A Free-for-All on Science and Religion

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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/sc...ce&oref=slogin



New York Times Science
By GEORGE JOHNSON Published: November 21, 2006

Maybe the pivotal moment came when Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in
physics, warned that "the world needs to wake up from its long
nightmare of religious belief," or when a Nobelist in chemistry, Sir
Harold Kroto, called for the John Templeton Foundation to give its next
$1.5 million prize for "progress in spiritual discoveries" to an
atheist - Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist whose
book "The God Delusion" is a national best-seller. Skip to next
paragraph Enlarge This Image Tad Majewski

Enlarge This Image Sandy Huffaker/The New York Times

'GOD DELUSION' The author Richard Dawkins, with a book, says people
are brainwashed to respect religion.

Or perhaps the turning point occurred at a more solemn moment, when
Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York
City and an adviser to the Bush administration on space exploration,
hushed the audience with heartbreaking photographs of newborns
misshapen by birth defects - testimony, he suggested, that blind
nature, not an intelligent overseer, is in control.

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.

Carolyn Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science
Institute in Boulder, Colo., called, half in jest, for the
establishment of an alternative church, with Dr. Tyson, whose powerful
celebration of scientific discovery had the force and cadence of a good
sermon, as its first minister.

She was not entirely kidding. "We should let the success of the
religious formula guide us," Dr. Porco said. "Let's teach our
children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its
incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and
awesome - and even comforting - than anything offered by any
scripture or God concept I know."

She displayed a picture taken by the Cassini spacecraft of Saturn and
its glowing rings eclipsing the Sun, revealing in the shadow a barely
noticeable speck called Earth.

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.)

A presentation by Joan Roughgarden, a Stanford University biologist, on
using biblical metaphor to ease her fellow Christians into accepting
evolution (a mutation is "a mustard seed of DNA") was dismissed by
Dr. Dawkins as "bad poetry," while his own take-no-prisoners
approach (religious education is "brainwashing" and "child
abuse") was condemned by the anthropologist Melvin J. Konner, who
said he had "not a flicker" of religious faith, as simplistic and
uninformed.

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 "pop conflict books" like Dr. Dawkins's "God
Delusion," as "commercialized ideological scientism" -
promoting for profit the philosophy that science has a monopoly on
truth.

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."

"Every religion is making claims about the way the world is," he
said. "These 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."

By shying away from questioning people's deeply felt beliefs, even
the skeptics, Mr. Harris said, are providing safe harbor for ideas that
are at best mistaken and at worst dangerous. "I don't 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," he said.

Dr. Weinberg, who famously wrote toward the end of his 1977 book on
cosmology, "The First Three Minutes," that "the more the universe
seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless," went a step
further: "Anything 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."


A Free-for-All on Science and Religion

(Page 2 of 2)

With a rough consensus that the grand stories of evolution by natural
selection and the blossoming of the universe from the Big Bang are
losing out in the intellectual marketplace, most of the discussion came
down to strategy. How can science fight back without appearing to be
just one more ideology?

"There are six billion people in the world," said Francisco J.
Ayala, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California,
Irvine, and a former Roman Catholic priest. "If we think that we are
going to persuade them to live a rational life based on scientific
knowledge, we are not only dreaming - it is like believing in the
fairy godmother."

"People need to find meaning and purpose in life," he said. "I
don't think we want to take that away from them."

Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University
known for his staunch opposition to teaching creationism, found himself
in the unfamiliar role of playing the moderate. "I think we need to
respect people's philosophical notions unless those notions are
wrong," he said.

"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."

"With a few notable exceptions," he said, "the viewpoints have
run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or
only with a baseball bat?"

His response to Mr. Harris and Dr. Dawkins was scathing. "I think
that you and Richard are remarkably apt mirror images of the extremists
on the other side," he said, "and that you generate more fear and
hatred of science."

Dr. Tyson put it more gently. "Persuasion isn't always 'Here are
the facts - you're an idiot or you are not,' " he said. "I
worry that your methods" - he turned toward Dr. Dawkins - "how
articulately barbed you can be, end up simply being ineffective, when
you have much more power of influence."

Chastened for a millisecond, Dr. Dawkins replied, "I gratefully
accept the rebuke."

In the end it was Dr. Tyson's celebration of discovery that stole the
show. Scientists may scoff at people who fall back on explanations
involving an intelligent designer, he said, but history shows that
"the most brilliant people who ever walked this earth were doing the
same thing." When Isaac Newton's "Principia Mathematica" failed
to account for the stability of the solar system - why the planets
tugging at one another's orbits have not collapsed into the Sun -
Newton proposed that propping up the mathematical mobile was "an
intelligent and powerful being."

It was left to Pierre Simon Laplace, a century later, to take the next
step. Hautily telling Napoleon that he had no need for the God
hypothesis, Laplace extended Newton's mathematics and opened the way
to a purely physical theory.

"What concerns me now is that even if you're as brilliant as
Newton, you reach a point where you start basking in the majesty of God
and then your discovery stops - it just stops," Dr. Tyson said.
"You're no good anymore for advancing that frontier, waiting for
somebody else to come behind you who doesn't have God on the brain
and who says: 'That's a really cool problem. I want to solve it.'
"

"Science is a philosophy of discovery; intelligent design is a
philosophy of ignorance," he said. "Something fundamental is going
on in people's minds when they confront things they don't
understand."

He told of a time, more than a millennium ago, when Baghdad reigned as
the intellectual center of the world, a history fossilized in the night
sky. The names of the constellations are Greek and Roman, Dr. Tyson
said, but two-thirds of the stars have Arabic names. The words
"algebra" and "algorithm" are Arabic.

But sometime around 1100, a dark age descended. Mathematics became seen
as the work of the devil, as Dr. Tyson put it. "Revelation replaced
investigation," he said, and the intellectual foundation collapsed.

He did not have to say so, but the implication was that maybe a
century, maybe a millennium from now, the names of new planets, stars
and galaxies might be Chinese. Or there may be no one to name them at
all.

Before he left to fly back home to Austin, Dr. Weinberg seemed to
soften for a moment, describing religion a bit fondly as a crazy old
aunt.

"She tells lies, and she stirs up all sorts of mischief and she's
getting on, and she may not have that much life left in her, but she
was beautiful once," he lamented. "When she's gone, we may miss
her."

Dr. Dawkins wasn't buying it. "I won't miss her at all," he said.
"Not a scrap. Not a smidgen."

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

(Will "she" be lamented as Dr. Weinberg suggests? What is forecast at
Rev. 18:10, 16 and 19?)

GO AWAY..... this is a group about ponds not some nutcase religious beliefs.
Thankyou

PatC wrote:

GO AWAY..... this is a group about ponds not some nutcase religious
beliefs. Thankyou

Please don't do that. If you respond in any way, it only encourages them.
My filters are good enough to have blocked the post you responded to - but
you had to give me a complete copy of it, anyway.
--
derek