Jerry Coyne and I had an interesting exchange yesterday that will appear in a brief video on USA Today's website at some point. The question related to the compatibility of science and religion. Can one accept the modern scientific view of the world and still hold to anything resembling a traditional belief in God?
My answer to this question is "yes, of course," for I cannot see my way to clear to embrace either of the two alternatives -- a fundamentalist religion prepared to reject science, or a pure scientism that denies the reality of anything beyond what science can discover. But my position seems precarious to me in many ways, since I am getting shot at so vigorously by both sides.
The events of the past few days have driven this home with great clarity. At the end of June, Al Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, gave an address emphasizing the importance of reading the Genesis creation story literally as a way to protect the Bible from attacks by science. Such a reading, according to the persuasive Mohler, demands that we affirm that the "days" of Genesis are 24-hour days, and that the earth, therefore, is less than 10,000 years old. His audience clapped when he made this point.
I think Mohler's position has been indefensible for 200 years. I find it amazing that such a large group of people -- 100 million Americans agree with him -- can get themselves onto an intellectual island and float so far away from modern science that they can't see the shoreline any longer. But Mohler and his audience are not hillbillies with straw hats, smoking corncob pipes, drinking moonshine and laughing about "Darwin's dumb theory about ape-men." They are well-educated and intelligent. They have simply decided that the consequences of changing their traditional views under pressure from science are too great. They are protecting something they value that feels threatened.
Mohler's central point, however, was not that a young earth is essential or that science must be resisted. Few Young Earth Creationists would call themselves anti-science. His point is that the Bible must be taken seriously if one wants to be a Christian and, for Mohler, seriously means literally. And literally means the earth is young. And so much of modern science must be rejected in favor of a literal reading of Genesis.
Jerry Coyne, who wrote the excellent Why Evolution Is True and runs a blog of the same name, wants to know how in the world Mohler's religion can ever be compatible with science. Framing the question like this closes the discussion. Young Earth Creationism is completely incompatible with science and we can all agree on that.
But I don't think this comparison is fair. Juxtaposing "empirical science" with "revealed religion" in this particular way seems unbalanced. Mohler's views have broad popular appeal, to be sure, but they don't represent the best in Christian thinking. Few Catholics or Anglicans, for example, would agree with him. If we want to make a comparison with "populist" religion, we should use "populist" science. The great masses of religious "faithful" should be juxtaposed with the great masses of people who "believe" in science but are not leading professionals. What do you suppose "science" would look like, were it defined by these "believers"? The physics would be Aristotelian; astrology and aliens would be accepted as real; General Relativity would be unknown; quantum mechanics would be perceived as a way to influence the world with your mind, as we occasionally read on these blogs.
Here is the kicker: all these people would have had far more education in science than the typical religious believer has in theology. Science, as "lived and practiced by real people" who "believe" it, is quite different from the science promoted by the intellectuals in this conversation.
The observations of science do indeed trump revealed truth about the world. Just ask Galileo. But empirical science also trumps other empirical science. Einstein supplanted Newton. This did not undermine the scientific enterprise, however, even though it showed that the science of that time was in error.
In the same way, modern theology has replaced traditional theology. The mere fact that old-fashioned ideas persist does not mean that they can be legitimately used in an argument that religion is incompatible with science.
If "science" is allowed to toss its historical baggage overboard when its best informed leaders decide to do so, even though the ideas continue to circulate on main street, then surely religion can do the same.
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Relationship between religion and science - Wikipedia, the free ...
Religion and Science (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Albert Einstein: Religion and Science
Try the following for another aspect of why the world is as it is, and how to get a propper meaning for your life.
http://www.creationtheory.8k.com/beginning.html purpose of the world.
http://www.creationtheory.8k.com/salvation.html What to do about it.
Why go to the trouble of copying something that happened by random chance of unguided chemicals and cells?
Because it provides an absolutuly brilliant solution to a very complex problem. We can learn a lot from the marvelous designs and technical expertese shown in the complexity of life.
Hall,M.,Lobster serves as model for new X_ray device. poc.com/pressroom/new_LEXID_usatoday.asp
20Dec 2007. You may have to go to poc.com and then follow through.
Cosmologists endeavor to explain the unknown - in their case, the origin of the universe. In so doing, string theorists have developed 10- or 26-dimensional models to explain our four-dimensional universe. So they have not explained the unknown in terms of the known. They have appealed to further "unknowns (dimensions that we don't know about) to explain the existing unknown (the origin of the universe) so it does not qualify (at this stage) as an exÂplanation. If they turn out to be correct and one day we discover that there are strings and 26 dimensions, that will mean that the universe is unimaginably more complex than it appears to be now.
So don't let the complexity of cosmology fool you. In reality it points to the fact that cosmologists cannot explain the origin of the universe in terms of what they know. That is why they have to appeal to things that they don't know. Having said this, however, we hasten to point out that such activity is quite legitimate in science - scientists use their imagination to come up with new theories, but until those theories are tested they remain little more than
imagination.
Although he makes a disparaging remark about "influencing the world with your mind" (and there are indeed a lot of wild claims made about that) he should be aware that there's a lot of very good published science demonstrating non-local properties of mind from the last 40 years of research. The effects are faint, but they are measurable, and current materialist science still pretends they don't exist. When we finally adopt a religion and a science that are compatible, this area of mind is the likely meeting ground.
"If you believe that God created the universe, then you must also believe that God created Physics. If you traced origins of the universe back beginning when time = 0, you then have to ask "what happened before that?" "
Why is it assumed that everything started with a minute dot that contained everything? Then it exploded!
Then there was a period of inflation. But science cannot explain this as all our science cannot reach into the hypothetical events prior to the expansion. we can only assume that something happened.
The "dot" was a singularity and is a thermodynamic dead end, totally inactive. The gravitational forces would prevent it exploding.
According to evolutionary scientists even a "black hole" greater than 10 solar masses cannot explode because of it's gravity.
If it really bothers you that your EVOLUTIONIST religion conflicts with science, I have a suggestion: change your religion. It's difficult but it isn't impossible and it's a whole lot easier than trying to bend and twist scientific thinking to hide the inconsistencies OF EVOLUTIONIST DOGMA THAT HAS NO SCIENTIFIC SUPPORT.
The lies of Haeckel's diagrams that are still used, and taught in schools, says something very strong about evolutionists, and their scientific and moral integrity.
How many times have evolutionists asserted that they have found the missing link between apes/monkeys and humans, but they never have. Do you add the new claim to your belief, and then subtract it, or do evolutionists just keep believing it anyway?
There is no single "missing link." This is a straw man repeated by the opponents of evolution who have absolutely no understanding of the theory, like yourself. There are in fact many missing links, because there were many species that evolved between apes and humans... This is simple common sense.
Your argument that evolution is false wouldn't pass a second grade science test. Do you creationists even try to be intellecually honest to yourself or is it more comfortable to live in the dark?
Probably half of those people are lying if they claim they believe bible stories are literal truth.
So to is science.