An Incompatibility Between Science and Religion?

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A_Wanderer

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A rich essay by Jerry Coyne
Charles Darwin was born on February 12, 1809--the same day as Abraham Lincoln--and published his magnum opus, On the Origin of Species, fifty years later. Every half century, then, a Darwin Year comes around: an occasion to honor his theory of evolution by natural selection, which is surely the most important concept in biology, and perhaps the most revolutionary scientific idea in history. 2009 is such a year, and we biologists are preparing to fan out across the land, giving talks and attending a multitude of DarwinFests. The melancholy part is that we will be speaking more to other scientists than to the American public. For in this country, Darwin is a man of low repute. The ideas that made Darwin's theory so revolutionary are precisely the ones that repel much of religious America, for they imply that, far from having a divinely scripted role in the drama of life, our species is the accidental and contingent result of a purely natural process.

And so the culture wars continue between science and religion. On one side we have a scientific establishment and a court system determined to let children learn evolution rather than religious mythology, and on the other side the many Americans who passionately resist those efforts. It is a depressing fact that while 74 percent of Americans believe that angels exist, only 25 percent accept that we evolved from apelike ancestors. Just one in eight of us think that evolution should be taught in the biology classroom without including a creationist alternative. Among thirty-four Western countries surveyed for the acceptance of evolution, the United States ranked a dismal thirty-third, just above Turkey. Throughout our country, school boards are trying to water down the teaching of evolution or sneak creationism in beside it. And the opponents of Darwinism are not limited to snake-handlers from the Bible Belt; they include some people you know. As Karl Giberson notes in Saving Darwin, "Most people in America have a neighbor who thinks the Earth is ten thousand years old."

The cultural polarization of America has been aggravated by attacks on religion from the "new atheists," writers such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, who are die-hard Darwinists. Outraged religious leaders, associating evolutionary biology with atheism, counterattacked. This schism has distressed liberal theologians and religious scientists, who have renewed their efforts to reconcile religion and science. The "science" is nearly always evolutionary biology, which is far more controversial than any area of chemistry or physics. Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project, wrote The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief; the philosopher Michael Ruse produced Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? (his answer is yes); and there are high-profile books by theologians such as John Haught and John Polkinghorne. The Templeton Foundation gives sizeable grants to projects for reconciling science and religion, and awards a yearly prize of two million dollars to a philosopher or scientist whose work highlights the "spiritual dimension of scientific progress." The National Academy of Sciences, America's most prestigious scientific body, issued a pamphlet assuring us that we can have our faith and Darwin, too:

Science and religion address separate aspects of human experience. Many scientists have written eloquently about how their scientific studies of biological evolution have enhanced rather than lessened their religious faith. And many religious people and denominations accept the scientific evidence for evolution.


Would that it were that easy! True, there are religious scientists and Darwinian churchgoers. But this does not mean that faith and science are compatible, except in the trivial sense that both attitudes can be simultaneously embraced by a single human mind. (It is like saying that marriage and adultery are compatible because some married people are adulterers. ) It is also true that some of the tensions disappear when the literal reading of the Bible is renounced, as it is by all but the most primitive of JudeoChristian sensibilities. But tension remains. The real question is whether there is a philosophical incompatibility between religion and science. Does the empirical nature of science contradict the revelatory nature of faith? Are the gaps between them so great that the two institutions must be considered essentially antagonistic? The incessant stream of books dealing with this question suggests that the answer is not straightforward.
Seeing and Believing

It continues in depth, I respect the detail quite a bit.
 
I don't spend a lot of time thinking about this. I can't say I've ever had a problem accepting science and believing in the Christian God or the possibility of a god. I don't see why it's so difficult. One of the wisest people I have ever met is an ordained Presbyterian who has a PhD studying the evolution of apes (specifically, their pelvic bones and their bone structure, how it effects how they walk and how human bones effect how we walk.....super interesting stuff).
 
The meat and bones of the essay is that it isn't impossible for religious people to accept science, but that ultimately religious beliefs cannot fit into the scientific paradigm; they are faith based positions that cannot be falsified no matter what evidence is brought to bear
Giberson offers another reason for his faith--we might call it the argument from convenience.

As a purely practical matter, I have compelling reasons to believe in God. My parents are deeply committed Christians and would be devastated, were I to reject my faith. My wife and children believe in God, and we attend church together regularly. Most of my friends are believers. I have a job I love at a Christian college that would be forced to dismiss me if I were to reject the faith that underpins the mission of the college. Abandoning belief in God would be disruptive, sending my life completely off the rails.

This touching confession reveals the sad irrationality of the whole enterprise--the demoralizing conflict between a personal need to believe and a desperation to show that this primal need is perfectly compatible with science.

It would appear, then, that one cannot be coherently religious and scientific at the same time. That alleged synthesis requires that with one part of your brain you accept only those things that are tested and supported by agreed-upon evidence, logic, and reason, while with the other part of your brain you accept things that are unsupportable or even falsified. In other words, the price of philosophical harmony is cognitive dissonance. Accepting both science and conventional faith leaves you with a double standard: rational on the origin of blood clotting, irrational on the Resurrection; rational on dinosaurs, irrational on virgin births. Without good cause, Giberson and Miller pick and choose what they believe. At least the young-earth creationists are consistent, for they embrace supernatural causation across the board. With his usual flair, the physicist Richard Feynman characterized this difference: "Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." With religion, there is just no way to know if you are fooling yourself.

So the most important conflict--the one ignored by Giberson and Miller--is not between religion and science. It is between religion and secular reason. Secular reason includes science, but also embraces moral and political philosophy, mathematics, logic, history, journalism, and social science--every area that requires us to have good reasons for what we believe. Now I am not claiming that all faith is incompatible with science and secular reason--only those faiths whose claims about the nature of the universe flatly contradict scientific observations. Pantheism and some forms of Buddhism seem to pass the test. But the vast majority of the faithful--those 90 percent of Americans who believe in a personal God, most Muslims, Jews, and Hindus, and adherents to hundreds of other faiths--fall into the "incompatible" category.
 
The meat and bones of the essay is that it isn't impossible for religious people to accept science, but that ultimately religious beliefs cannot fit into the scientific paradigm; they are faith based positions that cannot be falsified no matter what evidence is brought to bear

I guess a religious person might see it the other way around. Think of religion as the big circle, and then all the other disciplines like science, humanities, art, etc as the smaller circles inside. I can't think of anything scientifically proven that I can't accept, from a religious point of view.
 
One of the biggest issues on this is when it comes to people believing the world is only 6,000 years old. I heard a man one time say that carbon dating was bunk, didn't mean anything, and others have said the devil planted the dinosaur bones to ruin your faith! When it's reduced to crap like that, it makes those who hang to the 6,000 year thing look very bad. We do have to accept that the world is billions of years old because denying it is ridiculous. I don't see how this damages anyone's faith. God never gave an age for the earth, the 6,000 came from somebody calculation the 'begats' back thru time. But who's to say what happened before that? There's a way to combine the two, say, God did it all, but this (science) is HOW he did it and the seven days were only symbolic. The people who wrote the Bible didn't know what we know today about science. They didn't even know the entire western hemisphere existed. We could say, God didn't want them to know, it was up to us, the people, to obtain the knowledge and learn it in time. Looking at it this way, I don't see a conflict.
 
I guess my feeling stems more from the fact that I just don't care. I don't care how old the earth is or why dinosaurs lived. Give me any scientific answer and it won't change what I believe or don't believe about God. I don't need a religion or a faith that spoon-feeds me answers about scientific theory in explicit detail to decide for myself whether I believe a god exists.
 
I don't spend a lot of time thinking about this. I can't say I've ever had a problem accepting science and believing in the Christian God or the possibility of a god. I don't see why it's so difficult. One of the wisest people I have ever met is an ordained Presbyterian who has a PhD studying the evolution of apes (specifically, their pelvic bones and their bone structure, how it effects how they walk and how human bones effect how we walk.....super interesting stuff).

I don't have any problem with science either. Your friend's studies sound interesting! Has he written any publish articles on this topic?
 
I don't have any problem with science either. Your friend's studies sound interesting! Has he written any publish articles on this topic?

I'm sure he has but I've not seen them. He's almost 80 years old. Very wise man with a lot of stories. Raised by white supremecists/KKK in the south, has lived in Liberia and been there about 20 times... I had him for an anthropology class but I e-mail him when I have theological questions or have lunch with him. FWIW I tried looking stuff up but he has the same name as a bunch of other doctors and professors.
 
One of the biggest issues on this is when it comes to people believing the world is only 6,000 years old. I heard a man one time say that carbon dating was bunk, didn't mean anything, and others have said the devil planted the dinosaur bones to ruin your faith! When it's reduced to crap like that, it makes those who hang to the 6,000 year thing look very bad. We do have to accept that the world is billions of years old because denying it is ridiculous. I don't see how this damages anyone's faith. God never gave an age for the earth, the 6,000 came from somebody calculation the 'begats' back thru time. But who's to say what happened before that? There's a way to combine the two, say, God did it all, but this (science) is HOW he did it and the seven days were only symbolic. The people who wrote the Bible didn't know what we know today about science. They didn't even know the entire western hemisphere existed. We could say, God didn't want them to know, it was up to us, the people, to obtain the knowledge and learn it in time. Looking at it this way, I don't see a conflict.

There are many Christians though who don't take the seven day creation as being literal though. If I'm correct, the ancient word used for "day" doesn't totally equate to a 24-hour period of time.
 
God working through science raises two important points;

Firstly, if God's actions are indistinguishable from the natural workings of the universe then what point is there assuming that it exists? If it is bound by natural law, which is subject to scientific scrutiny, what makes it special.

Secondly what type of God would use billions of years of sex and death to generate humans. I have trouble seeing how can people accept evolution as a process devised by a loving God? An naturalistic position can integrate such mechanical slaughter, but it really turns natural theology on its head.
 
Secondly what type of God would use billions of years of sex and death to generate humans.
Apparently a God you can't believe in. So what? Why worry so much about it then? Why does it bother you so?

I have trouble seeing how can people accept evolution as a process devised by a loving God?
I don't, but you do. Again, so what?

An naturalistic position can integrate such mechanical slaughter, but it really turns natural theology on its head.
No, it doesn't. You see it that way, but I don't.
 
God working through science raises two important points;

I guess I don't see it as God working "through" science, as if science is a tool he obtains. Science, to me, is the study of God's handiwork. He created, we study it. I see science is our attempt to understand.

Firstly, if God's actions are indistinguishable from the natural workings of the universe then what point is there assuming that it exists? If it is bound by natural law, which is subject to scientific scrutiny, what makes it special.
His workings aren't bound by natural law, he put natural law in place. It's there for a reason. It has a purpose, therefore, it's not restrictive in that sense.

Secondly what type of God would use billions of years of sex and death to generate humans. I have trouble seeing how can people accept evolution as a process devised by a loving God? An naturalistic position can integrate such mechanical slaughter, but it really turns natural theology on its head.

I don't know, why don't you ask him? :wink:

You have an incredible scientific mind, but I don't think you can keep trying to explain the existence or lack thereof of God with science (is that ultimately why you so bitterly disagree with the idea of a God?). He's outside of it. Does that make sense? To me, I can see plenty of evidence of a loving God. I also find it harder to believe everything just came into existence without anything behind it or that we're the result of a simple flash of lightening striking a puddle of mud. It just all comes together too well and full of purpose. However, God, if he truly exists, is outside of scientific laws and time. He created them, too.
 
There are many Christians though who don't take the seven day creation as being literal though. If I'm correct, the ancient word used for "day" doesn't totally equate to a 24-hour period of time.

True a lot don't, but a lot do. I have seen them in action myself. I have seen kids in the library being told they can't look at a book on dinosaurs because it's full of 'lies'. I was in school with kids whose parents forbid them to listen or participate in classes where things older than 6000 were being taught, and they had to leave the room. This was excused for religious reasons just as the Jehovah's witness kids were not allowed to make any holiday items, for any holiday. There was also a news report on TV of a religious group taking kids through a museum with dinosaur bones, the group leader literally making fun of the things the museum had written on the display and telling the kids why it was all fake. Some people, too many, really do believe it's all an evil plot by Satan to destroy your faith. I've been told this in so many words.
 
Apparently a God you can't believe in. So what? Why worry so much about it then? Why does it bother you so?
The burden of proof isn't on me, I see selection as an emergent property of complex systems, I'm not supposing that it came from an intelligent agent.

I am perfectly at ease with an amoral process emerging from amoral matter and energy acting under amoral physical contraints in an amoral universe.

The evolutionary paradigm doesn't have a place where God neatly slots in. The system doesn't need God. We can cut it all down to how complexity emerges from chaos, but that seems to make evolution a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, which is a property of the universe.

At some point along the chain theistic evolution takes a leap beyond the facts and gets God involved, is that really indefensible?
I don't, but you do. Again, so what?
I am willing to justify my position, you're not.

No, it doesn't. You see it that way, but I don't.
How do you see it?
 
The burden of proof isn't on me
It's not on either of us. I'm not asking you to believe what I believe, I'm not belittling you for what you believe, I'm not requiring you to follow any law based on my beliefs, so I don't have to prove anything to you. You don't have to prove anything to me. Yet it bugs the shit out of you that I believe. If it didn't, you wouldn't take so much of your time posting articles and threads trying to prove believers are wrong and stupid.


The evolutionary paradigm doesn't have a place where God neatly slots in.
Sure it does. You just don't see that it does.

I am willing to justify my position, you're not.
I have nothing to justify at all. You keep thinking you do. I don't think you do.

How do you see it?
You don't really care how I see it; you just want more fodder.
 
Actually I'm not sure it's as cut and dried as you make out, A-wanderer.

The evolutionary paradigm doesn't have a place where God slots neatly in, you say. Well, why should it? It's a man-made paradigm; as has often been discussed, scientific hypotheses are human-made constructs, which stand if they continue to fit the observable data. That does not make them the whole story.

I don't really care about debates like this, because I just don't see an incompatibility (referring back to the title of the thread). Science and religion are concerned with different questions. Maybe what you really mean, is that the mechanistic worldview (which in many ways owes a great debt to the Victorian era) is incompatible with traditionalist culture or worldviews. If that's what you mean, you could have a point, but it's not the question I'm answering.
 
It's not on either of us. I'm not asking you to believe what I believe, I'm not belittling you for what you believe, I'm not requiring you to follow any law based on my beliefs, so I don't have to prove anything to you. You don't have to prove anything to me. Yet it bugs the shit out of you that I believe. If it didn't, you wouldn't take so much of your time posting articles and threads trying to prove believers are wrong and stupid.
No, I post these threads because I am genuinely interested in how thinking people reconcile their faith in God with their appreciation of science, and because I enjoy arguing the point, it's practically dialectical.
Sure it does. You just don't see that it does.
Where does God slot in? Seriously, this is a question about evolutionary theory, I just don't see where God fits; does he make mutations? Does he set the optimal designs that evolution stumbles across? Does he restrict the starting conditions?

I conceptualise it all as an unguided process but the issue of complexity is a very real debate, and the developments in evolutionary developmental biology may put these embryological constraints on an important level alongside natural selection.

I have nothing to justify at all. You keep thinking you do. I don't think you do.
Yeah, I should just answer any challenges with "of course it does, your blind to the truth".
You don't really care how I see it; you just want more fodder.
I don't care about you getting offended, I do care about what role you think God plays in the universe.
 
No, I post these threads because I am genuinely interested in how thinking people reconcile their faith in God with their appreciation of science, ... I do care about what role you think God plays in the universe.
If you really want to know, I can explain it as I see it and understand it

but



and because I enjoy arguing the point,

This is the part that worries me. I will not post for you to belittle or argue. Discuss, yes.
 
Heres a rebuttal by Ken Miller
My colleague and friend Jerry Coyne is a brilliant scientist, an excellent writer, and a thoughtful, outspoken atheist. He believes that God does not exist, and that any reasonable person should think as he does, rejecting the elixir of faith as pointless delusion. In taking that position, even though it is one with which I disagree, he places himself in distinguished company, no question. If Dr. Coyne's review of recent books by Karl Giberson and myself (Only a Theory, and Saving Darwin, respectively) sought only to make that argument, thereby to distance himself from a couple of deluded Christians, I wouldn't have much to complain about. On the issue of faith, there's plenty of distance between us, even if I think Coyne is on the wrong side of the question.

But Coyne did something quite different from that.

In addition to making the usual claims about the lack of evidence for God, Coyne flatly states that faith and science are not compatible, arguing that the empirical nature of science contradicts the revelatory nature of faith. What about the tens of thousands of scientists, now and in the past who were people of faith (including roughly 40% of all working scientists in the US, members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science)? Coyne waves them away with scorn, literally comparing them to "adulterers" who have subverted their vows to be true to science—or at least to Coyne's view of science. More on that later.

Coyne claims that "theistic evolutionists" like me exhibit three of the four hallmarks of creationism, making me really no different from the folks I opposed at the Kitzmiller trial. He couldn't be more wrong about that. I share exactly one thing in common with creationists, which is my belief in God. The other points of supposed agreement are figments of Coyne's imagination—or of his overwrought efforts to slander any believer by placing them in the "creationist" camp.

He seems to argue that a person of faith who accepts evolution must also believe God "micro-edited DNA" to guide evolution. While it's certainly true that a Divine author of nature could intervene in his world at any time, I have never argued for the sort of divine tinkering that Coyne finds so disturbing. In fact, I have argued exactly the opposite. Evolution is not rigged, and religious belief does not require one to postulate a God who fixes the game, bribes the referees, or tricks natural selection. Unfortunately, Coyne does not seem to appreciate this point.

And, just to quibble, he claims that only 25% of Americans believe we evolved from apelike ancestors. The actual figure (unlike Coyne, I will cite a reference) is 40% (Miller, Scott, and Okamoto. Science 313: 765, August 2006).

Coyne's eagerness to close out any possibility that there is an author to the natural world leads him into a curious position of self-contradiction on the appearance of the human species on our planet. As I pointed out in Only a Theory, evolution did indeed produce the grand and beautiful fabric of life that covers our planet, including our own species. Therefore, we are not a "mistake" of nature, but a full-fledged product of the natural world. If God is the creator of that world, including the laws of chemistry and physics and even the unpredictable events of the quantum universe, then it would be perfectly reasonable for a religious person to see our emergence, through the process of evolution, as part of God's plan for that universe. This doesn't mean, as I took care to point out in my book, that nature is rigged to produce big-brained, hairless, bipedal primates who would invent football, canned beer, and reality television. Rather, it means that the universe in which we live is sufficiently hospitable to life that on this one planet, at the very least, it has supported an evolutionary process that gave rise to intelligent, self-aware, reflective organisms, who would then be capable of arguing about the meaning, purpose, and nature of existence.

I made no argument that this happy confluence of natural events and physical constants proves the existence of God in any way—only that it could be understood or interpreted as consistent with the Divine by a person of faith.

To Coyne, however, even the mere possibility that someone might understand nature in a Divine context is absolute heresy. As a result, while he strictly rules out anything but natural causes in the evolutionary process (as would I), he then must argue that the same process could never, ever happen again. Why? Because if conditions in our universe are such that they make the emergence of intelligent life, sooner or later, pretty much a sure thing, then people might wonder why. And if they were to come to the conclusion this might mean that there was a Creator who intended that as part of his work, they would be guilty of the very thoughts that Coyne finds so outrageous that he wishes to banish them from the scientific establishment.

So, despite his frank admission that "convergences are striking features of evolution," he rules any possibility that human-like intelligence could also be a convergent feature. His only reason for so doing seems to be that such intelligence evolved "only once, in Africa." Apparently, to satisfy his standards, it should have evolved many times. Actually, of course, if an observer had checked as recently as 5 million years ago, it wouldn't have evolved at all. Nonetheless Coyne has absolutely no empirical reason for claiming that what happened once could not happen again—and he surely knows that. But, to borrow a phrase, he is "forced" into that conclusion by his own anti-theist views.

For someone so insistent on empirical evidence, Coyne is remarkably quick to invoke faith when it suits his purposes. Realizing that the anthropic principle could indeed be seen as friendly to religion, he knows he just doesn't have enough evidence to reject it. So Coyne dreams that "perhaps some day, when we have a ‘theory of everything' that unifies all the forces of physics, we will see that this theory requires our universe to have the physical constants that we observe." Indeed. Perhaps we will. But even if we achieve that theory, we will still have to ask where the laws and principles of that theory come from, something that even Coyne at his speculative and hopeful best does not seem to appreciate.

Finally, what of his central criticism—the claim that science and religion are not only different, but incompatible and mutually contradictory?

He's right on one score, obviously. That is that certain religious claims, including the age of the earth, a global worldwide flood, and the simultaneous creation of all living things are empirical in nature. As such, they can be tested scientifically, and these particular claims are clearly false. Claims of demonstrative miracles in the past, such as the virgin birth or the resurrection cannot be tested empirically, because there are no data from which to work. On such claims, science has nothing to say one way or the other. Coyne's complaint on such things, paradoxically, is that they must not have happened because there is no scientific explanation for them. That amounts, in essence, to saying that these things could not have happened because they would be miracles. Well, that's exactly what most Christians take them for, so Coyne's only real argument is an a priori assumption that miracles cannot happen. Make that assumption, and miracles are nonsense. But it is an assumption nonetheless, something that Coyne fails to see.

How, then, should we take his claim that scientists who profess religious faith are akin to adulterers? An adulterer, of course, is one who has taken the marriage vow of faithfulness and exclusivity, and then broken that vow to have sex with another. Have scientists who profess faith broken some vow of philosophical naturalism that is implicit in the profession?

I, for one, don't remember any such vow in my training, my PhD exam, or my tenure review—although perhaps things work a little differently at the University of Chicago.

What science does require is methodological naturalism. We live in a material world, and we use the materials of nature to study the way nature works. By definition, that confines science to purely naturalistic explanations, because only those are testable, and only those have validity as science. I agree, and would defy Dr. Coyne to point to any claim made in the books he has reviewed that defines science in any other way. He cannot do that, of course, because there are no such claims. I would also ask that he point out scientific flaws in the work of biologists such as Theodosius Dobzhansky, Francisco Ayala, or Francis Collins that may have derived from their personal religious faith. He won't be able to do that, either, of course. Every scientist makes mistakes—and I've made plenty in my career. But the real issue is whether a scientist's view on the question of God is incompatible with their scientific work. Clearly, it is not.

Coyne's entire critique, then, is based upon an unspoken assumption he expects his readers to share, namely, that science is the only legitimate form of knowledge. To Coyne, any deviation from that view is an adulterous contradiction of the sacred scientific vow to exclude any possibility of the spiritual, not just from one's scientific work, but from the entirety of one's philosophical world view.

With all due respect to my distinguished colleague, that is nonsense. One can indeed embrace science in every respect, and still ask a deeper question, one in which Coyne seems to have no interest. Why does science work? Why is the world around us organized in a way that makes itself accessible to our powers of logic and intellect? The true vow of a scientist is to practice honest and open empiricism in every aspect of his scientific work. That vow does not preclude the scientist from stepping back, acknowledging the limitations of scientific knowledge, and asking the deeper questions of why we are here, and if existence has a purpose. Those questions are genuine and important, even if they are not scientific ones, and I believe they are worth answering.

To Jerry Coyne, a person of faith like the Belgian priest Georges Lemaître, could not possibly have been a true scientist because of his faith in a loving and provident God. That would make Father Lemaître, in Coyne's eyes, nothing more than a creationist. Too bad, because as I'm sure Jerry knows, it was Georges Lemaître who provided the first detailed mathematical arguments for cosmic expansion, which today we call the "big bang." Remarkable how Lemaître rose above his adulterous tendencies, isn't it?

The genuine tragedy of Coyne's argument is the way in which it seeks to enlist science in a frankly ideological crusade—a campaign to purge science of religionists in the name of doctrinal purity. That campaign will surely fail, but in so doing it may divert those of us who cherish science from a far more urgent task, especially in America today. That is the task of defending scientific rationalism from those who, in the name of religion would subvert it beyond all recognition. In that critical struggle, Jerry, scientists who are also people of faith are critical allies, and you would do well not to turn them away.
Edge: DOES THE EMPIRICAL NATURE OF SCIENCE CONTRADICT THE REVELATORY NATURE OF FAITH? - Jerry Coyne
 
I'm convinced that A_W has to be a spambot of some kind. No man could write 95% of his posts on one topic and never get bored.
 
The other problem is confusing belief in God per se with fundamentalist religion.

The young-earth crowd, for instance. I've seen nothing in the Bible to support let alone demand that sort of view of the world. That view of the world comes out of a certain culture, as does a lot of the trappings that go with Catholicism (my own background). So when someone says, 'well of course Christians believe xxx', they best be careful they aren't just speaking bollocks.

Now I myself view the Bible as a problematic document. The New Testament gospels are the basic foundation stone, the Old Testament a far more difficult proposition but generally understood as the precursor to the latter. It is partly a morality code, partly a mythical history/prophecy for the peoples who made the various stories (often orally).

So you can see that I don't view any of that as having a bearing on modern science, whilst - and this is the key point - they may contain a certain kind of truth. Great art and literature can also contain elements of this greater truth. Will I sit here and think that science somehow conflicts with those, either? Of course not.
 
I'm sure he has but I've not seen them. He's almost 80 years old. Very wise man with a lot of stories. Raised by white supremecists/KKK in the south, has lived in Liberia and been there about 20 times... I had him for an anthropology class but I e-mail him when I have theological questions or have lunch with him. FWIW I tried looking stuff up but he has the same name as a bunch of other doctors and professors.

It's wonderful to see someone post something positive about our seniors. There is a Catholic Priest at my church, now retired. But, this man is in good health and 92 years young. I love to listen to his stories, especially in regards to the Great Depression. Something, he lived through and I have only read about in history books.

His parents came from Ireland and he said when they would want to talk about something not meant for children's prying ears. They would speak in Irish.
 
Claims of demonstrative miracles in the past, such as the virgin birth or the resurrection cannot be tested empirically, because there are no data from which to work. On such claims, science has nothing to say one way or the other. Coyne's complaint on such things, paradoxically, is that they must not have happened because there is no scientific explanation for them. That amounts, in essence, to saying that these things could not have happened because they would be miracles. Well, that's exactly what most Christians take them for, so Coyne's only real argument is an a priori assumption that miracles cannot happen. Make that assumption, and miracles are nonsense. But it is an assumption nonetheless, something that Coyne fails to see.

this is exactly what i thought when i read the original article, just said much better than i could have said it.
 
The New Testament gospels are the basic foundation stone, the Old Testament a far more difficult proposition but generally understood as the precursor to the latter. It is partly a morality code, partly a mythical history/prophecy for the peoples who made the various stories (often orally).

So you can see that I don't view any of that as having a bearing on modern science, whilst - and this is the key point - they may contain a certain kind of truth. Great art and literature can also contain elements of this greater truth. Will I sit here and think that science somehow conflicts with those, either? Of course not.

Precisely
 
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