TruthBook Religious News Blog

It began about three years ago, Francis Collins recalled, with a series of lectures at Harvard University.

Hundreds turned out to hear him, the nation's leading geneticist, speak on a topic normally considered taboo territory for a trained scientist: spirituality, and its relationship to science.

Pen soon met paper on a book that, in some ways, Collins began writing ever since he abandoned atheism and reached for religion as a young doctor 30 years ago.

"The Language of God," a book that challenges religion and science as it embraces them both, reached bookstores this month, as the debate between pure science and pure belief reaches ever-more shrill tones.

Collins is making his rounds in the media, appearing in Time magazine this month, on the Charlie Rose show Tuesday night and, on Aug. 5, in his humble hometown of Staunton.

His book's premise — that both disciplines can enlighten each other — describes Collins' own quest to walk a middle path between Genesis and Darwin, and his desire to ease the sense of conflict between the twin towers that dominate his worldview.

"I'm troubled by the way in which the discussion of science and faith has been dominated by extreme voices on both ends of the spectrum," said Collins, a Robert E. Lee High School graduate who, as director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, helped create the road map of the human gene in 2003.

"There are many of us who live in harmony in the middle of this spectrum."

Scientists have long fallen into a camp dominated by a clinical sort of atheism that discourages religious belief as too soft for science, but substitutes science as a sort of faith, he said. Meanwhile, a backlash by Christian fundamentalists who misinterpret scientific discoveries, he fears, could dampen scientific inquiry.

Collins bridges the gap by what he calls BioLogos, or theistic evolution.

To him, the Darwinian processes that shaped life over billions of years of evolution are beyond debate. Yet to the believer's mind — his mind — they can reinforce faith in a miraculous creator, he said.

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Sunday, July 16, 2006

The modern world has proved hospitable to religious belief

The world is indeed more modern: It enjoys more political freedom, more democracy and more education than perhaps at any time in history. According to Freedom House, the number of "free" and "partly free" countries jumped from 93 in 1975 to 147 in 2005. UNESCO estimates that adult literacy rates doubled in sub-Saharan Africa, Arab countries and South and West Asia between 1970 and 2000. The average share of people in developing countries living on less than a dollar a day fell from 28 percent to 22 percent between 1990 and 2002, according to World Bank estimates.

If people are wealthier, more educated and enjoy greater political freedom, one might assume they also would have become more secular. They haven't. In fact, the period in which economic and political modernization has been most intense – the last 30 to 40 years – has witnessed a jump in religious vitality around the world.

The world's largest religions have expanded at a rate that exceeds global population growth. Consider the two largest Christian faiths, Catholicism and Protestantism, and the two largest non-Christian religions, Islam and Hinduism. According to the World Christian Encyclopedia, a greater proportion of the world's population adhered to these religious systems in 2000 than a century earlier. At the beginning of the 20th century, a bare majority of the world's people, precisely 50 percent, were Catholic, Protestant, Muslim or Hindu. At the beginning of the 21st century, nearly 64 percent belonged to these four religious groupings, and the proportion may be close to 70 percent by 2025.

The World Values Survey, which covers 85 percent of the world's population, confirms religion's growing vitality. According to scholars Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, "The world as a whole now has more people with traditional religious views than ever before – and they constitute a growing proportion of the world's population."

Not only is religious observance spreading, but it also is becoming more devout. The most populous and fastest-growing countries in the world, including the United States, are witnessing marked increases in religiosity. In Brazil, China, Nigeria, Russia, South Africa and the United States, religiosity became more vigorous between 1990 and 2001. Between 1987 and 1997, surveys by the Times Mirror Center and the Pew Research Center registered increases of 10 percent or more in the proportions of Americans surveyed who "strongly agreed" that God existed, that they would have to answer for their sins before God, that God performs miracles and that prayer was an important part of their daily life. Even in Europe, a secular stronghold, there have been surprising upticks in religiosity.

By Timothy Samuel Shah, a senior fellow in religion and world affairs at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. His e-mail address is tshah@pewforum.org

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Friday, July 07, 2006

Poll: Fewer voters choose based on faith

Most traditional barriers to religion in presidential elections have toppled, a new Los Angeles Times / Bloomberg poll has found. In particular, the survey to be released today showed that anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism are fading as voter taboos.

But uneasiness about some religions persists. Thirty-seven percent of those questioned said they would not vote for a Mormon presidential candidate - and 54 percent said no to the prospect of a Muslim in the White House.

In addition, 21 percent said they could not vote for an evangelical Christian. Only 15 percent replied that they would not vote for a Jewish presidential candidate. Just 10 percent of those polled were unwilling to cast ballots for a Catholic chief executive.

"This clearly shows that the old Protestant / Catholic / Jewish distinction has largely eroded in American politics," said David Campbell, a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. "That doesn't mean that candidates from religious groups that might be considered to be exotic, in the way that Catholics once were thought to be exotic, wouldn't necessarily be confronted with challenges."

The nationwide survey of 1,321 adults was conducted June 24-27. The poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, poll director Susan Pinkus said.

With no likely Muslim candidate on the presidential horizon, the poll numbers present the greatest threat to a potential contender from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (as the Mormon Church is formally known). Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is a Mormon who is exploring a run for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.

"It is something he will have to address," said Merle Black, a professor of politics at Emory University. "It will be a challenge. It doesn't necessarily kill him as a candidate, but he may have to talk in more detail than he ever has before about his faith."

His religion apparently was no detriment in Massachusetts in 2002, when he easily won election as governor. Massachusetts is one of the most heavily Catholic states in the country, and also one of the most Democratic.

In a Roper poll from June 1960, 35 percent of respondents said either that it might be better not to have a Catholic president, or that they would be against it. Then-Sen. John F. Kennedy addressed the Southern Leadership Conference on the subject of his religion that September, and was elected president two months later.

But Emory University political scientist Black rejected the comparison to earlier political biases against Catholic or Jewish candidates. "I don't think it is of the same status, because Mormonism has never been seen as a mainstream religion," Black said.

According to Campbell, "The question facing Mitt Romney is, will he be the Mormons' Al Smith - who was the first Catholic ever to run for president in 1928, and went down in flames. Or will he be the Mormons' John F. Kennedy?"

LOS ANGELES TIMES

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It's all about me

A survey this week revealed that we're all becoming rampant individualists. But what are the social consequences of this mass outbreak of selfishness?

This week, the Henley Centre published its annual findings for a question it has been asking us for 20 years: "Do you think the quality of life in Britain is best improved by:

a) looking after the community's interests instead of our own; or

b) looking after ourselves, which ultimately raises standards for all?"

From 1994 to 2000, the overwhelming majority chose a. But since then, the gap has been closing. This year, for the first time in a decade, a majority (53%) chose b.

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Sunday, July 02, 2006

Study: Americans lonelier than ever

A sociological study from Duke and the University of Arizona found that most Americans have only two close confidantes, the New York Times reported Sunday.

With the rise of the Internet, an increase in work hours and long commutes, and technology that discourages face-to-face interaction, the average American's connection to his or her community is weakening, the Times reported from the study.

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Church-goers lead way when it comes to charity

Church-goers give about twice as much to charity as non-believers, with people aged 25 to 44 the most generous, according to research on donations in Australia.

But they are more likely to support specific programs such as aid projects than simply to put money in a collection, which is why many individual churches are struggling financially, according to researcher Philip Hughes of the Christian Research Association.

The association has just published its findings about giving money, based on a government report into philanthropy published in October, the National Church Life Survey, and other research. Donations by individual Australians nearly doubled between 1997 and 2004.

"Australians generally are more wealthy, they have an increased capacity to give," Dr Hughes said yesterday. "In churches, those who were nominal have tended to drop out, so you are left with the more committed group who give more but there's fewer of them."

Individuals gave $7.7 billion to charity in 2004, not counting money given following the Asian tsunami, with 87 per cent making donations averaging $424. Business donated $3.3 billion. Among people who profess any religion, 89 per cent made donations, averaging $460 in the year, while 84 per cent of non-church goers made donations, averaging $223.

About 35 per cent of Christians "tithe" (donate 10 per cent of their income), and another 25 per cent give 5 to 9 per cent.