A Free-for-All on Science and Religion

[Swede]

“The Earth isn’t 6,000 years old,” he said. “The Kennewick man was not a Umatilla Indian.” But whether there really is some kind of supernatural being — Dr. Krauss said he was a nonbeliever — is a question unanswerable by theology, philosophy or even science. “Science does not make it impossible to believe in God,” Dr. Krauss insisted. “We should recognize that fact and live with it and stop being so pompous about it.”

That was just the kind of accommodating attitude that drove Dr. Dawkins up the wall. “I am utterly fed up with the respect that we — all of us, including the secular among us — are brainwashed into bestowing on religion,” he said. “Children are systematically taught that there is a higher kind of knowledge which comes from faith, which comes from revelation, which comes from scripture, which comes from tradition, and that it is the equal if not the superior of knowledge that comes from real evidence.”

By the third day, the arguments had become so heated that Dr. Konner was reminded of “a den of vipers.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/science/21belief.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ei=5087%0A&em&en=fe3f5ff4e8b79080&ex=1164258000

[Vorta]

1. mencken

The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always
made, not by theologians, but by scientists unable to shake off
altogether the piety absorbed with their mothers' milk. The theologians,
with no such dualism addling their wits, are smart enough to see that
the two things are implacably and eternally antagonistic, and that any
attempt to thrust them into one bag is bound to result in one
swallowing the other. The scientists who undertake this miscegenation
always end by succumbing to religion; after a Millikan has been
discoursing five minutes it becomes apparent that he is speaking in
the character of a Christian Sunday-school scholar, not of a scientist.
The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given
idea, however fundamental it may seem to be, for a better one; the
essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and
immutable. To be sure, theology is always yielding a little to the
progress of knowledge, and only a Holy Roller in the mountains of
Tennessee would dare to preach today what the popes preached in the
Thirteenth Century, but this yielding is always done grudgingly, and
thus lingers a good while behind the event. So far as I am aware even
the most liberal theologian of today still gags at scientific concepts
that were already commonplaces in my schooldays.

Thus such a thing as a truly enlightened Christian is hard to imagine.
Either he is enlightened or he is Christian, and the louder he protests
that he is for former the more apparent it becomes that he is really
the latter. A Catholic priest who devotes himself to seismology or some
other such safe science may become a competent technician and hence
a useful man, but it is ridiculous to call him a scientist so long as he
still believes in the virgin birth, the atonement or transubstantiation.
It is, to be sure, possible to imagine any of these dogmas being true,
but only at the cost of heaving all science overboard as rubbish. The
priest's reasons for believing in them is not only not scientific; it is
violently anti-scientific. Here he is exactly on all fours with a
believer in fortune-telling, Christian Science or chiropractic.

[struggle4progress]

4. The 35 Lunar Craters Named to Honor Jesuit Scientists

http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/jmac/sj/scientists/lunacrat.htm

[MindPilot]

2. To paraphrase Adlai Stevenson

When they stop telling lies about science we will stop telling the truth about religion.

[struggle4progress]

5. How about a real quote from Stevenson? "My mother was a Republican and a Unitarian, my father was a

"My mother was a Republican and a Unitarian, my father was a Democrat and a Presbyterian. I wound up in his party and her church, which seemed an expedient solution to the problem."
http://www.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/adlaistevenson.html

[msongs]

3. have faith! if I say it is true, it IS true, especially if I write it down. Wanna buy my book?

it is absolutely true because my mommy said it is.

Msongs
www.msongs.com/political-shirts.htm

[struggle4progress]

6. Einstein:

... Does there truly exist an insuperable contradiction between religion and science? Can religion be superseded by science? The answers to these questions have, for centuries, given rise to considerable dispute and, indeed, bitter fighting. Yet, in my own mind there can be no doubt that in both cases a dispassionate consideration can only lead to a negative answer. What complicates the solution, however, is the fact that while most people readily agree on what is meant by "science," they are likely to differ on the meaning of "religion." ...

When we consider the various existing religions as to their essential substance, that is, divested of their myths, they do not seem to me to differ as basically from each other as the proponents of the "relativistic" or conventional theory wish us to believe. And this is by no means surprising. For the moral attitudes of a people that is supported by religion need always aim at preserving and promoting the sanity and vitality of the community and its individuals, since otherwise this community is bound to perish. A people that were to honor falsehood, defamation, fraud, and murder would be unable, indeed, to subsist for very long.

When confronted with a specific case, however, it is no easy task to determine clearly what is desirable and what should be eschewed, just as we find it difficult to decide what exactly it is that makes good painting or good music. It is something that may be felt intuitively more easily than rationally comprehended. Likewise, the great moral teachers of humanity were, in a way, artistic geniuses in the art of living. In addition to the most elementary precepts directly motivated by the preservation of life and the sparing of unnecessary suffering, there are others to which, although they are apparently not quite commensurable to the basic precepts, we nevertheless attach considerable importance. Should truth, for instance, be sought unconditionally even where its attainment and its accessibility to all would entail heavy sacrifices in toil and happiness? There are many such questions which, from a rational vantage point, cannot easily be answered or cannot be answered at all. Yet, I do not think that the so-called "relativistic" viewpoint is correct, not even when dealing with the more subtle moral decisions ...

The interpretation of religion, as here advanced, implies a dependence of science on the religious attitude, a relation which, in our predominantly materialistic age, is only too easily overlooked. While it is true that scientific results are entirely independent from religious or moral considerations, those individuals to whom we owe the great creative achievements of science were all of them imbued with the truly religious conviction that this universe of ours is something perfect and susceptible to the rational striving for knowledge. If this conviction had not been a strongly emotional one and if those searching for knowledge had not been inspired by Spinoza's Amor Dei Intellectualis, they wouid hardly have been capable of that untiring devotion which alone enables man to attain his greatest achievements.

http://www.einsteinandreligion.com/irrec.html