A Free-for-All on Science and Religion (NYT:not a great headline-trivializes serious conf. discussio

[lindisfarne]

November 21, 2006
A Free-for-All on Science and Religion
By GEORGE JOHNSON
<snip>
Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.
<snip>
There has been no shortage of conferences in recent years, commonly organized by the Templeton Foundation, seeking to smooth over the differences between science and religion and ending in a metaphysical draw. Sponsored instead by the Science Network, an educational organization based in California, and underwritten by a San Diego investor, Robert Zeps (who acknowledged his role as a kind of “anti-Templeton”), the La Jolla meeting, “Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival,” rapidly escalated into an invigorating intellectual free-for-all. (Unedited video of the proceedings will be posted on the Web at tsntv.org.)
(NOTE: this is now available; worth it to view it in quicktime (I was better able to jump through the video in quicktime than in realplayer)
<snip>
That brought an angry rejoinder from Richard P. Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, who said his own book, “Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine,” was written to counter “garbage research” financed by Templeton on, for example, the healing effects of prayer.

With atheists and agnostics outnumbering the faithful (a few believing scientists, like Francis S. Collins, author of “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief,” were invited but could not attend), one speaker after another called on their colleagues to be less timid in challenging teachings about nature based only on scripture and belief. “The core of science is not a mathematical model; it is intellectual honesty,” said Sam Harris, a doctoral student in neuroscience and the author of “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason” and “Letter to a Christian Nation.”

<snip>
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/science/21belief.html?8dpc=&_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

I've watched 2/3 of the session 1 talks so far and they're well worth listening to (watching all sessions will keep you busy but well-informed!)

[bananas]

1. IIRC, Jonas Salk has described his own "Cosmic Consciousness" experience

He quite literally "saw the light".
"Enlightenment" in the most literal sense.

[greenman3610]

2. link to that?

[bananas]

3. Here's a NY Times article

I don't have a link, but elsewhere he's gone into more detail about his own experience,
he isn't being metaphorical when he says "as if a light went on".

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE4DB133AF936A15752C1A966958260&sec=health&pagewanted=all

<snip>

Salk is talking not just about Darwin's theory but about evolution in a much larger sense. Since the Big Bang, he believes, the universe has been kaleidoscopically unfolding according to certain deeply ingrained principles. "The life force" is a name he gives this motivating spirit, or "cosmic consciousness" -- what some people call God.

"There is a dynamism, a dynamic force that propels us into the future," he said. And a few highly evolved people like himself ("mutants," he sometimes calls them) are blessed with the ability to tap into the current. They can sense which way evolution is going and hurry it along.

<snip>

THERE IS A MOMENT in some people's lives when they are seized by an insight that changes forever the way they think about the world. It need not be an original idea, but it strikes with such force that it is hard not to think of it as one's own. In 1936, in a class at New York University College of Medicine, Salk was told that the classic way to immunize is to give a person a mild form of an infection. But with bacterial diseases like diphtheria and tetanus, the class was told, there was a safer way. The toxins emitted by the bacteria could be rendered harmless with formaldehyde. When injected into the bloodstream, they would cause immunity without infection. Then in the following lecture, the class was told that the only way to immunize against viruses was to actually experience the infection.

"It was like an epiphany," Salk said. "I remember exactly where I was sitting, exactly how I felt at the time -- as if a light went on. I said, 'Both statements can't be true.' " As he would later put it, it seemed clear that with both bacteria and viruses, "immunicity can be divorced from infectivity."

<snip>