The forum is complaining at me to post moar, so here goes.
I'm getting kind of sick of people insisting on folding together science and religion. They address completely different issues. For example, from Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate:
"The longest-standing right-wing opposition to the sciences of human nature comes from the religious sectors of the coalition, especially Christian Fundamentalism. Anyone who doesn't believe in evolution is certainly not going to believe in the evolution of the mind, and anyone who believes in an immaterial soul is certainly not going to believe that thought and feeling consist of information processing in the tissues of the brain." (p.128)
That's funny, because the bolded section describes exactly what I think.
To be fair, I think that many Christians don't think like I do and that it's fair to criticize them for wanting to stop science so that they can preserve morality. But that's just the other side of the same token -- it's another form of conflating religion and science. Also, I find the people who say that modern science waylays the need for God equally silly.
Science will study things that are observable and follow regular patterns. Religion will study things that are faith-based and allow for the work of supernatural. There is no reason for a rational person to not benefit from the work of both.
When school boards argue over teaching Creationism in science classrooms, or demand that evolution-endorsing textbooks come with warnings that it is "just a theory", that comes out of children coming home with the misguided idea that science has destroyed God. [Or sometimes just dumb parents.] It reflects a much deeper problem: that our kids memorize griploads of science-oid errata like the atomic number of potassium, and wrap their minds only around a few basic theories created by science; nobody teaches them what science actually is.
As a scientist and a religious man, I fear for the future of both disciplines.
I'm getting kind of sick of people insisting on folding together science and religion. They address completely different issues. For example, from Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate:
"The longest-standing right-wing opposition to the sciences of human nature comes from the religious sectors of the coalition, especially Christian Fundamentalism. Anyone who doesn't believe in evolution is certainly not going to believe in the evolution of the mind, and anyone who believes in an immaterial soul is certainly not going to believe that thought and feeling consist of information processing in the tissues of the brain." (p.128)
That's funny, because the bolded section describes exactly what I think.
To be fair, I think that many Christians don't think like I do and that it's fair to criticize them for wanting to stop science so that they can preserve morality. But that's just the other side of the same token -- it's another form of conflating religion and science. Also, I find the people who say that modern science waylays the need for God equally silly.
Science will study things that are observable and follow regular patterns. Religion will study things that are faith-based and allow for the work of supernatural. There is no reason for a rational person to not benefit from the work of both.
When school boards argue over teaching Creationism in science classrooms, or demand that evolution-endorsing textbooks come with warnings that it is "just a theory", that comes out of children coming home with the misguided idea that science has destroyed God. [Or sometimes just dumb parents.] It reflects a much deeper problem: that our kids memorize griploads of science-oid errata like the atomic number of potassium, and wrap their minds only around a few basic theories created by science; nobody teaches them what science actually is.
As a scientist and a religious man, I fear for the future of both disciplines.
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