{"id":4473,"date":"2006-11-21T09:55:14","date_gmt":"2006-11-21T09:55:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/11\/faith-and-science.html"},"modified":"2006-11-21T09:55:14","modified_gmt":"2006-11-21T09:55:14","slug":"faith-and-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/11\/faith-and-science.html","title":{"rendered":"Faith and Science"},"content":{"rendered":"

They hate us. They really hate us.<\/a><\/p>\n

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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 \u201canti-Templeton\u201d), the La Jolla meeting, \u201cBeyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival,\u201d rapidly escalated into an invigorating intellectual free-for-all. (Unedited video of the proceedings will be posted on the Web at tsntv.org<\/span><\/a>.)<\/p>\n

A presentation by Joan Roughgarden, a Stanford University<\/span><\/a> biologist, on using biblical metaphor to ease her fellow Christians into accepting evolution (a mutation is \u201ca mustard seed of DNA<\/span><\/a>\u201d) was dismissed by Dr. Dawkins as \u201cbad poetry,\u201d while his own take-no-prisoners approach (religious education is \u201cbrainwashing\u201d and \u201cchild abuse\u201d) was condemned by the anthropologist Melvin J. Konner, who said he had \u201cnot a flicker\u201d of religious faith, as simplistic and uninformed.<\/p>\n

After enduring two days of talks in which the Templeton Foundation came under the gun as smudging the line between science and faith, Charles L. Harper Jr., its senior vice president, lashed back, denouncing what he called \u201cpop conflict books\u201d like Dr. Dawkins\u2019s \u201cGod Delusion,\u201d as \u201ccommercialized ideological scientism\u201d \u2014 promoting for profit the philosophy that science has a monopoly on truth. <\/p>\n

That brought an angry rejoinder from Richard P. Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center<\/span><\/a>, who said his own book, \u201cBlind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine,\u201d was written to counter \u201cgarbage research\u201d financed by Templeton on, for example, the healing effects of prayer.<\/p>\n

With atheists and agnostics outnumbering the faithful (a few believing scientists, like Francis S. Collins, author of \u201cThe Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief,\u201d 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. \u201cThe core of science is not a mathematical model; it is intellectual honesty,\u201d said Sam Harris, a doctoral student in neuroscience and the author of \u201cThe End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason\u201d and \u201cLetter to a Christian Nation.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cEvery religion is making claims about the way the world is,\u201d he said. \u201cThese are claims about the divine origin of certain books, about the virgin birth of certain people, about the survival of the human personality after death. These claims purport to be about reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

By shying away from questioning people\u2019s deeply felt beliefs, even the skeptics, Mr. Harris said, are providing safe harbor for ideas that are at best mistaken and at worst dangerous. \u201cI don\u2019t know how many more engineers and architects need to fly planes into our buildings before we realize that this is not merely a matter of lack of education or economic despair,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Dr. Weinberg, who famously wrote toward the end of his 1977 book on cosmology, \u201cThe First Three Minutes,\u201d that \u201cthe more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless,\u201d went a step further: \u201cAnything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

They hate us. They really hate us. 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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nFaith and Science - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/11\/faith-and-science.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Faith and Science - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"They hate us. They really hate us. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4473\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}