God vs. science: Can religion stand up to the test?
Posted on November 7th, 2006 by Michael
It’s a debate that long predates Darwin, but the anti-religion position is being promoted with increasing insistence by scientists angered by intelligent design and excited, perhaps intoxicated, by their disciplines’ increasing ability to map, quantify and change the nature of human experience. Brain imaging illustrates — in color — the physical seat of the will and the passions, challenging the religious concept of a soul independent of glands and gristle. Brain chemists track imbalances that could account for the ecstatic states of visionary saints or, some suggest, of Jesus.
Catholicism’s Christoph Cardinal Schönborn has dubbed the most fervent of faith-challenging scientists followers of “scientism” or “evolutionism,” since they hope science, beyond being a measure, can replace religion as a worldview and a touchstone.
It is not an epithet that fits everyone wielding a test tube. But a growing proportion of the profession is experiencing what one major researcher calls “unprecedented outrage” at perceived insults to research and rationality, ranging from the alleged influence of the Christian right on Bush administration science policy, to the fanatic faith of the 9/11 terrorists, to intelligent design’s ongoing claims. Some are radicalized enough to publicly pick an ancient scab — the idea that science and religion, far from being complementary responses to the unknown, are at utter odds.
Finding a spokesman for this side of the question was not hard, since Richard Dawkins, perhaps its foremost polemicist, has just come out with “The God Delusion” (Houghton Mifflin), the rare volume whose position is so clear it forgoes a subtitle. The five-week New York Times best seller (now at #8 ) attacks faith philosophically and historically as well as scientifically, but leans heavily on Darwinian theory, which was Dawkins’ expertise as a young scientist and more recently as an explicator of evolutionary psychology.
November 9th, 2006 at 8:36 am
Arguing about God is akin to arguing about the emotional lives of animals.
Those that know know and thos ethat seek scientific fact and hard evidence, arguiing rigorously from a scientific platform have simply never held a purring kitten and discovered that God is in fact in the atOMs and purrrrrtons of the embodiment of Love in action……
Science will always be impurrrrrrfect whereas as God simply Is.
Religion…well that has very little to do with God and a lot to do with clubs and dress ups, rituals, rules, factions and fighting…….with only one or two whispurrrrrrrs for the discerning heart.
November 8th, 2006 at 11:08 pm
life is the way you choose to see it. For what ever you look for, you will see and find which will give evidence to what you were looking for in the first place.
Imillionaire