TruthBook Religious News Blog

By The Staff at wowOwow.com

God may be loving some recent religion-related poll results. A Harris Interactive survey released today shows that more Americans believe in an Almighty presence than in Darwin’s theory of evolution and that the majority of the public believes that the Virgin Mary gave birth to baby Jesus.

The findings, compiled from 2,126 U.S. adults, included:

— 80% of adult Americans believe in God

— 75% believe in miracles

— 73% believe in heaven

— 71% believe in angels

— 71% believe that Jesus is God or the Son of God

— 70% believe in the resurrection of Jesus

— 62% believe in hell

— 61% believe in virgin birth (Jesus born to Virgin Mary)

— 47% believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution

— 36% believe in UFOs

Click here for more of the poll’s findings.

American’s aren’t the only ones to believe in virgin birth. Another poll out today from theology think-tank group Theos has found that more than a third of Britons believe that the virgin birth of Jesus Christ really happened. In the poll carried out by ComRes on behalf of Theos, 34% of people agreed that the statement "Jesus was born to a virgin called Mary" was historically accurate, while only 32% said they believed it was fictional.

What’s also interesting is women — who experience the agonizing pains of birthing — were more likely to believe in the virgin birth (39%), compared to 29% of men, who just stand in the hospital room sweating.

Labels: Americans, angels, Darwin, God, heaven, Jesus, miracles, virgin birth

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Monday, June 09, 2008

Book Review: Science from a different perspective

Jonathan Davies
Gauntlet News

June 05, 2008

Book Review: A University of Calgary professor is trying to bring science and religion closer together. In his latest book, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion, Dr. Stuart Kauffman argues society needs a new worldview that accepts the inability to fully understand the universe through science alone.

For over four centuries, pioneering scientists such as Galileo, Newton and Descartes promoted a philosophy called reductionism, the view that all phenomena can be reduced to and understood in terms of interactions between basic particles governed by natural law. This view suggests that life can be reduced from biology to biochemistry to chemistry and eventually to physics. However, Kauffman finds a problem with this view.

"Our biosphere cannot be completely understood or predicted by natural law," explained Kauffman. "Science leaves a gap in our understanding."

The problem with reductionism, he argues, is that it cannot predict biocomplexity-- when biological systems emerge that are not created by a single pattern or rule. Darwinian preadaptation, an example in his book, is when existing anatomical features evolve to serve a new purpose that cannot be predicted based on biological, biochemical or physical laws. In nature, this has been illustrated by dinosaurs using feathers for insulation or sweat glands evolving into mammary glands. Thus, argues Kauffman, science alone is an inadequate tool to explain our evolving universe.

"If we accept that Darwinian preadaptations cannot be reduced to physics, then what we've believed for the past 400 years is wrong," he said.

As the world becomes smaller, the rift between science and religion seems to widen. Religious and scientific fundamentalism is becoming increasingly common as cultures and ideals clash. Kauffman maintained recent books by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, which have been highly critical of religion, even suggesting that a belief in God is a delusion, are not helping matters.

"These books aren't doing any good," he suggested. "It's time to move past some of these old ideas and find the middle ground. We have to rethink everything. We need a second enlightenment."

Traditional Christianity credits a creator God as the sculptor of our world. By contrast, Kauffman believes that honoring the emergent creativity of the universe is far more awe-inspiring than believing that a supernatural God created the universe in six days.

"Do we need the Creator or just the creativity?" he asked. "We need to consider that emergence and biocomplexity is the creativity of a fully natural God."

He added that the concept of God and the sacred values that God represents have also evolved along with what devotees collectively consider sacred.

"The [book] title is controversial as hell," said Kauffman. "But how many gods have we worshipped down the eons? It seems to me that we're telling God what we consider sacred, not the other way around. Perhaps it's time to consciously consider what we hold sacred for ourselves."

A recent book launch tour in the United States has received a warm reception. Afterwards, Kauffman will be returning to Canada to continue his research as director of the U of C's Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics. He plans to expand on his theories with research of biocomplexity and the physics of the origins of life. For the moment, Kauffman hopes that his proposal of a marriage between science and God will provide a starting point for a new scientific world view, although he acknowledges that this concept may upset some.

"If this view holds, we will undergo a major transformation in our understanding of science," he said. "If we reinvent the sacred to mean the creativity in the universe, biosphere, human history and culture, are we not also inevitably invited to honour all life on the planet that sustains it?"

Labels: Darwin, God, Jonathan Davies, reductionism, sacred, Stuart Kauffman

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Sunday, March 30, 2008

Faith news

March 29, 2008

— One in every ten voters in America believes Barack Obama to be a Muslim, a survey has revealed. White evangelical Protestants and Americans from the Southern, mid-Western and rural states are the most likely to hold this view, according to the poll commissioned by the Pew Research Centre.

— A hotel in Nashville is removing the Bible from its bedrooms and offering guests a “spiritual” reading menu instead. Reports in the Tennessee press say the Hotel Preston will invite guests to call room service to ask for the religious book of their choice. The selection offered will include the Koran, Book of Mormon, the Torah, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism as well as the King James Bible. “Our guests come from different places and they definitely come from different cultures, backgrounds, ethnicities, so we want everyone to feel welcomed and comfortable,” said Dina Nishioka, public relations director for Hotel Preston.

— A German security agency has published a teenage comic illustrated with Manga cartoon sketches as an attempt to combat the appeal of Islamic extremists. One hundred thousand copies of Andi, a comic relating the adventures of a schoolboy with a Muslim girlfriend who is influenced by a radical preacher, have been published and distributed to every secondary school in Germany. They have been produced by the intelligence and security department of the interior ministry of North-Rhine Westphalia. Spokesperson Hartwig Moller explained: “We had to make clear we weren't aiming against Muslims, but only those people who want to misuse Islam for political aims." The magazine is intended for use in citizenship and religion lessons for 12-16 year olds.

— Yale University is running a course on the theology of Harry Potter. Danielle Tumminio, a graduate from Yale Divinity School has devised a study programme that examines Christian themes of sin, evil and resurrection in JK Rowling's seven Harry Potter books. She described the course as “a critical endeavour” adding that she did not wish to “indoctrinate students.”

— A church magazine in Canada has become the first sponsor in North America of a travelling exhibition devoted to the life and work of Charles Darwin. David Wilson, editor of The United Church Observer, decided after learning the exhibition had attracted no corporate funding that the magazine should sponsor the exhibition. “There is nothing in the exhibit that threatens or diminishes religion. If anything, it shines a light on the inherent beauty and wonder of a creation that is constantly and eternally evolving,” he explained. Darwin: The Evolution Revolution is on display at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto until until August 4 and will later come to the Natural History Museum in London.

— The governing body of the Church of Wales is to vote on whether women should be ordained as bishops. The Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan said: "I do not personally see how, having agreed to ordaining women to both the diaconate and priesthood, the church can logically exclude women from the episcopate.” The vote will take place on Wednesday when the governing body is due to meet.

Labels: Barack Obama, Bible, bishops, Darwin, Harry Potter, Islam, women

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Thursday, November 29, 2007

Debunking the Galileo Myth

By Dinesh D'Souza
Monday, November 26, 2007

Many people have uncritically accepted the idea that there is a longstanding war between science and religion. We find this war advertised in many of the leading atheist tracts such as those by Richard Dawkins, Victor Stenger, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. Every few months one of the leading newsweeklies does a story on this subject. Little do the peddlers of this paradigm realize that they are victims of nineteenth-century atheist propaganda.

About a hundred years ago, two anti-religious bigots named John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White wrote books promoting the idea of an irreconcilable conflict between science and God. The books were full of facts that have now been totally discredited by scholars. But the myths produced by Draper and Dickson continue to be recycled. They are believed by many who consider themselves educated, and they even find their way into the textbooks. In this article I expose several of these myths, focusing especially on the Galileo case, since Galileo is routinely portrayed as a victim of religious persecution and a martyr to the cause of science.

The Flat Earth Fallacy: According to the atheist narrative, the medieval Christians all believed that the earth was flat until the brilliant scientists showed up in the modern era to prove that it was round. In reality, educated people in the Middle Ages knew that the earth was round. In fact, the ancient Greeks in the fifth century B.C. knew the earth was a globe.

Huxley’s Mythical Put-Down: We read in various books about the great debate between Darwin’s defender Thomas Henry Huxley and poor Bishop Wilberforce. As the story goes, Wilberforce inquired of Huxley whether he was descended from an ape on his father or mother’s side, and Huxley winningly responded that he would rather be descended from an ape than from an ignorant bishop who was misled people about the findings of science. A dramatic denouement, to be sure, but the only problem is that it never happened.

Darwin Against the Christians: As myth would have it, when Darwin’s published his Origin of Species, the scientists lined up on one side and the Christians lined up on the other side. In reality, there were good scientific arguments made both in favor of Darwin and against him. The British naturalist Richard Owen, the Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz, and the renowned physicist Lord Kelvin all had serious reservations about Darwin’s theory. Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb points out that while some Christians found evolution inconsistent with the Bible, many Christians rallied to Darwin’s side.

The Experiment Galileo Didn’t Do: We read in textbooks about how Galileo went to the Tower of Pisa and dropped light and heavy bodies to the ground. He discovered that they hit the ground at the same time, thus refuting centuries of idle medieval theorizing. Actually Galileo didn’t do any such experiments; one of his students did. The student discovered what we all can discover by doing similar experiments ourselves: the heavy bodies hit the ground first! As historian of science Thomas Kuhn points out, it is only in the absence of air resistance that all bodies hit the ground at the same time.

Galileo Was the First to Prove Heliocentrism: Actually, Copernicus advanced the heliocentric theory that the sun, not the earth, is at the center, and that the earth goes around the sun. He did this more than half a century before Galileo. But Copernicus had no direct evidence, and he admitted that there were serious obstacles from experience that told against his theory. For instance, if the earth is moving rapidly, why don’t objects thrown up into the air land a considerable distance away from their starting point? Galileo defended heliocentrism, but one of his most prominent arguments was wrong. Galileo argued that the earth’s regular motion sloshes around the water in the oceans and explains the tides.

The Church Dogmatically Opposed the New Science: In reality, the Church was the leading sponsor of the new science and Galileo himself was funded by the church. The leading astronomers of the time were Jesuit priests. They were open to Galileo’s theory but told him the evidence for it was inconclusive. This was the view of the greatest astronomer of the age, Tyco Brahe. The Church’s view of heliocentrism was hardly a dogmatic one. When Cardinal Bellarmine met with Galileo he said, “While experience tells us plainly that the earth is standing still, if there were a real proof that the sun is in the center of the universe…and that the sun goes not go round the earth but the earth round the sun, then we should have to proceed with great circumspection in explaining passages of scripture which appear to teach the contrary, and rather admit that we did not understand them than declare an opinion to be false which is proved to be true. But this is not a thing to be done in haste, and as for myself, I shall not believe that there are such proofs until they are shown to me.” Galileo had no such proofs.

Galileo Was A Victim of Torture and Abuse: This is perhaps the most recurring motif, and yet it is entirely untrue. Galileo was treated by the church as a celebrity. When summoned by the Inquisition, he was housed in the grand Medici Villa in Rome. He attended receptions with the Pope and leading cardinals. Even after he was found guilty, he was first housed in a magnificent Episcopal palace and then placed under “house arrest” although he was permitted to visit his daughters in a nearby convent and to continue publishing scientific papers.

The Church Was Wrong To Convict Galileo of Heresy: But Galileo was neither charged nor convicted of heresy. He was charged with teaching heliocentrism in specific contravention of his own pledge not to do so. This is a charge on which Galileo was guilty. He had assured Cardinal Bellarmine that given the sensitivity of the issue, he would not publicly promote heliocentrism. Yet when a new pope was named, Galileo decided on his own to go back on his word. Asked about this in court, he said his Dialogue on the Two World Systems did not advocate heliocentrism. This is a flat-out untruth as anyone who reads Galileo’s book can plainly see. Even Galileo’s supporters, and there were many, found it difficult to defend him at this point.

What can we conclude from all this? Galileo was right about heliocentrism, but we know that only in retrospect because of evidence that emerged after Galileo’s death. The Church should not have tried him at all, although Galileo’s reckless conduct contributed to his fate. Even so, his fate was not so terrible. Historian Gary Ferngren concludes that “the traditional picture of Galileo as a martyr to intellectual freedom and as a victim of the church’s opposition to science has been demonstrated to be little more than a caricature.” Remember this the next time you hear some half-educated atheist rambling on about “the war between religion and science.”

Labels: atheism, church, Darwin, Dinesh D'Souza, fallacy, Galileo, myth, religion, science