Article on reconciling faith with science

[Xaiveir]

:wtf:

Did we just have a religious debate where Arlos and I agreed, there was a mindia-style poster, AND everyone got along?

To boot...the mindia-style poster................ADMITTED BEING WRONG?!

My fucking head is going to explode, something is wrong.

This is clearly a sign of the upcoming Apocalypse!

[Burgy99]

It's really an amazing article. I think alot of us here are somewhere in the middle of Science and Religion, and its information like this that asserts us that its OK to have these beliefs, and that there are many people out there who feel the same way.

[Ganzo]

Actually, I find no conflict here, and neither apparently do the 40 percent of working scientists who claim to be believers. Yes, evolution by descent from a common ancestor is clearly true. If there was any lingering doubt about the evidence from the fossil record, the study of DNA provides the strongest possible proof of our relatedness to all other living things.

But why couldn't this be God's plan for creation? True, this is incompatible with an ultra-literal interpretation of Genesis, but long before Darwin, there were many thoughtful interpreters like St. Augustine, who found it impossible to be exactly sure what the meaning of that amazing creation story was supposed to be. So attaching oneself to such literal interpretations in the face of compelling scientific evidence pointing to the ancient age of Earth and the relatedness of living things by evolution seems neither wise nor necessary for the believer.

I have found there is a wonderful harmony in the complementary truths of science and faith. The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. God can be found in the cathedral or in the laboratory. By investigating God's majestic and awesome creation, science can actually be a means of worship.

Basically how i feel about it.

[Yamori]

It's one thing to say that faith and science can be reconciled, believing god to be the prime mover, the cosmic clockmaker, or the universe/universal laws itself. It largely just semantics at this point, and arguments over the source of what we know, observe, and understand rather than the fundamental content of it.

It's a whole nother thing to say that faith and science can be reconciled, but that a vague book that incredibly clashes with scientific facts is the undisputed word of god.

Or that god has a distinct and personalized will and emotions that involves it arbitrarily intervening in human lives and suspending the laws of physics at will in order to spook people.

Or that god happened to decide to impregnate a virgin who birthed a son to be his voice, who then got killed but come back to life (all according to a master plan to open up heaven to humans).

Or that a fallen angel got pissed because god loved humans more than him, so now he spends all day trying to make people mess up so they'll do bad stuff.

Or that God decided to choose a specific race of people (hi jews) to be his favorites - even to the point that non-favored peoples were subhuman and fit to be killed for said races' political interests (hi book of Joshua).

Need I go on?

Any scientist that claims to be christian (or jewish, or muslim, or hindu, or any other mono/polytheistic religion with a personalized deity) faith is guilty of compartmentalizing their mind or not taking their religion's essence seriously.

[Ganzo]

Newsflash Yamori: Religion is not set in stone, it evolves with civilization.

What you see now is a seeds of next step in religion.

In every stage of society and civilization there was time when current system of believes was outdated and began to slow down progress. At that time some visionary would appear and create new Idea that would be advanced by his followers and made into religion that pushed civilization to new heights.

We about due for a new Idea.

[Tossica]

Agree with Yamori.

[Lyion]

No, you miss the point of 'faith' when you try to diametrically align it with materialistic science and how we handle knowledge. Science in and of itself is a dynamic and living thing. It changes based on what we know, such as our growth from Newtonian Physics to Quantum Mechanics. Our quest for knowledge is good and benefits mankind. It has very little to do with the meaning of life, however.

Science is the materialistic search for knowledge. Faith is the search for the truth in ones soul through belief. It's looking at the mysteries of why we are here, and considering the concept of humanity, ones soul, and our own personal cognizance.

Many people enamored with knowledge wrongly equate faith with weakness or a lack of understanding. It is not frailty or strength. It simply is.

The fact someone does not 'get' the true meaning of faith does not mean someone who does is wrong if they choose to also seek knowledge and intellectual growth. Quite the opposite, in fact.

It's no wonder so many of the greatest scientists then and now were men of deep faith, as I'd imagine the search for the truth of ones being is as important as the great mysteries of science.

[Harrison]

I just see them as ignorant fools. (the "hahah you have a religion" types)

[Lyion]

Here's a great article, albeit from a journalist I have almost no common ground on his political beliefs, but he is spot on in this regard

Answers To the Atheists

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, April 6, 2007; A21

This weekend, many of the world's estimated 2 billion Christians will remember and celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

While some Christians harbor doubts about Christ's actual physical resurrection, hundreds of millions believe devoutly that Jesus died and rose, thus redeeming a fallen world from sin.

Are these people a threat to reason and even freedom?

It's a question that arises from a new vogue for what you might call neo-atheism. The new atheists -- the best known are writers Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins -- insist, as Harris puts it, that "certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one." That's why they think a belief in salvation through faith in God, no matter the religious tradition, is dangerous to an open society.

The neo-atheists, like their predecessors from a century ago, are given to a sometimes-charming ferociousness in their polemics against those they see as too weak-minded to give up faith in God.

What makes them new is the moment in history in which they are rejoining the old arguments: an era of religiously motivated Islamic suicide bombers. They also protest the apparent power of traditionalist and fundamentalist versions of Christianity.

As a general proposition, I welcome the neo-atheists' challenge. The most serious believers, understanding that they need to ask themselves searching questions, have always engaged in dialogue with atheists. The Catholic writer Michael Novak's book "Belief and Unbelief" is a classic in self-interrogation. "How does one know that one's belief is truly in God," he asks at one point, "not merely in some habitual emotion or pattern of response?"

The problem with the neo-atheists is that they seem as dogmatic as the dogmatists they condemn. They are especially frustrated with religious "moderates" who don't fit their stereotypes.

In his bracing polemic " The End of Faith," Harris is candid in asserting that "religious moderates are themselves the bearers of a terrible dogma: they imagine that the path to peace will be paved once each one of us has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of others."

Harris goes on: "I hope to show that the very ideal of religious tolerance -- born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God -- is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss. We have been slow to recognize the degree to which religious faith perpetuates man's inhumanity to man."

Argument about faith should not hang on whether religion is socially "useful" or instead promotes "inhumanity." But since the idea that religion is primarily destructive lies at the heart of the neo-atheist argument, its critics have rightly insisted on detailing the sublime acts of humanity and generosity that religion has promoted through the centuries.

It's true that religious Christians were among those who persecuted Jews. It is also true that religious Christians were among those who rescued Jews from these most un-Christian acts. And it is a sad fact that secular forms of dogmatism have been at least as murderous as the religious kind.

What's really bothersome is the suggestion that believers rarely question themselves while atheists ask all the hard questions. But as Novak argued -- in one of the best critiques of neo-atheism -- in the March 19 issue of National Review, "Questions have been the heart and soul of Judaism and Christianity for millennia." (These questions get a fair reading in another powerful commentary on neo-atheism by James Wood, himself an atheist, in the Dec. 18 issue of the New Republic.) "Christianity is not about moral arrogance," Novak insists. "It is about moral realism, and moral humility." Of course Christians in practice often fail to live up to this elevated definition of their creed. But atheists are capable of their own forms of arrogance. Indeed, if arrogance were the only criterion, the contest could well come out a tie.

As for me, Christianity is more a call to rebellion than an insistence on narrow conformity, more a challenge than a set of certainties.

In " The Last Week," their book about Christ's final days on Earth, Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, distinguished liberal scriptural scholars, write: "He attracted a following and took his movement to Jerusalem at the season of Passover. There he challenged the authorities with public acts and public debates. All this was his passion, what he was passionate about: God and the Kingdom of God, God and God's passion for justice. Jesus' passion got him killed."

That's why I celebrate Easter and why, despite many questions of my own, I can't join the neo-atheists.

[Burgy99]

It's no wonder so many of the greatest scientists then and now were men of deep faith, as I'd imagine the search for the truth of ones being is as important as the great mysteries of science.

I think the point is that to alot of scientist, they are discovering "the truth of ones being" through the means of the "great mysteries of science". So not two seperate passions, but one. Getting the facts from science, and applying a meaning through religion. The facts of science being first, not "The bible says THIS so i'm going to stretch and say THIS". Ex. DNA proving evolution and common ancestors being a fact. Theres not enough water in the world to be able to support a flood of biblical proportions, another fact.

I bet to some religion types it pisses them off that educated people are making sense out of religion through science, and not a direct interpretation of the Bible.

[Yamori]

It's no wonder so many of the greatest scientists then and now were men of deep faith, as I'd imagine the search for the truth of ones being is as important as the great mysteries of science.

I've heard this a number of times. Who are some examples of this?