CAN SCIENCE AND RELIGION RESPECTFULLY COEXIST? - 1 views

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  #1 Frederick Smith on 10 Jan 10

   

  Total opposition appears to be the only relationship between science and religion admissible by "militant atheists" like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Caniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens.
  
  Last summer Robert Wright - the non-theistic author of The Evolution of God, - wrote an interesting NYTimes Op-Ed column arguing that the science and the great religious traditions in no way displace each other as ways of understanding reality: see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/opinion/23wright.html.
  The Times was kind enough to publish my letter in response to Wright's column, on 8/25/09. (To my delight, it directly rubbed print with a letter above by the afore-mentioned D.Dennett):
  
  To the Editor: My middle-age recommitment to the theistic paradigm of my youth answered years of unhappy experience (echoing Paul of Tarsus): "I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate."
  Most religions aim to help human beings address our own moral failings. They provide stories, symbols and disciplines - reflecting a higher, transcendent order - which seem to work in rescuing many from illusion, malice, self-created suffering and self-righteousness.
  When I joined Pascal in a leap of faith, my own gamble centered not on a postmortem heaven or hell, but on the desire to live a more consistently purposeful, altruistic and peaceful life in the days that are left to me.
  My faith is based on moral (and aesthetic), not cosmological or ontological, reasoning. I thank Robert Wright for explaining why it does not fly in the face of the science I serve in my daily work as a physician.
  Frederick A. Smith, 8/24/09
  
  Francis Collins - evangelical biologist, identifier of the genes for cystic fibrosis and Huntington's chorea, director of NIH's Human Genome project, and now Obama-appointed Director of the entire National Institutes of Health (to the great dismay of Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith) - has made a well-reasoned theistic affirmation of this non-opposition between science and religion in his 2006 book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. (He does not resort to the current formal theory labeled "Intelligent Design," which he sees as untenable in the face of known evolutionary genetics.)

   

  <div class="cArrow"> </div><div class="cContentInner">Total opposition appears to be the only relationship between science and religion admissible by "militant atheists" like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Caniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens. <br /> <br /> Last summer Robert Wright - the non-theistic author of The Evolution of God, - wrote an interesting NYTimes Op-Ed column arguing that the science and the great religious traditions in no way displace each other as ways of understanding reality: see <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/opinion/23wright.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/opinion/23wright.html</a>. <br /> The Times was kind enough to publish my letter in response to Wright's column, on 8/25/09. (To my delight, it directly rubbed print with a letter above by the afore-mentioned D.Dennett): <br /> <br /> To the Editor: My middle-age recommitment to the theistic paradigm of my youth answered years of unhappy experience (echoing Paul of Tarsus): "I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate." <br /> Most religions aim to help human beings address our own moral failings. They provide stories, symbols and disciplines - reflecting a higher, transcendent order - which seem to work in rescuing many from illusion, malice, self-created suffering and self-righteousness. <br /> When I joined Pascal in a leap of faith, my own gamble centered not on a postmortem heaven or hell, but on the desire to live a more consistently purposeful, altruistic and peaceful life in the days that are left to me. <br /> My faith is based on moral (and aesthetic), not cosmological or ontological, reasoning. I thank Robert Wright for explaining why it does not fly in the face of the science I serve in my daily work as a physician. <br /> Frederick A. Smith, 8/24/09 <br /> <br /> Francis Collins - evangelical biologist, identifier of the genes for cystic fibrosis and Huntington's chorea, director of NIH's Human Genome project, and now Obama-appointed Director of the entire National Institutes of Health (to the great dismay of Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith) - has made a well-reasoned theistic affirmation of this non-opposition between science and religion in his 2006 book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. (He does not resort to the current formal theory labeled "Intelligent Design," which he sees as untenable in the face of known evolutionary genetics.)</div>

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