TruthBook Religious News Blog

Origin of debate: On the bicentennial of his birth, confronting Darwin's theory and its impact on faith
By Brett Buckner
Staff Writer
02-07-2009

This is a very good article - too lengthy to reproduce here, but just click on "external source" to access the complete article.

His name alone is inflammatory, sparking emotionally charged responses ranging from fury to enthusiasm. Its mere mention in public is liable to incite a heated debate the volume of which may rise above all surrounding conversations.

Charles Darwin.

Though none have ever met him and few have cracked the spine of any of his famous works — namely On the Origin of Species and Descent of Man — everyone has an opinion about where Darwin ranks among the iconoclasts of history.

To some he stands alongside great thinkers like Copernicus, Einstein, Socrates, Galileo and Freud. Others are less kind, labeling him a devil's advocate; a corrupting force whose ideas of evolution contradict tightly guarded biblical beliefs and challenge the very existence of God.

The truth, however, lies somewhere in between.

But whether demonized or deified, Charles Darwin is credited with having forever altered the way human beings perceive their place in the universe.

"If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone ever had, I'd give it to Darwin," writes philosopher Daniel Dennett in his 1995 book Darwin's Dangerous Idea. "In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law."

Feb. 12 is Darwin's 200th birthday and 2009 marks the 150th anniversary of his masterpiece, On the Origin of Species. But before the controversy, the legal wrangling, religious posturing and scientific bullying … there was a ship named the HMS Beagle...

Labels: Brett Buckner, Charles Darwin, Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, evolution

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Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Einstein's God, or The Hopes for Secular Spirituality

Deepak Chopra
Posted August 27, 2007

It came as a shock when the letters of Mother Teresa, long concealed by the Church, recently came to light. Suddenly it was revealed that this saintly icon -- who is on the way to becoming an official saint -- had anguishing doubts about the existence of God.

Even though she was an outsized personality and a model of immense compassion, Mother Teresa wasn't all that different from ordinary believers who come to the conclusion that God is a myth, perhaps even a fantasy created out of whole cloth. A rash of prominent books by atheists like Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins have pounded away on the theme of delusion and fraud. Using science as their chief bulwark, they insist that religion serves the purpose of blocking reality. A rational secular society is their ideal, and their fervent hope is that religious yearning will be seen for what it is, a childish, irrational, and ultimately hopeless drive. Everyone can see the result. Neither side, the atheists or the religionists, have won the argument; they've simply become more entrenched in their original position.

All of which brings me to a revelatory chapter in another bestseller, Walter Isaacson's Einstein: His Life and Universe, which dwells on Einstein's view of God more completely than anything I've read before. At first the story of Einstein's spirituality conforms to any other twentieth-century skeptic. As a young man he rejected on logical grounds the literal truth of events recounted in the Old Testament. He moved beyond orthodox faith while struggling personally with his Jewishness. Being a scientist, he could have completed the easy trajectory then and there, ending up where Dawkins is, as a debunker of outworn superstition who saw the light of reason and used science as a weapon to combat the vestiges of belief in God.

Fortunately, Einstein was also a great mind, and his greatness took the form of a wider vision than either the religionists or the atheists who surrounded him. He continued his spiritual journey in a fascinating way. By stages he reconciled faith and science, not by offering a compromise that straddled the fence between these opposites, nor by saying that each side was right in its own sphere. Einstein took the bolder step of trying to understand if a single reality encompasses both drives in human beings, the drive to believe in a higher reality and the drive to explain Nature in terms of laws and processes that operate seemingly independent of God. Time, space, and gravity don't seem to need God at all, yet without God the universe seems random and meaningless. Einstein expressed this dichotomy in a famous saying: "Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind."

I'd like to retrace Einstein's lifelong spiritual path because what he was searching for -- and never quite found -- was secular spirituality, and in many ways that is our best hope today. Instead of falling back on traditional religion, which has been shattered by science and the horrors of the twentieth century, or erasing spirituality in favor of stark materialism, secular spirituality looks at the whole of life in a different way. God and reason are allowed not simply to co-exist but to fulfill a single vision. This vision is rooted in consciousness. Either we think like God or he thinks like us. If neither is true, there cannot be a connection between us. Einstein's ultimate goal, he said, was to understand God's mind, and to do that, the human mind must be explained first. After all, our minds are the filter through which we perceive reality, and if that filter is distorted and misunderstood, there's no possibility of grasping God's mind.

Einstein's spiritual ambition was enormous but largely private. However, thanks to his world fame as the most intelligent person alive (true or not), people flocked to hear what he had to say on every great issue, scientific, religious, even political (hence his involvement in Zionism and the development of the atomic bomb). In the next few installments of this post we'll see how he came to terms with a God that was unknown to the Judeo-Christian tradition but was still alive and real. By following a great man's thought processes, we might find a way to escape the deadlock between faith and science ourselves.

(to be continued)

Labels: Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Deepak Chopra, God, Mother Theresa, religion, Richard Dawkins, science, Walter Isaacson