"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." --Hamlet, Act 1, Scene V
Many see the meeting of science and religion as a meeting of ideas. Biologists propose evolution and believers counter with creation. Physicists say "Big Bang" and pastors say "God's handiwork." Science is theories, religion is theology; sometimes the ideas put forth by each mesh, and sometimes they grind.
This sort of scheme is the basis of a lot of what is written about science and religion, by both those who see the two as warring, and those who see the two as compatible. Sam Harris adopted it in his essay here in the Huffington Post, "Science Must Destroy Religion":
Religious faith -- faith that there is a God who cares what name he is called, that one of our books is infallible, that Jesus is coming back to earth to judge the living and the dead, that Muslim martyrs go straight to Paradise, etc. -- is on the wrong side of an escalating war of ideas.
So, too, Christopher Hitchens who wrote that:
Faith must believe in answered prayers, divinely ordained morality, heavenly warrant for circumcision, the occurrence of miracles or what you will. Physics and chemistry and biology and paleontology and archeology have, at a minimum, given us explanations for what used to be mysterious, and furnished us with hypotheses that are at least as good as, or very much better than, the ones offered by any believers in other and inexplicable dimensions.
Richard Dawkins also maintains that the issue is ideas. "Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth," he writes, and these foolish truths are what gum up the real truths of science.
Once you see science and religion principally as bodies of ideas, the obvious thing to ask about them is whether or not these ideas fit together. Thus, even the brilliant philosopher of science, Alan Plantinga, writing on "Religion and Science" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy concludes that "perhaps the most salient question is whether the relation between religion and science is characterized by conflict or by concord." Is there or isn't there "an escalating war of ideas" between the two?
But the thing is, though both are rich with ideas of all sorts, neither science nor religion is mostly about ideas. These grand and impossible abstractions -- science and religion -- are about more than theories and theology. Each also describes exquisitely complex practices, prescriptions and proscriptions of behaviors and attitudes, communal institutions, structures of authority, canonical texts, rules for deciding what is to be believed and what rejected, sanctioned forms of communication, rituals, traditions, calendars and seasons, and more.
Science is often taken to be a bunch of rarefied, bespectacled, ethereal, elegant E=mc2 codifications. In fact, it is much broader, including scientific practices and scientific technologies (through which most of us experience science most immediately) as well as science funding and science teaching and medicine and psychiatry and a hundred other paths by which science and scientists wend their ways into our lives.
Religion is often taken to be a compendium of religious dogma championed by beshrouded men in odd hats and vestments and collars who tsk tsk about the decline of traditional values. In fact, it is much more than that, including patterns of language and liturgy, stories we tell our kids, foods we make, how we mark birth and marriage and death, how we understand sickness, what songs we sing when and why, and a hundred other paths by which religion wends its way into the lives of those who embrace or reject it.
All this being the case, the meeting between science and religion is rarely a meeting about ideas at all. Conflicts about evolution and intelligent design dominate headlines, but they are rarely, if ever, the most important story to tell about the relationship between science and religion. In fact, even when a conflict about science and religion seems to be about ideas, usually it is at the same time also about something else altogether. Obviously, these meetings are often about politics. Equally often, they are about identity, autonomy, authority and manners. They can be about economics. They can be about knowledge and what counts as reliable knowledge. Who is an expert and who is a charlatan.
Sometimes, though they seem to be about abstract ideas, meetings of science and religion are really about how best to bring up your kids and how to be a mate. Or about whether and when and how to have sex or use drugs. Or about what counts as health and what counts as illness. Or about whom one should turn to for advice when facing a problem. Or about how to entertain yourself and how to spend your money.
A few days ago, Pope Benedict XVI issued a statement about social networks like Facebook, called "Truth, Proclamation and Authenticity of Life in the Digital Age." The Pope's tone is one of reflection and careful measure, and he finds online things to admire and things to avoid. He sees in the Internet "a new appreciation of communication itself, which is seen first of all as dialogue, exchange, solidarity and the creation of positive relations." At the same time, he finds in posting and Tweeting and poking a "tendency to communicate only some parts of one's interior world" and a "risk of constructing a false image of oneself, which can become a form of self-indulgence." Life online shakes up life as we knew it, raising important questions:
Who is my "neighbour" in this new world? Does the danger exist that we may be less present to those whom we encounter in our everyday life? Is there a risk of being more distracted because our attention is fragmented and absorbed in a world "other" than the one in which we live? Do we have time to reflect critically on our choices and to foster human relationships which are truly deep and lasting?
What makes this document moving is the fact that in it Pope Benedict tries to make sense of how the vast changes quickly wrought by scientific technologies affect the lives of our kids and our own lives, how they might bring people together or keep them apart, how they add to our loneliness or subtract from it, how they allow us to find meaning and love, or prevent us for this. What makes it moving is the Pope's certainty that "the truth of Christ" and "the task of witnessing to the Gospel" are affected by the Internet (and other technologies served up by science), alongside his wavering and worried uncertainty about just how they are affected. The Pope knows that social networks answer a "desire for relationship, meaning and communion" that are the soul of what it means to be human, and he knows that at the same time they provide new ways for people to bully and berate one another, another human tendency.
Even more than tired polemics about Darwin, this is where science and religion meet in ways that matter, behind the locked bedroom door of a teen at a screen, waiting, forlorn, to be friended. Meetings of this sort reflect no "great war of ideas." They are something more delicate than that, far from headlines, taking place at a scale more human than seminar room polemics, with stakes that are, in the end, higher.
Over the next months, I will present in a series of essays examples of these other sorts of meetings of science, technology and religion: on Wall Street and Main Street, in bedrooms and boardrooms and examination rooms, in bistros and bodegas, in short, in all the places where, as a matter of course, we live our lives.
Follow Noah Efron on Twitter: www.twitter.com/noahjefron
Jonathan Dudley: Christian Faith Requires Accepting Evolution
Faithful Facebook: Pope Benedict Blesses Social Networking - TIME ...
Pope Welcomes and Warns Facebook
Science is not the Moon. Science is the Finger pointing at the Moon
Example:
1. God (Allah, Yahweh, Yeshua etc..) created the soup of atoms, electrons etc... and then stirred the pot with the intentions and knowing of the outcomes.
2. Science gives names and actions to those elements that God created and defined principles of actions, behaviors and patterns.
Neither needs to document that God, Angels, or Jesus had a hand in the evolution of our galaxy inorder to embrace one or the other or both.
When a Scientist reaches Heaven he'll be able to articulate in perfect diction and definition the workings that God created and exclaim that he lived his life without ever having too or subcoming to believing in God or Religion or Faith. And God will smille and say, I know and you've served my chilidren as I planned. Thank you.
There is no conflict between God and Science.
There is however a ton of conflict between ignorance and the teaching of religion and science. We're all students from the time we're born til the time we die. To study either subject matter with less respect than a scientists rules and guidelines would be dishonest to both.
Teaching Creationism in Biology Science class is neither scientific nor relgious. It's just ignorant arrogant and using God to push a political agenda conflict with God. He doesnt give damn about politics.
Application of this process to religious ideals is, in every event, a disaster for religion; it breeds atheism, in most cases. That is what is meant by a "conflict between science and religion".
Evolutionary theory, big bang theory, etc - these are incursions of the results of scientific investigation into concepts previously covered by existing religious teachings. Every time this happens, there is resistance, then apologisms, and, eventually - ages later - acceptance of the scientific result by the religious establishment.
Scientific information is generated by the careful extraction of truth from reality; religious information is generated by, usually, a small group bookish dudes writing things down as they come upon them without question. Since the former is more likely to produce accurate information, the latter eventually folds.
“There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works,” : Stephen Hawking
Please take the time and enjoy.
http://www.cbc.ca/tapestry/episode/2011/01/30/survival-of-the-kindest-3/
Scienctists aren't looking for the 'links' between their profession and god. It's not their job.
Let's just start with the big bang and go forward is the science community's contention. Let's not let facts get in the way of science -- forward and onward with the Big Bang! This is not science folks - these are theorists that dabble in the "studies of the universe." And get paid handsomely let's not forget that; and use science lingo as their pin-strip suits to sound believable. Believable like the Wall Street professionals believable; all smoke and mirrors! Not all -- but a lot!!
There is enough doubt in the science community's assertions that we as consumers that buy into their every word should always ask ourselves: Is this science -- something that can be proven in a lab? Or is it theory -- something with lots of holes, like in facts and Probabilities -- of which, the holes can be crater size..... and laughable!
Dogma: physics
Evidence: the Bible
Experiment: Providence
Newton: Anti-Christ
Proof: the Bible
Progress: Greek to Latin
Refutation: the Bible
Science: Immutability
Scientist: God
Theory: Literalism
The Trinity: Moe, Larry, Curly
Buddhism, like physics- is all about cause and effect. For every action there is a reaction. This entire train of thought is missing from Christianity with its emphasis on rules and don't do this or you will go to hell. Instead, Christians should be saying A) Why not do this? and B) Why do I feel compelled to do this if it's wrong? and C) Why is it wrong ?
Saying something is wrong because the bible says so is simply lazy.
Saying the bible is the word of God is not factual, at least there is no factual evidence.
Saying to take it on faith seems an awfully weak hand. Surely the word of God will stand up to scrutiny.
Science has never concerned itself about religion, beyond the terms of religion was hindering science.
If you're alluding to an incident like Galileo, bear in mind that the only empirical evidence he had for his view was Venus "phasing outside" the confines of a Ptolemaic celestial sphere. Both Ptolemy and Heliocentrism were viable from a mathematical view, Heliocentricity's strength coming primarily from its ability to simplify the equations used to determine the orbit of the planets...actual observational evidence would not come until much later.
The Vatican's scientists were wrong, but they weren't stupid.
Ah, the religious apologist at work. If some inalienable fact about religion becomes inconvenient to your attempts to defend it, simply redefine the term! For the purposes of this essay, Mr. Efron finds it convenient to conflate the terms "religion" and "science" with, well, everything remotely connected to them. That way, he gets to argue that the dispute is not about conflicting methods of forming beliefs about the world, but about conflicting lifestyle choices. And we all have to be tolerant of each others' lifestyle choices, don't we?
The unfortunate fact for Efron is that those terms mean what they mean and do not mean all that other stuff. The principles of logic, empirical observation and rationality on which science is built are the principles we all use, in every facet of life. Many people, however, think that an exception should be made when we consider certain questions about ourselves and the nature of the universe. For those questions alone, faith replaces reason as the prime arbiter of truth. The dispute between science and religion is a dispute about whether such intellectual dishonesty is allowable.
There is no conflict, other than the one *certain* people want to create. *Certain* secular people are just as dogmatic and absolutist as the most conservative fundamentalist Christian.
If you are going to call our *certain* people, how about an example.
I believe if you get religion (particularly Christianity) out of our social, legal and political systems, you would hear nothing but crickets from the Athiest/Agnostic community, other than in debating circles discussing Beyond Freedom and Dignity.