One question non-believers often get is “if religion isn’t true, how have so many people and the world’s greatest minds been religious?” This, obviously, does not prove anything. So you might imagine my frustration around 1999 when 20/20 first ran a small segment claiming that the “world’s smartest man” was on his way to proving God’s existence through complex mathematics and science that most people, even mathematicians, could barely understand. By the way, the reason mathematicians cannot understand it is not due to its complexity. Continue reading…
Archived entries for Intelligent Design
What else is there to do on the subway but to read? Well, people watch, yeah, but that gets boring, so I decided to start reading a copy of Chariots of the Gods? that I have had for a long time and never got around to reading. I don’t know if any of you have ever read this book that came out in 1968 but it is interesting in a I want to burn this book kind of way. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this book, it works under the premise that anything from human’s ancient past that is inexplicable must have been the work of extraterrestrials helping our ancestors. This includes, but is not limited to the Pyramids, large rocks in Peru, the precision of the Greek builders. The book also goes on to say that any reference to the gods in ancient works is obviously extraterrestrials and not just the imaginations of ancient peoples because apparently only modern people can come up with things such as Moby Dick, War of the Worlds, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Dune, Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, Frankenstein, The Munsters, Johhny Quest, blah blah blah.
I just watched a video presentation by Timothy Keller. He is a Presbyterian Minister who wrote a book entitled “The Reason for God.” I felt a sense of “Déjà vu all over again” while watching his presentation. I have read a lot of Christian apologist’s books. When you are raised an evangelical Christian and then declare yourself an atheist when you are 18 years old, you get a lot of these books as well-meaning gifts. I have a pretty awesome collection of books by Ravi Zacharias, Josh McDowell, Lee Strobel, C.S. Lewis, Norman Geisler, and others.
Keller starts with making the same old “atheists are mean” argument. We should respect human beings because because that is the way we would like to be treated. This does not mean we don’t have the right to criticize institutions that have incoherent beliefs or are abusive. This also does not mean that we have to give any degree of deference to ideas that are bad. Do we “respect” the ideas of astrologers? Any atheist who is nasty to religious people should stop. But the ongoing project of pointing out the philosophical problems and bad effects of religion should never cease. Continue reading…
I would like to propose an alternate (although wordy) title for this book. “The language of God: How a really good scientist can make many great discoveries and accept a changed version of a religion that is somewhat compatible with science.”
This book penned by Francis Collins spent many weeks on the NY Times bestseller list in 2006. Dr. Collins has done great things for humanity in his work on the human genome project. He is a medical doctor, the Director of the NIH and a member of the highly prestigious National Academy of Sciences. His goal in writing this book is to show that science and religion are compatible. In one sense this is true. Dr. Collins does not argue for a type Christianity that takes the bible literally, or even seriously. In fact, he mainly quotes the bible to show that if you read Genesis in a completely figurative sense it is compatible with science. From reading this book, it seems his Christianity is based more on the writings of C.S. Lewis than the words of the Bible or Jesus. Continue reading…
This is a really cool article. It doesn’t have much to do with atheism qua atheism, but it kind of relates to our earlier post “Scientists create synthetic cell.”
I think the problem of drawing the line between what is life and non-life is very interesting. This article also reminds me of “The most poetic thing we know about the universe.“
I read an interesting piece by biologist Michael Zimmerman on The Huffington Post yesterday. I’d like to respond.
First, I agree wholeheartedly with the goal of the Clergy Letter project. I think it is very important that clergy members convey the message that evolution is true, observable science based on facts, proven every day and vital for human knowledge and especially medical science that makes people’s lives better every day. I will always support and applaud anyone (not just a clergy member) who make this point clear and debunks Creationist and Intelligent Design falsehoods.
However, the title of the article is “Science and Religion: Respecting the differences.” The point is basically that we naturalists should stop being “intolerant” of religion. He says that science’s scope is limited to falsifiable observable hypotheses and religion is not an observable falsifiable hypothesis, therefore it is outside of the bounds of science. Examples of these “non-scientific” areas are aesthetics, morality and spirituality. I think this is wrong for the simple reason that most religious people don’t believe in a non-scientific god. Rather they believe in a god that does things in the world, therefore, it is possible (at least in principle) that this god’s “effects” can be tested. I believe that the god idea is nothing more than a failed hypothesis.
I don’t think Zimmerman’s argument has much credibility, as it is similar to Gould’s “Non-Overlapping Magisteria” (NOMA). It is true that science is limited by falsifiability and observability, but it’s scope has continually expanded since people stared observing the world. Religion says “I don’t know how this works-I guess god did it!” Science says “I don’t know how this works-let’s create a test to figure it out!” Science doesn’t have “sacred cows.” If scientists decided to “stay out” of the areas that religion has taken for itself, we would still live in a geocentric, astrology governed, superstitious world. It is because scientists have challenged religion’s ideas that we have scientific and technological advances.
Zimmerman is only half right that science has “nothing” to say about aesthetics, morality and spirituality. It is true that we don’t understand everything that is going on inside the human brain. But the current advances in neuroscience, including the “god helmet” experiments discussed earlier, do give us a good idea about what is going on inside the brain when we make decisions. Isn’t at least attempting to set up tests to understand what is going on in our minds better than just consigning these phenomena to magic spooks that supposedly animate our bodies?
My questions for Zimmerman are as follows: Didn’t religion have all the answers for law, government, science, technology, morality, and every other area of human experience until people used science to understand the way the world actually works? Why should we science-minded, rational naturalists, just shut up and let clergy tell us what their ancient traditions teach us about “aesthetics, morality and spirituality?”
Note: I have edited this post for content. Although I strive to write in a passionate manner, I don’t want to be disrespectful of people. I do disrespect some ideas I think are bad, but I strive to get rid of language that may offend people, i.e. make them think I am attacking them, and not their ideas. Also, I correct myself about NOMA. It does have credibility, in the sense that Gould was a working scientist and published a paper about the topic. However, I think that NOMA is wrong for the simple reason I stated above. Despite the “sophisticated theologians” ideas about their religious traditions, most people believe in a god that does things in the natural world. This is a scientific proposition, and thus needs to be tested with science.
In an article dated April 9, 2010, USA today reported that Old Testament scholar Bruce Waltke was asked to resign from the evangelical institution, Reformed Theological Seminary (RTS). The event that caused the resignation was a video released by the BioLogos foundation (a groups that “promotes and celebrates the integration of science and Christian faith”) in which Dr. Waltke stated the following:
“If the data is overwhelmingly in favor of evolution, to deny that reality will make us a cult … some odd group that is not really interacting with the world. And rightly so, because we are not using our gifts and trusting God’s Providence that brought us to this point of our awareness” Continue reading…
