I was not surprised by the findings of a recent Rice University survey that half of the top 1,700 U.S. scientists described themselves as religious. The scientific community, like any other group, includes people with many world views, from evangelicals to atheists.
Of course, some people in sociologist and survey director Elaine Ecklund's study group, as with the general population, described themselves as atheists. Yet even within that category, many also identified themselves as "spiritual." This may explain why, in 275 lengthy follow-up interviews Ecklund found only five scientists who said they actively oppose religion.
Let's hope that Ecklund's unusually comprehensive assessment will help overturn the myth that scientists reject spirituality, or that science and religion are inherently incompatible.
That myth persists among scientists and religious believers alike. In 2009 study by the Pew Research Center, 61% of Americans said that science poses no conflict with their own faith. Nonetheless, 55% of those same respondents said they view religion and science generally as "often in conflict." Evolution, for instance, has divided Americans since 1859, when Charles Darwin published "On the Origin of Species."
There is a better way, which will be demonstrated June 16 when leading scientists and a respected Christian minister engage in a free, public dialogue at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
A successful engagement effort does not require a specific outcome. So, civil discourse will be the only objective for the upcoming event, convened by the association's Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion program. The association also takes no position on whether religion is good or bad.
Americans have long recognized the power of scientific engagement as a neutral tool for improving foreign relations. Science diplomacy in the 1970s resulted in new cooperation with China and the Soviet Union. Similarly, the current administration launched a major science diplomacy effort, naming science envoys to predominantly Muslim countries in North Africa and Southeast Asia.
But within our own borders, we have tended to overlook another important form of diplomacy that could promote civility by easing political and religious polarization. Increased civil dialogue between scientists and religious leaders suggests a path toward common ground, whether the topic is human origins or climate change.
The need for such diplomacy is clear as U.S. science educators and some in the religious community increasingly find themselves at loggerheads over issues where science can appear to conflict with long-held beliefs. In state after state, those who oppose evolution are introducing legislation to undermine science education. Revised Texas science standards, for example, fail to mention common descent or the age of the universe. These omissions are unfortunate. Understanding evolution is central to science literacy, which in turn affects students' job prospects and American competitiveness.
Climate change skeptics also are challenging science curricula. The Texas standards, similar to a new Louisiana bill and proposals elsewhere, now require students to learn "different views on the existence of global warming." Such attempts to weaken K-12 science education are troubling and perplexing. The science of climate change is clear, and a basic tenet of many religions is the call to be good stewards of the planet.
Various groups are working to mend this rift. For example, the Scientists and Evangelicals Initiative in 2007 sent religious leaders and scientists to Alaska to see receding glaciers and talk with people affected by climate change. Last year, the group also spoke with U.S. policy-makers about options for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
The June 16 event at AAAS will bring David Anderson, founder and lead pastor of Bridgeway Community Church, together with scientists such as William Phillips, a 1997 Nobel Laureate in Physics, astrophysicist Howard Smith of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, and paleontologist Rick Potts of the Smithsonian Human Origins Program.
Tensions at the intersection of science and society can promote a pervasive atmosphere of disrespect that damages the fabric of our culture: A recent Zogby International survey revealed that Americans overwhelmingly feel "fed up with incivility." In response, Mark DeMoss, a Republican and evangelical Christian, teamed up last year with Lanny Davis, a liberal Jewish Democrat, to launch the Civility Project, which calls on us to be respectful despite our differences.
We should all follow their example. Both medical and technological advances and high-quality science education improve human welfare and drive economic progress, creating jobs and better lives for our children. Civil dialogue offers a way for the American public and the scientific community to collaborate more productively on behalf of our communities and our nation.
Follow Alan I. Leshner on Twitter: www.twitter.com/aleshner
Jay Michaelson: A Better Way to Believe in God
Whether one is religious is nearly impossible to define with majority accord. One religious scholar, Lloyd Geering, defines religion as a meaning system. Another scholar, the late mythologist Joseph Campbell, when asked what his religion was, said, "I underline books."
If religion is following the edicts of a particular organized group, very few are religious. Consider the overwhelming evidence that the self-proclaimed religious deviate from the given path.
However, if religion is the intention to find appropriate values and use them in living a meaningful life, most people are religious.
True religion is about the hereafter... the participating religious want the effects of their life of good works to continue "here... after" they're gone.
It is a petty god who demands that his "flock" ignore the age of Earth, the Universe and the evolution of life. It is an amazing process that life slowly evolved from stromatolites to humans. It is a magnificent Deity who patiently nurtures evolution.
Climate change is OUR RESPONSIBILITY, Divinity has a Prime Directive called "Free Will." WE have to clean up our mess. BIG SKY DADDY IS NOT GOING TO CLEAN UP AFTER US!
I live in Texas. I am appalled at the new textbooks and directives of fanatical idiots who want to deprive our children of the right to know TRUTH. Their petty god image is going to inflict an entire generation of children with ignorance. We are in deep cr@p.
They won't know Earth's age, or evolution, requiring a more powerful Divinity than the little, vile god that they want to stuff down our children's throats. They won't know that climate change is very real and that WE DID IT TO OURSELVES, and that WE are going to have to deal with the consequences. WE HAVE TO STOP LETTING SMALL MINDED FANATICS DICTATE SCHOOL CIRRICULUMS, NOW AND FOREVER!!
Do we want to be a bunch of starving refugees, no coastal cities or islands anywhere? Ignorant people that no one wants because we let dogma and stupidity destroy our technical base, instead of teaching our children the TRUTH about the world? The truth we DO know? Stop this insanity, BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE!
(shouting is intentional)
I am a Pagan, specifically a Sibylline Elder Teaching Priestess Emeritus (and a High Priestess/other titles of 7 or 8 other Traditions, some of which no longer exist, and while I uphold my oaths, I no longer practice them) and a Thelemite. Look it up.
I do not entertain the Christian, Jewish or Muslim hysteria about their holy books, or any other "holy books," or attempts to force others to follow outdated and even dangerous mythologies. We abhor proselytizing and keep our religion to ourselves, because we believe it wrong to inflict our religion on others. We are spiritual, not religious.
What most people don't realize is that religion is an attempt by the authors (prophets, same thing) to explain the science of their time, to make sense of their world. The "Bible" (means "book") is 1700 year old science, Torah is 4000 year old science, Koran is 1400 year old science, Vedas are 5000 year old science, etc. ad. nauseum.
Religion is also an attempt to correct social injustice, codify behavior, invade the most private relationships, diets, and personal habits, with public laws. But like the 11 innocent young people in Saudi Arabia who were just arrested, sentenced to prison and flogging, including the minor girl who was sentenced 80 lashes, just for having a gathering that mixed unrelated boys and girls; laws are civilizing for about a year, then start stagnating the societies they tried to enlighten. Veils make sense in the desert, for men and women, covering themselves robes prevents wrinkles and skin cancer. In a city, it makes no sense at all.
Young people SHOULD meet and mingle, not for orgies (a terrible health risk), but to be themselves and find their own mates, not have their marriages arranged as if the last 3000 years never happened. But I am biased. I think it's barbaric to flog people who were just listening to music and talking, yet I know that my opinion doesn't count for much in a religion that is the 2nd largest in the world (Hinduism is #1, Christianity is #3).
Our philosophies, as Pagans, are what we call "Catma" because we have NO DOGMA. Wicca does not have any "holy books." Thelema has "The Book of the Law," which is to be read and not discussed - the author actually said that we should burn it after reading it, to avoid arguments about his experiences - we should have our own
We believe in science -quantum physics, and genetics. Our personal beliefs are nobody's business and we like it like that. We have one law as Wiccans - "Harm none and do as thou wilt." As Thelemites (which is the grandfather of Wicca), our law is "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Love is the law, love under Will." (Yes, I could go on for days explaining it, but I won't. If you care, you can do your own research).
Yes, we have our share of fluffy bunnies, and we protect them because they have a right to be fluffy (and they are sweet and cuddly). No, we don't think they are prophets. Most of us practice our religion by paying attention to science and math. Most of us believe that genetics and physics ARE the language of Unknown Divinity. We believe that each person is a Goddess or God, but we do not necessarily associate with their pantheons. We believe that every living thing, the Earth and all the Stars and planets are alive, each person (which includes hypothetical sentient species of other worlds), plant, animal, fish, algae, water, air, earth- minerals and stones - are part of this magnificent and mysterious Universe, precious, unique, glorious and sacred.
Our hearts are broken by what greed has done to the Gulf and all of our oceans. We weep for the slaughter of the innocents by barbarians who practice genocide. We struggle to free every man, woman and child from the injustices that we perceive, not to convert them, but to free them to find their own paths. We object to torture, slavery, the sexual mutilation of women and the brutal mutilation of men for crimes that they may or may not have committed.
We fight to free our world from tyranny, from pollution, from bigotry, from homophobia, from invasion of privacy and from fanaticism of any kind. We want to heal our Earth so that our grandchildren will be able to prosper on a beautiful and clean Earth, and not leave to them a world with with no hope. We believe that we have inherited this Earth from our ancestors, to hold in trust for our descendants. We abhor greed, jealousy, hatred, bigotry, and hypocrisy. We hold dear love, kindness, compassion, sexual maturity, respect and Spirit.
We believe that we should write our own holy books and share them only if asked, then we do so with respect for Others' holy books - not to believe, but to share and learn. We value education, both scholarly (as in University) and personal research and insights.
We place spirituality and seeking to better ourselves by becoming more compassionate, more conscious, more aware, more learned, more educated, as the path to wisdom - to find little truths (which is all we are capable of finding, TRUTH is forever unknowable by our tiny brains). We create Gods in our own image, in order to partake of a tiny part of the Unknown IT. So ANY God or Goddess we create is just software, the TRUE IT is not going to be knowable, because our brains are not big enough to comprehend even a part of IT, and that's okay.
So for all you Gods and Goddesses out there arguing about your "one right true way, " you are deceiving yourselves and being petty little children having temper tantrums. Unfortunately, some idiot gave the babies guns and bombs. Let's take away the capacity for violence and try, very hard, to respect whatever Bunny in the Sky or Shiva/Shakti, or Voudoun, Book or Prophet that makes each person happy in their own space, and leave each other alone about it.
Fighting about religion is the very Stupidest thing we have ever done to ourselves, and we only started doing so in the last 2000 years, because we forgot that our beliefs were just software that interfaces with the UNKNOWABLE. We could learn so much from the ancient peoples, Hindu, Iraqi (the cradle of civilization, in case you didn't learn that in you home school or whatever) If we just get over our conceit and condescension, we might even earn the respect of the rest of the world - you know, the 6 .5 BILLION to our paltry 3.4 million!; we haven't earned it, and it's preventing us from freeing our minds and hearts to learn our history and our truths.
SO STOP IT! NONE of it is THE TRUTH, it's just what we have created to feel less alone in this magnificent, tremendous, mysterious Universe that we are traveling through on our way to the unknown.
When we are born, at some point we learn that the destination is death, for every single one of us.
SO GET OVER IT. It's the journey that counts, not the destination. May all your travels be beautiful and peaceful.
Namaste. (Which means - The Divinity in me recognizes and honors the Divinity in you.)
I appreciate your contribution to the HP religion section very much.
The conclusion of the Man of the Century: For Einstein, the greatest Jew ever, the Word God was Devoid of the Divine.
Most mortals believe in a “personal God”, in heaven and souls, in idols and all kinds of sacred follies. They also believe that Einstein believed in God.
Not only Einstein’s personal God has been dead all along. God was never even alive according to Einstein.
According to Einstein, God is “a product of human weakness”. That is what’s important. Beyond that all the pretentious, pseudo-science is empty, meaningless, and delusional.
Einstein’s quotes were used by dealers of delusions to confuse the common man to fool him about Einstein true religious beliefs. Einstein categorically rejected the supernatural.
In his article, Albert Einstein’s God — the “Product of Human Weaknesses”, published on Thursday, May 15, 2008, R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, one of the largest on earth wrote: Einstein’s language is very clear. God is dismissed as “nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses” — a statement hauntingly like the verdict of Friedrich Nietzsche... In the end, it is better to see Einstein, not as a believer of sorts, but as an atheist of sorts. Belief in God was simply childish, he asserted.
http://www.albertmohler.com/2008/05/15/albert-einsteins-god-the-product-of-human-weaknesses/
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/10/word-god-is-product-of-human-weakness.html
IF IGNORANCE OF NATURE GAVE BIRTH TO GODS, KNOWLEDGE OF NATURE IS MADE FOR THEIR DESTRUCTION.
-- Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Necessity of Atheism
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Ninety five percent of our best biologists reject the Delusion - but not 100%.
OUR LATEST SURVEY FINDS THAT, AMONG THE TOP NATURAL SCIENTISTS, DISBELIEF IS GREATER THAN EVER — ALMOST TOTAL.
We found the highest percentage of belief among NAS mathematicians (14.3% in God, 15.0% in immortality).
Biological scientists had the lowest rate of belief (5.5% in God, 7.1% in immortality), with physicists and astronomers slightly higher (7.5% in God, 7.5% in immortality).
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/news/file002.html
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v394/n6691/full/394313a0_fs.html
http://ncseweb.org/rncse/18/2/do-scientists-really-reject-god
http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/sci_relig.htm
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My blasphemous blog
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Holyheretic.com
Here are selected quotes from an article about the Rice study and a University of Chicago study.
"Nearly 38 percent of natural scientists -- people in disciplines like physics, chemistry and biology -- said they do not believe in God. Only 31 percent of the social scientists do not believe.
In the new study, Rice University sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund surveyed 1,646 faculty members at elite research universities, asking 36 questions about belief and spiritual practices.
"Based on previous research, we thought that social scientists would be less likely to practice religion than natural scientists are, but our data showed just the opposite," Ecklund said.
Some stand-out statistics: 41 percent of the biologists don't believe, while that figure is just 27 percent among political scientists.
In separate work at the University of Chicago, released in June, 76 percent of doctors said they believed in God and 59 percent believe in some sort of afterlife."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8916982/
You wrote: We are all included in God, therefore we should love, worship, and diligently seek to understand each other".
Your definition of divinity seems confusing to me. Love to other humans I can understand. But why worship them by engaging in acts of prayers?
Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris argue for humanity. Those who don’t like it should, before objecting, observe the facts. If the facts are correct then there is NO REASON other than discomfort/tradition to object to the criticism. There’s been no torches, pitchforks, pogroms, or laws against religious-belief but rather exposé. Religion can’t make that claim.
Criticism is NOT persecution.
How many scientists were surveyed? (Survey 5 people and 80% might say anything.)
Where were they surveyed?
Who did the survey?
Two points:
Jesuit motto "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man,"
Saint-Bellarmine forced the perjury of Galileo under threat of torture, persecuted-confined him after burning Bruno for their physics theories. I understand Bellarmine University has a great physics-program.
Fanned and marked as favorite.
A God made by man undoubtedly has need of man to make himself known to man.
-- Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Necessity of Atheism
SPIRIT
I was an infant when my mother went
To see an atheist burned. She took me there.
The dark-robed priests were met around the pile;
The multitude was gazing silently;
And as the culprit passed with dauntless mien,
Tempered disdain in his unaltering eye,
Mixed with a quiet smile, shone calmly forth;
The thirsty fire crept round his manly limbs;
His resolute eyes were scorched to blindness soon;
His death-pang rent my heart! the insensate mob
Uttered a cry of triumph, and I wept.
"Weep not, child!" cried my mother, "for that man
Has said, 'There is no God.'"
Percy Bysshe Shelley, from Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem VII (1813)
And priests dare babble of a God of peace,
Even whilst their hands are red with guiltless blood,
Murdering the while, uprooting every germ
Of truth, exterminating, spoiling all,
Making the earth a slaughter-house!
Percy Bysshe Shelley, from Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem (1813)
WHAT’S WORSE: tobacco or the tyranny of religions?
End of Tobacco Publicity
http://www.tobacco.org/news/249671.html
Propaganda Warfare of Tobacco Merchants
http://www.jtnet.ad.jp/WWW/JT/Culture/museum/english/tabacco/japan/publicity.html
MY BLASPHEMOUS BLOGS
Bible Belts
http://biblebelts.blogspot.com/
http://whengodwins.blogspot.com/
.
Those who oppose evolution?
How can you oppose evolution? Evolution is there. Whether you like it or not.
That's like opposing gravity.
If you step off a 10 story building gravity doesn't care if you oppose it.
Then again, maybe those people who oppose the "teaching of evolution" are examples of devolution, which Merriam Websters online describes as "retrograde evolution."
How can you have any kind of rational debate with people who oppose evolution?
Where do you start?
Marked as favorite. Proud to become your first fan.
THEOLOGICAL THEORY OF REGRESSION
Versus Scientific Theory of Evolution
Scientific Method and Social Progress
There have been three general philosophies or methods of explaining and hypothecating progress 1. The earliest was to attribute it to the fiat of the gods or of a god.
This view conceives of progress-or, perhaps, more frequently in earlier times, of regression-as part of the cosmic order determined by the gods.
It was this view which placed the Golden Age in the past, which later caused people who adhered to certain religions to turn to the hereafter for a fulfilment of the expectations of progress which they could not find or hope for in this world, and which has led the adherents of some sects and creeds to look for the establishment of the kingdom of a redeemer on earth...
JSTOR_ The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Jul., 1925), pp.
http://www.jstor.org/pss/2764878
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MY BLASPHEMOUS BLOGS
In the East God Won - The high cost of organized ignorance.
Michael Pieracci, Ph.D., Religion Instructor: “Holy heretic’s insight is indeed profound.”
http://whengodwins.blogspot.com/
Holy Cows and Calves - Sacred superstitions, aka religions.
http://holycowsandcalves.blogspot.com/
Holy Heretics - Jesus, Maimonides, Spinoza, the Founding Fathers, Herzl, Einstein.
http://holyheretics.com/
Holocaust Haggadah - שואה
Delusion dealers blame the victims.
Rabbi Irwin Kula: "Your Holocaust Haggadah is amazing."
http://holocausthagaddah.blogspot.com/