without preconceptions, secular or otherwise. That way of thinking still exists among individual scientists, though it is in need of a good revival. With that tradition older, grander, more open-minded, even more enlightened, you could say there is no need for a truce with faith, no need for a separation, no need for a divorce.
David Klinghoffer, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, writes the Kingdom of Priests blog at Beliefnet.
Ping.
Ping.
Discovery Institute Twaddle Alert
So . . . you're saying that the "war" between "accommodationists" and their opponents doesn't really exist? You're saying that Darwinism is perfectly compatible with an "activist G-d" and not a mere "deism?"
Perhaps you're saying the quotes in the article were never uttered by the people to whom they are ascribed and Klinghoffer is making the whole thing up.
I think what he’s saying is that with real scientists, open minded scientists without preconceived secular notions, that there is no conflict necessary between faith and science.
The war exists between religion and pseudo-scientists that bring preconceived secular notions such as an “a prior commitment to naturalism”. True religion rejects scientific claims when the claims are not scientific.
True science makes observations and forms hypothesis and tests those hypothesis. True science does not make dogmatic statements about matters that it cannot prove.
Unfortunately, the so-called scientific establishments of today are filled with the pseudo-scientists. And it’s not just religion that the pseudo-scientists attack with their dogma, but also capitalism and democracy via the dogma of the unscientific global warming.
Well, well. Ol’ Larry knows there’s something to accomodate alright:
“But when you look at CMB map, you also see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That’s crazy. We’re looking out at the whole universe. There’s no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun the plane of the earth around the sun the ecliptic. That would say we are truly the center of the universe.” -Lawrence Krauss
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/krauss06/krauss06.2_index.html
I don't know what religion the author is, but THAT is NOT what Judeo-Christianity teaches!
Spiritual image; NOT corporeal!
No matter how you slice it, a purely mechanistic view of this world will produce hopeless, unimaginable, cruelty and brutality in a struggle(s) for domination.
For what difference would cruelty and brutality make?
Despite the brains that say otherwise, design is obvious even to the unbeliever. Paul says so.
They know.
And for those who have “ears to hear” as 2 sisters are wont to remind, there is entry into the glorious Kingdom of God.
For what difference would cruelty and brutality make?
Despite the brains that say otherwise, design is obvious even to the unbeliever. Paul says so.
They know.
And it is so obvious in biological life that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Or to put it another way, we can break down a rock and rabbit and see that they are made of the same quantum fields - but something was lost along the way that the rabbit passed from life to death. And he cannot be put back together again.
For a rigorous mathematical approach to this very issue, Lurkers should read Rosen's Life Itself
That there was a Creature, a beginning, a cause of causation itself is obvious and everyone will be held responsible for noticing:
For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, [even] his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:
Because that, when they knew God, they glorified [him] not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. - Romans 1:18-21
Did you see the article on FR the other day about coffee being a natural solution for Alzheimer’s....
There seems to be such a combination of anti-God and anti-Christian forces that are so powerful in this era. There is no strategy I see by which this can be overcome by human hands.
Where iniquity abounds grace much more abounds. Either God will intervene or these are final days.
Where iniquity abounds grace much more abounds. Either God will intervene or these are final days.
Not by might, not by power but by His Spirit (Zech 4:6) - or Maranatha, Jesus!!!
I think it is the latter because there are many signs (2 Tim 3 et al) and the time is right (see posts 1160 and 1172.)
To God be the glory!
Thank you, sister, for your links. The only thing I had to stop and think on was the part about the physical and spiritual realms (tree of life) both being created by God.
My concern regards the spiritual for the bible says, “God is Spirit.” (Therefore, eternal)
I might use the word “heavenly” rather than “spiritual” to describe the locus of the tree of life.
What do you think?
My central point is that the tree of life is in the midst of the garden of Eden and also in the midst of Paradise.
He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God. Revelation 2:7
I agree with your point, sister. I do believe that the creation includes the angelic beings. I also think that the New Jerusalem is a creation of God, and in it are also a variety of sentient beings and plants.
I liked your catching the transition from “day” to “years” in terms of “day you eat thereof” and “Adam’s days” were so many years. So much about your interpretations that I do like.
In any case, even in my reading of the future state in Revelation, there is no “depiction” of God. God is unique. There is no other.
The purely mechanistic view is motivated by a mania for objectivity. Of course, that mania is itself relentlessly subjective.
However, the mechanistic view drains all life and consciousness out of the world. There have been objections to this sort of thing from within science. The physicist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, well known as the father of General System Theory, developed his theory as an alternative to reductionist, Cartesian notions of mechanism, which he believed were not only hamstringing science WRT to the investigation of such questions as life and mind, but had deplorable social and ethical side effects for humanity at large. Evidently the Nobel Laureate biologist Jacques Monod detested Bertalanffy for holding such reprehensible views.... (Monod is a great champion of mechanistic reductionism as the prime strategy for biological investigation.)
Such "intramural spats" can be highly instructive and interesting....
Thank you ever so much, dearest sister in Christ, for your excellent essay/post!
Seems to me this mechanistic view plus consequentialism gives us the likes of Peter Singer, bioethicist who believes that parents should be able to terminate their offspring up to a year after birth (or something like that.) The end justifies the means when to them, the whole is the sum of the parts - there's nothing more, nothing precious to be preserved but rather an inconvenience to be eliminated for the greater "good."
Infanticide and euthanasia are just flavors of eugenics, taking out the trash, which sadly can be presented as "politically correct" altruism if one "drains all life and consciousness" out of the world, as you say.
Maranatha, Jesus!!!
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