In the long interview he gave the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano yesterday, Father José Gabriel Funes, a Jesuit priest from Argentina, called the existence of extraterrestrials a real possibility. “Astronomers contend that the universe is made up of a hundred billion galaxies, each of which is composed of hundreds of billions of stars,” he correctly noted. (The interview was headlined The Extra-terrestrial Is My Brother.) “Many of these, or almost all of them, could have planets. [So] how can you exclude that life has developed somewhere else?”
For all the attention they got, however, Funes’ comments do not exactly break new ground, as my colleague Edward Pentin, who covers the Vatican for Newsweek, points out. In 2005 Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno wrote a 50-page booklet, Intelligent Life in the Universe, published by the Catholic Truth Society, in which he makes the standard astronomical points—lots of galaxies, lots of stars, some with planets, some of which may have conditions conducive to life. (Theological question: can God create life only in places with the right conditions? Or could He create life where there is, for instance, no water, or where the temperatures are too hot or too cold? If not, why not?).
But the Vatican has never denied the findings of contemporary astronomy, which is now up to 288 “extrasolar” planets (that is, those that orbit a star beyond our own solar system), including one whose atmosphere contains organic molecules, the ingredients of life, as I blogged in March. As Consolmagno put it, “There is nothing in Holy Scripture that could confirm, or contradict, the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe,” which means that telescopes and not the bible will be the only reliable guide to the question.
In asking whether little green men might be guilty of original sin, we are obviously in the realm of “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.” But the theologian astronomers don’t blink. Fr. Funes said he was sure that, if aliens needed redemption, they “in some way, would have the chance to enjoy God’s mercy.” Consolmagno was more explicit: there’s no problem in getting the Son of God to every planet with ETs because, as Christians accept every Sunday during the Holy Eucharist, “Christ is truly, physically present in a million places, and sacrificed a million times, every day at every sacrifice of the Mass.”
So if the Catholic Church has accepted the possibility of aliens for a while now, why the high-profile interview in the Vatican newspaper? Applying the techniques of Kremlinology to St. Peter’s, Edward Pentin’s sources tell him it might be part of a push to demonstrate the Vatican’s embrace of science (in 1992 it apologized for that whole unfortunate Galileo mess, after all). Toward the end of the interview, Fr. Funes called science and religion “two allies which elevate the human spirit. There can be tensions or conflicts, but we mustn’t be afraid. The Church mustn’t fear science and its discoveries.”
Interestingly, the Vatican has plans to host a conference in Rome next spring to mark the 150th anniversary of the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin’s seminal work on the theory of evolution. Conference organizers say it will look beyond entrenched ideological positions—including misconstrued creationism. The Vatican says it wants to reconsider the problem of evolution “with a broader perspective” and says an “appropriate consideration is needed more than ever before.”
Contrary to much conventional wisdom, the Church has often been in science’s corner. The telescopes of the Vatican Observatory are perched on the roof of the Pope’s summer home in Caste1 Gandolfo, and Jesuits were for centuries Europe’s leading astronomers. “Seventeenth-century Jesuits invented the reflecting telescope and the wave theory of light,” Consolmagno pointed out. “In the 18th century they ran a quarter of all the astronomical observatories in Europe.” And it was Georges Lemaitre, a priest, who in 1927 deduced from Einstein’s equations of general relativity that the universe is expanding—and that it therefore began in a Big Bang. It will be fascinating to see if the Vatican is now enlisting in the battle to defend science from its growing legions of attackers.
In February 450 churches celebrated Charles Darwin’s birthday with sermons arguing that religion and evolution do not contradict one another.
Called Evolution Sunday, the event grew out of a project organized by Dean Michael Zimmerman and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. They wrote an open letter signed by nearly 200 clerics in response to a 2004 resolution by the Grantsburg, Wisconsin, school board requiring that biology classes incorporate “various models or theories” of the origin of life. Later that year, the Grantsburg board backed down a bit, modifying its curriculum resolution to stipulate that “students shall be able to explain the scientific strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary theory.”
Noting the ongoing evolution wars in the United States, Zimmerman decided to expand the project beyond the borders of Wisconsin. The result was “An Open Letter Concerning Religion and Science,” which has received endorsements from 10,000 clergy members around the country. Most endorsers hail from relatively liberal mainline Protestant denominations. (There were just seven endorsements from Southern Baptists, almost all of whom were associated with hospitals or academic institutions.)
The open letter declares: “We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as ‘one theory among others’ is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children.” So far, so good.
The letter goes on to draw a distinction between “two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.” Religious truth, according to the letter, is “of a different order from scientific truth. Its purpose is not to convey scientific information but to transform hearts.” The divines seem to be reaching for the proposed accommodation between science and religion devised by the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould.
Gould argued that science and religion are two “nonoverlapping magisteria.” According to Gould, “if religion can no longer dictate the nature of factual conclusions properly under the magisterium of science, then scientists cannot claim higher insight into moral truth from any superior knowledge of the world’s empirical constitution.”
But can this formulation survive the continuing scrutiny of religion by science? While it is true that science has nothing to say about whether souls are divinely infused into people, religion is still part of the world’s empirical constitution.
I have no doubt about the ability of religion to “transform hearts.” Religion motivates the charitable works of the Salvation Army; it helped President George W. Bush stop drinking; and it inspired 19 Muslims to slam airliners into buildings. It is an undeniably powerful force in human lives. Something that has such a far-reaching influence cannot escape the scrutiny of humanity’s most powerful techniques for uncovering the facts of the world.
According to Gould, “The net of science covers the empirical universe: what is it made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value.” Possibly because he despised evolutionary psychology and sociobiology, Gould was comfortable making this distinction. But in a sense, values are facts about human beings and as such can be studied by scientists. Today researchers into evolutionary psychology, neuroeconomics, genetics, and other fields are elucidating the sources of human morality and how it functions.
Dean Hamer, a biologist at the National Cancer Institute, even claims to have found “the God gene,” which affects how certain mood-regulating chemicals are transported in people’s brains. This variant of the VMAT2 gene seems to make people who have it more susceptible to spiritual beliefs.
Of course, theology is still a long way from being reduced to biochemistry. Scientific research into the sources of religious belief is just beginning, so any of the current findings could be rejected or revised as further evidence becomes available. Nevertheless, the magisterium of science is surrounding and constricting the magisterium of religion. Zimmerman’s letter declares, “We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator.” It may well be that that same capacity for critical thought eventually leads us to understand how the universe and humanity came to be in such a way that God fades away, and we no longer need to believe in Him.
Scientist: Belittling evolution has dubious origins
BY BRIAN WILLIAMS Monday, April 07, 2008
VALPARAISO | The Darwinian theory of evolution, because it has not been disproved by rigorous testing over time, has become accepted knowledge, and disbelieving it is not an option.
That was the conclusion of Murray Peshkin, a physicist with Argonne National Laboratory, in a recent talk on science and religion at Valparaiso University.
Opponents of teaching Darwinian evolution have lost the court fight to keep it out of the public schools, Peshkin said, so they have changed the battle to push for equal billing for creationism, or intelligent design.
"What's wrong is teaching those as part of science -- they are not. They belong to religion because their assumptions and their logic belong to religion," he said.
Dismissing science with "it's only a theory," Peshkin said, is "intellectually appalling" and a material threat to the country. Science in the 21st century offers chances to conquer diseases and achieve other advances, opportunities that could be lost if students aren't taught the best science and if parents aren't taught respect for science, he said.
Scientists have failed to explain the limits of science, Peshkin said. Science deals in what can be observed and measured through experimentation. Assertions or beliefs are not part of it. A theory, he said, is a hunch about how the world works that is then subjected to experimental observation.
Religion, on the other hand, accepts revealed knowledge. The two, therefore, take different approaches to reality, Peshkin said.
But each is valid and the conflict between the two is unnecessary, he said.
Peshkin said experimentation can only disprove a theory, but never finally prove it.
With proof always impossible, then, scientists rely on the repeated successful testing of a theory to make conclusions about the physical world, he said. Newton's laws of mechanics are accepted because they have accurately described observable phenomena consistently over centuries. They have been found to apply not only to planets, as Newton started with, but also to baseballs and jet engines. An airplane designed to fly under a different theory of motion would not get any riders, Peshkin said.
Disbelieving well-tested theories is not an option intellectually or practically, he said.
Since the 1900s, Darwin's prediction of primates' descent from a common ancestor through natural selection has been confirmed by repeated observation. The theory of evolution has been subjected to numerous and varied tests and has not yet encountered limitations, he said.
Einstein's religious views have been a matter of considerable controversy. Max Jammer, the well-known Jewish historian and philosopher of science, wrote a thoughtful book, Einstein and Religion, concluding that for Einstein 'religion' was definitely not 'atheism'. Einstein himself said that: 'You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific minds without a religious feeling'. Yet in his best-selling and much-publicised atheist polemic, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins, who takes most of his Einstein quotes from Jammer, categorises Einstein as 'atheistic'.
Einstein, in fact, spoke and wrote of God extremely frequently; for example his most famous way of criticising the random nature of quantum mechanics was to say 'God does not play dice'. He described himself as 'an intensely religious man', but also, equally interestingly, as 'a deeply religious non-believer'.
A crucial point is that Einstein stated categorically that he did not believe in a personal God, of the kind assumed by most practising religious people. He had not always been this way. Though brought up in a very liberal Jewish household, at the age of six he became fervently religious, obeying all the religious prescriptions. However, when he was 12, he read various scientific texts and came to believe that much in the Jewish bible could not be true. This was a crucial period in his life, in which he became an intense freethinker, first over religious matters, later over orthodox scientific beliefs.
So what was Einstein's religion? He called it 'cosmic religion' and it was a sense of awe at 'the nobility and marvellous order which are revealed in nature and in the world of thought'. He believed that throughout history the greatest religious geniuses have followed cosmic religion, and that exploring this order in the laws of science was the motivation for the most celebrated scientists such as Newton and Kepler. Without this feeling of confidence in order and simplicity, science, he felt, degenerated into uninspired empiricism.
Einstein felt closest to the nineteenth century Jewish philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, who also rejected the idea of a personal God. Like Einstein, some considered Spinoza intensely religious while others judged him an atheist. Spinoza's firmest belief was in a universal determinism; all events, including the actions of human beings, followed a precise law of cause and effect. There was no free will, and thus no justification for punishment of offenders. Einstein broadly followed Spinoza in these beliefs. As is well known, as well as realism, he was a strong believer in determinism; one of his main arguments against quantum mechanics was that it respected neither. Spinoza's belief in the unity of nature was paralleled in Einstein's long search for a unified field theory.
Einstein's view of traditional religion was somewhat ambivalent. He detested any idea of indoctrination or fundamentalism, but admitted that conventional religions had a role in setting ethical standards. Dawkins would disagree, considering that 'the cause of all this misery, mayhem, violence, terror and ignorance is religion itself'. Einstein also venerated the founders of the major religions, especially Jesus and Buddha; Dawkins might be more sceptical. Einstein even found the elements of cosmic religion in the Psalms and the Proverbs of the bible, and particularly in Buddhism.
An interesting question is whether Einstein's beliefs, like those of Spinoza, were pantheistic, in the sense of actual worship of Nature, giving it the status of God. At times Einstein seemed close to accepting this label, but he was clear that God was to be found in the laws of the Universe, not in Nature itself. Jammer suggests that Einstein's theology may be called a naturalistic theology, in which one searches for God by study of the Universe.
So at last we reach the question: Could Einstein be considered a mystic? Awe about the Universe might lead to some direct spiritual experience of 'God', however 'God' might be defined. However Einstein explicitly rejected such ideas, saying: 'Mysticism is the only reproach that people cannot level against my theory'. Whatever his feeling of wonder about the Universe, his exploration into its laws was always entirely rational. He believed that scientific knowledge could not be obtained through direct supernatural perception, and incidentally considered any idea of personal immortality or the suggestion of any contact with the dead ridiculous.
The Creator and the Created: the 2008 Templeton Prize
By Hasan Zillur Rahim
Michael Heller, a polish theologian, cosmologist and philosopher, was awarded the 2008 Templeton Prize “For Progress toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities.”
In accepting the prize, professor Heller said, “Science gives us knowledge, and religion gives us meaning. Both are prerequisites of the decent existence. The paradox is that these two great values seem often to be in conflict. I am frequently asked how I could reconcile them with each other. When such a question is posed by a scientist or a philosopher, I invariably wonder how educated people could be so blind not to see that science does nothing but explore God’s creation.”
Heller wrote 30 books, almost all of them dedicated to the creative dialogue between science, theology, and philosophy. Heller’s seminal contribution was to see in these seemingly distinct realms of human understanding a profound synergy, and he used his considerable intellect and insight in clarifying the nature of this synergistic relationship for us.
Attention to Heller’s work comes at a critical time. Scientists such as Richard Dawkins and atheists/secularists such as Christopher Hitchens have declared a war on religion. Their books are best-sellers. Many religionists have responded in kind, polarizing the religion-science issue further. What we seem to overlook is that inflexible ideologies, both secular and religious, drive common senses away, a loss for all humankind. It is this loss that Heller is determined to stem, by engaging our collective common sense and without minimizing the complexity involved in reconciling the knowable scientific world with the mysterious, and ultimately unknowable, nature of God. Through a rare combination of scientific acumen and theological insight, Heller addresses fundamental questions of knowledge and meaning in a holistic context that go far beyond the parochial arguments of the secularists and the religionists. In doing so, he also rejects a “God of the gaps” theory that uses God to explain what science cannot.
Michael Heller’s concluding statement after winning the Templeton Prize for 2008 should become a basis for public discourse on religion and science in America and elsewhere: “When thinking about science as deciphering the Mind of God, we should not forget that science is also a collective product of human brains, and the human brain is itself the most complex and sophisticated product of the universe. It is in the human brain that the world’s structure has reached its focal point – the ability to reflect upon itself. Science is but a collective effort of the Human Mind to read the Mind of God from question marks out of which we and the world around us seem to be made. To place ourselves in this double entanglement is to experience that we are a part of the Great Mystery. Another name for this Mystery is the Humble Approach to reality … The true humility does not consist in pretending that we are feeble and insignificant, but in the audacious acknowledgement that we are an essential part of the Greatest Mystery of all – of the entanglement of the Human Mind with the Mind of God.”
A Polish physicist and priest has won the annual million-dollar Templeton Prize for “progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities”.
Michael Heller walks away with $1.7 million for investigating questions including whether the Universe needs to have a cause (press release). This is the largest annual prize given to an individual (just bigger than the $1.6m Nobel), and comes from the same foundation that has previously funded studies into whether prayer can heal the sick, and how a nun's religious experience looks under a brain scanner.
“I always wanted to do the most important things, and what can be more important than science and religion? Science gives us knowledge, and religion gives us meaning. Both are prerequisites of the decent existence,” Heller told the New York Times.
According to the London Times:
His theories do not so much offer proof of the existence of God as introduce doubt about the material existence of the world around us. He specialises in complex formulae that make it possible to explain everything, even chance, through mathematical calculation.
Physics World says Heller has worked on various branches of cosmology and mathematics, and is currently working on non-commutative geometry. From Physics Today:
Heller’s current work focuses on noncommutative geometry and groupoid theory in mathematics which attempts to remove the problem of an initial cosmological singularity at the origin of the universe. "If on the fundamental level of physics there is no space and no time, as many physicists think," says Heller, "noncommutative geometry could be a suitable tool to deal with such a situation."
He says he will use the money to set up a centre for the study of science and theology in Poland.
“He’s one of the key contributors in the international scholarly community dedicated to the creative dialogue on science, theology, and philosophy,” says Robert John Russell, director of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley (Christian Science Monitor).
New Scientist’s Short Sharp Science blog admits to some unease about the Templeton Prize, about which it says: “It’s as if rather than fighting against science the way some religious factions - like creationists - do, they figure, we'll just buy science and use it for our own ends.”
Muslims scientists analyze why the work of contemporaries fails to result in breakthroughs.
By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN, Times Staff Writer Published January 27, 2008
In recognizing the top 50 scientific breakthroughs of 2007, Scientific American cites advancements in alternative fuels, treatment of Parkinson's disease and technology that would make consumer electronics easier to use.
Among those honored are researchers in Japan, Italy and the Netherlands, a country with a population of just 16-million. Yet the list does not include a single noteworthy breakthrough in any of the world's 56 Muslim nations, encompassing more than 1-billion people.
Dr. Essam Heggy has a reason.
"We don't live in an environment where we value science," says Heggy, a Muslim astronomer who left his native Libya and is working in Houston on NASA's Mars exploration program. "Science and intellectual presence have been seen as a real threat to governments that have no serious plans for democratic rule."
Why the dearth of scientific achievement in the modern Muslim world? Like Heggy, many critics blame authoritarian regimes that stifle independent thinking and limit contacts with the outside world. Most schools and universities in Muslim countries emphasize rote learning over debate and analysis. Defense budgets -- especially in the bellicose Middle East -- consume billions of dollars that might otherwise go to research.
And just as Christian conservatism in America has led to curbs on genetic research and pressure to teach alternatives to evolution, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism has turned many Muslims away from science and toward religion as a way to view and explain the world.
"Religious fundamentalism is always bad news for science," Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy, a Pakistani Muslim physicist, recently wrote in an article on Islam and science for Physics Today.
"Scientific progress constantly demands that facts and hypotheses be checked. But there lies the problem: The scientific method is alien to traditional, unreformed religious thought."
While the reasons are many and often controversial, there is no doubt that the Muslim world lags far behind in scientific achievement and research:
Muslim countries contribute less than 2 percent of the world's scientific literature. Spain alone produces almost as many scientific papers.
In countries with substantial Muslim populations, the average number of scientists, engineers and technicians per 1,000 people is 8.5. The world average is 40.
Muslim countries get so few patents that they don't even register on a bar graph comparison with other countries. Of the more than 3-million foreign inventions patented in the United States between 1977 and 2004, only 1,500 were developed in Muslim nations.
In a survey by the Times of London, just two Muslim universities -- both in cosmopolitan Malaysia -- ranked among the top 200 universities worldwide.
Two Muslim scientists have won Nobel Prizes, but both did their groundbreaking work at Western institutions. Pakistan's Abdus Salam, who won the 1979 physics prize while in Britain, was barred from speaking at any university in his own country.
Why? Salam belonged to what the Pakistani government had declared a heretical sect.
Vanguard of learning
Despite a popular myth, people in the Muslim world are not resistant to new technology. Even the poorest have cell phones, some with global positioning features that show the exact direction in which to pray to Mecca. Prayer rugs now contain computer chips that count the number of bend-downs. And as al-Qaida's frequent messages show, the Internet has been a valuable tool in spreading threats against the West.
But it is a far cry from Islam's early days when the prophet Mohammed said "the ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of martyrs."
As Islam spread from its birthplace on the Arabian Peninsula, Muslim scientists expanded on the knowledge gained from the Romans, Greeks and other cultures. The Golden Age of Islam, spanning the 8th through 13th centuries, saw major advances in mathematics, optics, chemistry, astronomy and medicine while Europe slept through centuries of intellectual darkness.
Over time, though, tensions grew between liberal Muslims, who had a flexible interpretation of Islam, and fundamentalists, who believed in predestination with all its chilling implications for learning and discovery. As reason bowed to faith, "science in the Islamic world essentially collapsed," Hoodbhoy writes. "No major invention or discovery has emerged from the Muslim world for well over seven centuries now."
Today, many of the brightest scientific minds leave their countries to study in Western universities like Virginia Tech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both of which have sizeable Muslim student associations. By some estimates, more than half of the science students from Arab countries never return home to work.
"Science has now been replaced by religious thinking," says Heggy, 32, the NASA researcher who got his doctorate in France. "Logic unfortunately is a smaller and smaller part of society."
Muslim scientists who do work in their native countries often find themselves embracing -- publicly at least -- so-called "Islamic science." Popularized in the '80s as an alternative to Western science and its perceived lack of moral values, the Islamic version tries to mesh religion and science with curious results.
Instead, fundamentalists typically view science only of value in giving more proof of God or showing the truth of the Koran. One oft-visited Internet site reveals this "astounding scientific fact" -- the Koran anticipated black holes and genes.
'Silent note-takers'
While critical of fellow Muslims, Hoodbhoy thinks the United States is partly to blame for the dismal record of scientific achievement. Western support for unpopular secular governments in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries has fueled a rise in fundamentalism that in turn discourages academic and cultural freedom.
At Hoodbhoy's own university in Islamabad, Pakistan, almost all female students now wear veils and have become "silent note-takers" who are increasingly timid and afraid to ask questions, he says. Movies, dramas and music are shunned as un-Islamic. The campus has three mosques, but no bookstore.
The picture is not entirely bleak. Saudi Arabia, though home to one of the most intolerant strains of Islam, is building a world-class research university in collaboration with Cape Cod's prestigious Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Turkey -- whose founder, Kemal Ataturk, wanted to Westernize his country -- has more than tripled its science funding since 2003 while under a religiously conservative prime minister. Tunisia, another secular Muslim nation, has largely rejected "Islamic science" in favor of practical research. The number of laboratories there grew to 139 from 55 in six years.
But far more needs to be done, says Hoodbhoy, who argues that arrested scientific development in the Muslim world is contributing to the "marginalization" of Muslims and their growing sense of injustice and victimhood. Muslim countries will continue to stagnate scientifically -- and in other ways as well.
"The struggle to usher in science," Hoodbhoy writes, "will have to go side-by-side with a much wider campaign to elbow out rigid orthodoxy and bring in modern thought, arts, philosophy, democracy and pluralism."
Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at susan@sptimes.com.
Notable modern Muslim scientists
Abdus Salam: Pakistani. Winner of Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 Ahmed Zewail: Egyptian. Winner of Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1999 Farouk El-Baz: Egyptian. NASA scientist involved in the Apollo moon program Essam Heggy: Egyptian-Libyan. Planetary scientist in NASA's Mars exploration program Lotfi Asker Zadeh: Iranian. Mathematician and computer scientist, founder of fuzzy logic, which recognizes more than simple true-or-false values. Used in artificial intelligence applications and some spell-checkers to suggest replacements for misspelled words Habiba Bouhamed Chaabouni: Tunisian. Medical geneticist, winner of 2006 UNESCO Women in Science Award
New Book Explores the Power of Mind as Force of Nature
New Book Explores the Power of Mind as Force of Nature
Author Stephen W. VandeCarr reveals what technological power really means for the future in A Reality Beyond Science.
Pahrump, Nev. (PRWEB) January 17, 2008 -- A Reality Beyond Science by Stephen W. VandeCarr discusses the role of human intelligence in creating reality, along with the mysteries of the mind and the tension between science and religion.
In A Reality Beyond Science, readers are presented with the view that their personal reality isn't what the world is; it's what they believe the world is. The question is…how do humans come to believe what they believe? This book examines why people hold the beliefs they do and form like-minded communities whose belief systems apparently work for the individuals involved. The scientific community is one such community. The book examines issues where religion and science may be compatible and points out where, in the author's view, they are clearly not compatible. While the author identifies with the scientific community, he clearly takes the view that the potential of life and mind is beyond the scope of our current science.
The subject of science versus religion and the impact of science and technology on the world are constantly in the news in various guises. The author sees both religion and science as products of the human mind. This book expands on the views of other authors and introduces the provocative idea that mind is a force of nature and a factor in cosmic evolution.
Strictly providing information from a philosophical perspective, the author does not advocate any formal theology, thus allowing readers to draw his or her own conclusions. Distinctly compelling, A Reality Beyond Science offers a glimpse of what could be in store for the future of humanity.
For more information or to request a free review copy, members of the press can contact the author at swvandecarr @ yahoo.com. A Reality Beyond Science is available for sale online at Amazon.com, BookSurge.com, and through additional wholesale and retail channels worldwide.
About the Author Stephen W. VandeCarr began his extensive career in medicine as a dental officer in the U.S. Army after receiving a D.D.S. from Emory University. He went on to obtain an M.D. from the University of Michigan, after which he practiced emergency medicine for several years. Subsequently, he earned a M.S. in epidemiology from Harvard University, followed by a fellowship at the National Institute of Health. Board certified in emergency medicine, VandeCarr has worked in various capacities in pharmaceutical research and has had his research published in professional journals. Currently retired, VandeCarr resides in Nevada and Oregon.
About BookSurge BookSurge Publishing is a DBA of On-Demand Publishing LLC, a subsidiary of Amazon.com Inc., (NASDAQ AMZN). BookSurge is a pioneer in self-publishing and print-on-demand services. Offering unique publishing opportunities and access for authors, BookSurge boasts an unprecedented number of authors whose work has resulted in book deals with traditional publishers as well as successful authorpreneurs who enhance or build a business from their professional expertise.
Posted on Sat, Jan. 12, 2008 By REBECCA ROSEN LUM Contra Costa Times
Scientists are taking a hard look at the value of faith as an instrument in healing -- including the "intercessory" or healing prayers said on behalf of others.
Numerous studies show a link between faith and outlook, faith and well-being, faith and healing times.
Scientists at such prestigious institutions as California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, Duke University in North Carolina, and the George Washington University Institute for Spirituality and Health in the nation's capital are exploring the relationship of prayer and faith to healing.
More than half of physicians in an April survey by a group at the University of Chicago said that religion and spirituality significantly influence patients' health.
But the exact mechanism by which it works remains elusive.
Religion can help those with chronic conditions, including traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury, stroke and arthritis, say the authors of a study at the University of Missouri at Columbia.
Yoga, reading of religious texts, meditation or the laying of hands have value in a clinical setting, the researchers concluded.
Hospital officials have long left patients' spiritual needs in the hands of chaplains, but they increasingly are reaching out to faith communities.
Official recognition
Parish nursing, or faith-community nursing, which combines spiritual and health services, has exploded since the American Nursing Association recognized the specialty in 2005.
Today, an estimated 10,000 faith-community nurses work in American congregations.
In San Francisco, a leading researcher in mind-body medicine found a positive link between intercessory prayer and the well-being of people with AIDS.
Prayed-for patients in a study by late University of California-San Francisco professor Elizabeth Targ had fewer setbacks and lived longer than a comparison group. A follow-up study found the same results. Targ later found a link between spirituality and well-being among women with breast cancer.
THE CONFLICT
Some academics recoil at the blurring of the line between faith and healthcare, saying prayer, meditation and other faith practices resist definition or measurement.
Far more studies show no link between religious belief and healing than a positive one, said Richard Sloan, a Columbia University behavioral medicine professor and the author of Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine. Suggesting one can mislead people and put an unfair burden on them, he said.
"Look, nobody disputes that religion and spirituality bring comfort in a time of difficulty, but when spirituality is brought into medical care, it is another issue entirely," he said.
"It can do all sort of harm because it causes people to confuse medical care with other aspects of their lives," he said. "It can lead them to avoid conventional medical care. And it can lead them to believe their health problems are from inadequate faith and devotion."
Islam’s Forsaken Renaissance by Mahathir bin Mohamad
According to the Koran, a Muslim is anyone who bears witness that “there is no God (Allah) but Allah, and that Muhammad is his Rasul (Messenger).” If no other qualification is added, then all those who subscribe to these precepts must be regarded as Muslims. But because we Muslims like to add qualifications that often derive from sources other than the Koran, our religion’s unity has been broken.
But perhaps the greatest problem is the progressive isolation of Islamic scholarship – and much of Islamic life – from the rest of the modern world. We live in an age of science in which people can see around corners, hear and see things happening in outer space, and clone animals. And all of these things seem to contradict our belief in the Koran.
This is so because those who interpret the Koran are learned only in religion, in its laws and practices, and thus are usually unable to understand today’s scientific miracles. The fatwas (legal opinions concerning Islamic law) that they issue appear unreasonable and cannot be accepted by those with scientific knowledge.
One learned religious teacher, for example, refused to believe that a man had landed on the moon. Others assert that the world was created 2,000 years ago. The age of the universe and its size measured in light years – these are things that the purely religiously trained ulamas cannot comprehend.
So what do we need to do? In the past, Muslims were strong because they were learned. Muhammad’s injunction was to read, but the Koran does not say what to read. Indeed, there was no “Muslim scholarship” at the time, so to read meant to read whatever was available. The early Muslims read the works of the great Greek scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers. They also studied the works of the Persians, the Indians, and the Chinese.
The result was a flowering of science and mathematics. Muslim scholars added to the body of knowledge and developed new disciplines, such as astronomy, geography, and new branches of mathematics. They introduced numerals, enabling simple and limitless calculations.
But around the fifteenth century, the learned in Islam began to curb scientific study. They began to study religion alone, insisting that only those who study religion – particularly Islamic jurisprudence – gain merit in the afterlife. The result was intellectual regression at the very moment that Europe began embracing scientific and mathematical knowledge.
And so, as Muslims were intellectually regressing, Europeans began their renaissance, developing improved ways of meeting their needs, including the manufacture of weapons that eventually allowed them to dominate the world.
By contrast, Muslims fatally weakened their ability to defend themselves by neglecting, even rejecting, the study of allegedly secular science and mathematics, and this myopia remains a fundamental source of the oppression suffered by Muslims today. Many Muslims still condemn the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kamal, because he tried to modernize his country. But would Turkey be Muslim today without Ataturk? Mustafa Kamal’s clear-sightedness saved Islam in Turkey and saved Turkey for Islam.
Failure to understand and interpret the true and fundamental message of the Koran has brought only misfortune to Muslims. By limiting our reading to religious works and neglecting modern science, we destroyed Islamic civilization and lost our way in the world.
The Koran says that “Allah will not change our unfortunate situation unless we make the effort to change it.” Many Muslims continue to ignore this and, instead, merely pray to Allah to save us, to bring back our lost glory. But the Koran is not a talisman to be hung around the neck for protection against evil. Allah helps those who improve their minds.
Mahathir bin Mohamad was Prime Minister of Malaysia from 1981-2003.
“I believe in God -- nothing will ever change that. You can hook me up to a torture machine and I’ll still say I believe. I’d die if I didn’t have God. But I also believe in science. Does that make me a bad Christian? Why do I have to ignore facts just to prove my faith is strong?”
These words, the unmistakably dramatic words of a teenage girl, belong to Mena Reece, the central character in Robin Brande’s YA novel Evolution, Me & Other Freaks of Nature. Mena’s story twists the coming-of-age high-school novel toward the American culture wars, and reading it, we learn something about the state of religion-science writing these days.
Everyone knows the deal by now: the sizeable percentage of Americans who call themselves creationists and pledge fidelity to the “fact” of a 6000-year-old Earth; the fancied-up, pseudo-science ID (intelligent design) cadre that acknowledges an ancient Earth but reifies the “irreducibly complex” structures and processes that, they insist, could not have evolved and could only have been created; the scientists who lament both of these views, acknowledging creationism and ID as our country’s twin pillars of scientific illiteracy; and the subset of those scientists who, bloated with certainty of their own one real truth, condescend to people of any faith and link all religiosity with rampant stupidity.
Behind each of these caricatures are living people -- we’ve all met them. But the four categories above omit so many people, people who leave room inside for a new rock-your-world idea to be digested, or even just nibbled and then spit out. These churchgoers and scientists, and churchgoing scientists, pair up science texts with sacred texts and read both with a critical eye.
Like real people in this latter group, Mena Reece can think for herself. This annoys her strait-laced, ultra-religious parents. The novel begins as Mena tries to cope with her new status as pariah both at home and at New Advantage High School. Swept up in the tide of peer pressure, she recently joined a nasty and (for much of the book) mysterious campaign against a fellow student, orchestrated by her supposedly Christian peers. I won’t reveal the nature of these doings; it’s enough to know that Mena came down with a severe case of guilt as a result. (Guilt! Staple emotion of any bathed-in-religion novel worth its salt). Mena seeks redemption by performing a counter-act, one that sets these same Christians, and her own parents, soundly against her. Now, she’s alone….
Until she observes, one day in biology class, the Mena-shunners’ protest: “Ms. Shepherd had barely gotten the word ‘evolution’ out of her mouth when suddenly there was this dramatic scraping of chairs. Next thing I knew, almost half of the room -- fourteen people, to be exact -- stood up, flipped their chairs around, and plopped into their seats with their backs to Ms. Shepherd. God help us. Because this was it, the Big Stand, the ‘taking it to the front lines’ Pastor Wells had bragged about.”
Ms. Shepherd cites separation of church and state, and pushes on. True to her name, she also herds Mena towards Casey, a compatible boy-soul. Together with his spirited sister Kayla and Ms. Shepherd herself, Casey works magic on Mena. She mutates into increasingly rebellious science-blogger Bible Grrrl, breaks from the sheep-pack of peers, and decides her God can make room for Darwin.
Sprinkled through the text are welcome references to the big stars and bit players of human prehistory, ranging from gorillas to Homo floresiensis, the unexpectedly tiny (and recent) Hobbit hominid. I was disappointed to see, though, that our closest primate relatives, living or extinct, become in Brande’s hands only metaphors for mean or dumb characters. Early on, “Adam turned his apelike face toward Casey… The stupid gorilla decided to ram his shoulder into Casey and bounce him off the wall, too.” Later, Kayla calls anti-evolution picketers “Neanderthals.” For my money, gorillas are, and Neanderthals were, group-living, complex-communicating smart primates, and I’m proud to have them in the family.
Brande is at her best when she lets us peek inside Mena’s mind, at its genuine confusion: “So what does [all this] mean for Genesis? Evolution says we’re all descended from a common ancestor, too, but it doesn’t exactly sound like Adam and Eve. So when did they come along? Were there already apes and other creatures, and then God picked us out to make us special? Or were we always planned from the beginning, human souls waiting until the time was right to be in human bodies that walked upright and used tools and could appreciate the Garden of Eden?”
This novel couldn’t be more hot-topic. This year, U.S. presidential candidates will play the faithier than thou game, and may face outing if they endorse evolution. In 2009, the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s The Origin of Species will force natural selection and ape-like ancestors into everyone’s face. In the shorter term, we can hope for a Texas-sized miracle. Recently, the Dallas-based Institute for Creation Research gained state approval for an online Master’s program in science education. Yes, for science education! Check out this bulleted point from the Institute’s website: “The harmful consequences of evolutionary thinking on families and society (abortion, promiscuity, drug abuse, homosexuality, and many others) are evident all around us even infiltrating our churches and seminaries.” Isn’t it just swell when being gay gets lumped with drug abuse? When evolutionary thinking is made into evil? Stay tuned: the final vote from the state of Texas on ICR’s Master’s program is slated for later this month.
Kids, like adults, need to understand what’s behind issues like these -- almost as much as they need to learn the bedrock principles and facts of evolution. A countryful of courage, that’s what we need, on behalf of the kids. Courage to continue to insist that teachers teach science in science class, and religion in religion class. Courage to write an array of books, fiction and otherwise, that look at God and evolution. Sure, let’s explore what it means for teens to bridge science and religion. But since when have YA readers been fragile? Not everyone has to pray their way through the issues; an atheist heroine or two (non-sneering variety), anyone?
-- Barbara J. King awaits a spring semester at William & Mary filled with science, and 37 students in two primatology classes.
Book Review: The Cure Within - A History of Mind-Body Medicine
By Anne Harrington Jan 2, 2008
(HealthNewsDigest.com) - Scientific studies, social trends, and pop culture show that we are endlessly fascinated by the magical notion of mind over matter. News headlines claim that reducing stress leads to a stronger immune system and a longer life expectancy. There are miraculous stories of tumors disappearing with the help of visualization techniques. Accordingly, many are embracing practices such as acupuncture, yoga, and transcendental meditation. Interest in alternative sources of health and wellness indicate that even with the advances of medicine, many recognize the mind’s role in healing the body.
In her new book, THE CURE WITHIN (W. W. Norton & Company; January 21, 2008; $25.95 cloth), Anne Harrington, historian and chair of Harvard’s Mind Brain and Behavior Initiative, unravels the mystery of “mind cures” – the mind’s role in healing the body and the notion that the mind exerts an influence on our well-being. Superbly researched, enlightening, and original, THE CURE WITHIN is the first cultural history of mind-body medicine. Beginning in the early days of Christianity, when notions of possession dominated the church and medicine, Harrington moves to the secularized mind cures of Freud’s psychoanalysis, explores the deep-seated Christian roots of our modern self-help vernacular, and probes today’s designer blending of Eastern and Western wellness medicines.
Harrington reveals the deep historical and cultural roots that underlie our notions of healing. She chronicles faith and religion’s historical role in curing illness from early Christian times, to the 17th and 18th century exorcisms sanctioned by the church as an effective treatment for what was deemed “demonic possession,” to the persistence of religion today in more modern examples of faith-healing, including pilgrimages to sites such as Lourdes and the laying in of hands. She traces the origin of the power of positive thinking to Mary Baker Eddy, the 1879 founder of The Church of Christ, Scientist, whose advocacy of spiritual healing above medicinal treatment remains the accepted doctrine of today’s Christian Scientists. Harrington also explores secular influences on mind-body healing—from Freud’s techniques for curing illness and hysteria to today’s stress management and visualization techniques popularized by figures likes Dr. Herb Benson, whose ground-breaking study of Transcendental Medicine sparked a tremendous interest in spiritual and holistic health practices.
Both religion and science have something to say about the seemingly real effects of the mind’s role in shaping, harnessing, and controlling disease. Harrington expertly navigates historical cases that demonstrate these influences, punctuating her story of psychosomatic medicine with an examination of neuroscience’s role in confirming the influence of mind over body. THE CURE WITHIN is an absorbing, enlightening investigation of our cultural notions of mind cure from ancient times to the present.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Anne Harrington is Harvard College Professor for the History of Science, specializing in the history of psychiatry, neuroscience, and the other mind sciences. Also a visiting professor for Medical History at the London School of Economics, she is the author of Reenchanted Science and the editor of The Placebo Effect and the The Dalai Lama at MIT. Currently she serves on the Board of the Mind and Life Institute, an organization dedicated to cross-cultural dialogue between Buddhism and the sciences. She lives in Watertown, Massachusetts.
TITLE: THE CURE WITHIN: A History of Mind-Body Medicine AUTHORS: Anne Harrington PUBLICATION DATE: January 21, 2008 PRICE: $25.95 cloth PAGES: 354 ISBN: 978-0-393-06563-3
U.S. science academy stresses evolution's importance
Thu Jan 3, 2008 By Will Dunham
(NOTE: This is page one of two. Please click on "external link" to view entire article.)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. National Academy of Science on Thursday issued a spirited defense of evolution as the bedrock principle of modern biology, arguing that it, not creationism, must be taught in public school science classes.
The academy, which operates under a mandate from Congress to advise the government on science and technology matters, issued the report at a time when the theory of evolution, first offered in the 19th century, faces renewed attack by some religious conservatives.
Creationism, based on the explanation offered in the Bible, and the related idea of "intelligent design" are not science and, as such, should not be taught in public school science classrooms, according to the report.
"We seem to have continuing challenges to the teaching of evolution in schools. That's something that doesn't seem to go away," Barbara Schaal, an evolutionary biologist at Washington University in St. Louis and vice president of National Academy of Sciences, said in a telephone interview.
"We need a citizenry that's trained in real science."
Evolution is a theory explaining change in living organisms over the eons due to genetic mutations. For example, it holds that humans evolved from earlier forms of apes.
The report stated that the idea of evolution can be fully compatible with religious faith. "Science and religion are different ways of understanding the world. Needlessly placing them in opposition reduces the potential of each to contribute to a better future," said the report.
But teaching creationist ideas in science classes confuses students about what constitutes science and what does not, according to the report's authors. Continued...
Science taking hard look at healing power of faith
By Rebecca Rosen Lum, STAFF WRITER Article Last Updated: 12/18/2007
Science is taking a hard look at the value of faith as an instrument in healing — including the intercessory or healing prayers said on behalf of others.
Numerous studies show a link between faith and outlook, faith and well-being, faith and healing times.
Such prestigious institutions as California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, Duke University in North Carolina, and the George Washington University Institute for Spirituality and Health in the nations capitol are exploring the relationship of prayer and faith to healing.
More than half of physicians in an April survey by a group at the University of Chicago said religion and spirituality significantly influence patients health.
But the exact mechanism by which it works remains elusive.
Religion can help those with chronic conditions, including traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury, stroke and arthritis, say the authors of a study at the University of Missouri at Columbia.
Religion is infrequently discussed in rehabilitation settings and is rarely investigated in rehabilitation research, said Missouri health psychologist Brick Johnstone. To better meet the needs of persons with disabilities, this needs to change.
Yoga, reading of religious texts, meditation or the laying on of hands have value in a clinical setting, the researchers concluded.
Hospitals have long left patients spiritual needs in the hands of chaplains, but increasingly are reaching out to faith communities.
Parish, or faith community nursing, which combines spiritual and health service, has exploded since the American Nursing Association recognized the specialty in 2005.
Today, an estimated 10,000 faith community nurses work in American congregations.
In San Francisco, a leading researcher in mind-body medicine found a positive link between intercessory prayer and the well-being of people with AIDS.
Prayed-for patients in a study by the late UCSF professor Elizabeth Targ had fewer setbacks and lived longer than a comparison group. A follow-up study found the same results. Targ later found a link between spirituality and well-being among women with breast cancer.
Some academics recoil at the blurring of the line between faith and health care, saying prayer, meditation, and other faith practices resist definition or measurement.
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.”
Geneticist Makes His Case At EMU By David Reynolds
HARRISONBURG — Like many young doctors, Francis Collins sometimes found himself at the bedsides of patients he could no longer help.
But always curious, Collins sat by their side listening and marveling at how many patients didn’t despair but found comfort in religion.
Then in his mid-20’s, a dying woman asked Collins what he believed on the subject. And the young man who was embarking on a career that would tackle some of the natural world’s toughest puzzles was stumped.
For all his training, Collins says, he had no answers for life’s basic questions: Why am I here? What will happen after I die? Is there a God?
On Saturday, Collins, 57, now a renowned geneticist and a Christian, spoke to a packed crowd at Eastern Mennonite University’s Martin Chapel.
His message: that science and religion, two ways of explaining the world we live in, are not incompatible.
“Truth can be found in scientific exploration and religious exploration; It’s all God’s truth,” Collins said. “Some people are saying you have to pick one or the other. I would say that would be an impoverished outcome.”
‘The Language Of God’
Raised near Staunton, Collins, is the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.
And he coordinated the Human Genome Project. Genomes, he says, are like books contained inside every living organism, which hold the secrets of life.
In 2003, Collins and other scientists finished “mapping” the human genome, a landmark achievement that, he says, was like figuring out each letter in a book. His leadership on the genome project and work overall work on genetic research has catapulted him to the top tier of scientific researchers and earlier this month earned him the Medal of Freedom. President Bush awarded him the medal, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in a ceremony on Nov. 7 in Washington.
Faith Bolstered By Science
Although scientists have yet to grasp the full meaning of the human genome, doing so could lead to advances in the fights against diseases such as cancer, diabetes and asthma.
But on Saturday, Collins focused on how decades in science has encouraged, not dampened, his religious faith.
It’s an experience described in his 2006 book, “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence For Belief”.
Known And Unknown
By studying fossils and DNA, scientists have achieved a greater understanding of life and found support for the theory of evolution, Collins said.
And most scientists now agree that the universe began about 13.7 billion years ago, he says, and that people share more than 98 percent of their DNA with chimpanzees.
Still science, Collins said, can’t answer how life began or the mystery of why 15 mathematical constants show up over and over in nature like a well-designed pattern.
Those questions, Collins says, are part of what has led him and about 40 percent of scientists to a belief in some God.
But Collins’ said his Christian faith led him a step further, to belief in a God who cares about people and has instilled in them a sense of right and wrong.
“We all have written in our hearts what is good and holy and the desire to reach out and find it,” he said.
Tricky Subject
Christian Early, a philosophy and theology professor at EMU says Collins’ message is important in a society where science and religion often seem at odds.
Still, aspects of Collins speech, especially evolution, can be difficult for Mennonites and other Christian denominations to accept, Early said.
Victoria Clymer, 15, and Malinda Bender, 14, both freshman at Eastern Mennonite High School said that Collins’ world-view is different from theirs.
“Coming from a Mennonite background, you take what the Bible says,” Bender said. “It was a little bit different, but interesting,” she said. “I’m glad I came.”
Dan McSweeney, 71, of Augusta County, says he’s an atheist who has no trouble with religious people, unless they tell him to be religious.
After the speech, he said he admired Collins as a scientist, but that the logic of his religious arguments doesn’t add up.
“What we have is the world around us, that’s what exists,” McSweeney said. But “a personal God? That’s a leap of faith,” he said. “Not science.”
Ethical, scientific breakthroughs seen in new stem-cell studies
By Nancy Frazier O'Brien Catholic News Service
WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Scientists, ethicists and church leaders hailed as a breakthrough two studies showing that human skin cells can be reprogrammed to work as effectively as embryonic stem cells, thus negating the need to destroy embryos in the name of science.
Separate studies from teams led by Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University in Japan and Junying Yu and James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison were published online Nov. 20 by the journals Cell and Science, respectively.
By adding four genes to the skin cells, the scientists were able to create stem cells that genetically match the donor and have the ability to become any of the 220 types of cells in the human body.
Cardinal Justin Rigali of Philadelphia, chairman of the U.S. bishops' Committee on Pro-Life Activities, welcomed the news, expressing gratitude "for scientists who took up the challenge of finding morally acceptable ways to pursue stem-cell research, and for government leaders who have encouraged and funded such avenues."
The new technology "avoids the many ethical land mines associated with embryonic stem-cell research: It does not clone or destroy human embryos, does not harm or exploit women for their eggs, and does not blur the line between human beings and other species through desperate efforts to make human embryos using animal eggs," he added.
The White House also praised the breakthrough Nov. 20, saying that President George W. Bush's June 2007 executive order expanding stem-cell research using "ethically responsible techniques" was "intended to accelerate precisely the kind of research being reported today."
"The president believes medical problems can be solved without compromising either the high aims of science or the sanctity of human life," said press secretary Dana Perino. "We will continue to encourage scientists to expand the frontiers of stem-cell research and continue to advance the understanding of human biology in an ethically responsible way."
Australian Archbishop Philip Wilson of Adelaide, president of the Australian Catholic Bishops' Conference, said, "While it is still early days for this research, it is a very promising discovery which will help scientists to fight serious diseases without resorting to the deliberate destruction of human embryos to obtain stem cells."
In Great Britain, the head of the pro-life group Society for the Protection of Unborn Children said the new stem-cell studies "show that one can be both pro-life and pro-science."
Ian Wilmut, the Scottish scientist who created Dolly the cloned sheep in 1996, told the London Telegraph that he had decided in light of the new findings to abandon his efforts to clone human embryos and would instead concentrate on research involving the new reprogramming techniques.
Archbishop Mario Conti of Glasgow, Scotland, chairman of the United Kingdom and Ireland Joint Bishops' Bioethics Committee, welcomed Wilmut's announcement, saying: "The Catholic Church has constantly supported the work of scientists who use adult stem cells, research which has produced much more promising results and avoids the ethical dilemma involved in creating and destroying human life."
The National Catholic Bioethics Center said Wilmut's change of heart "flowed largely from practical considerations" but that the scientist also had acknowledged that the new approach was "easier to accept socially."
However, Thomson and the International Society for Stem-Cell Research called on scientists to continue research involving the destruction of human embryos. More study is needed to ensure that the newly made cells "do not differ from embryonic stem cells in a clinically significant or unexpected way, so it is hardly time to discontinue embryonic stem-cell research," Thomson said.
"These findings do not obviate the need for research using human embryonic stem cells," said the society in a Nov. 20 statement. "Rather, the different avenues of human stem-cell research should be pursued side by side providing complementary information."
In light of that stand by some scientists, Mailee Smith, staff counsel for the Chicago-based Americans United for Life, said: "The need for states to pass legislation that bans all forms of human cloning remains."
What can Israeli scientists tell you about creativity?
Jurgen Wolff
A survey of 3300 Israeli scientists conducted by the Project Mind Foundation has yielded some interesting results.
When asked to comment on the surroundings most conducive to creativity, a number of respondents described an absence of sensation - a dark room, being tired, being relieved of all stress, etc. - as sparking the greatest inspiration. Some 90% of the scientists reported that they had experienced their most potent strokes of creativity when they were in their 20's. More than 60% of the respondents expressed a strong belief that they had experienced creativity as a spiritual process.
My guess is that these all link together. The 20's is when many people have the most time with "an absence of sensation" - at least the time when they are at university, with fewer daily obligations, more time to sit around chatting deep into the night or working through the night on papers due the next day, more focus on the bigger questions of life including the subject of spirituality, etc. It's also a time when they are not yet experts, so they approach their subjects with a beginner's mind.
ACTION: How can you recreate, if only in miniature form, the conditions of your life when you were most creative? Can you take a weekend off and go somewhere that does not remind you of your daily obligations, so you can let your mind wander? Or even just a couple of hours a week?
How long has it been since you read something that stimulated your thinking - and then actually took the time to think about it and form your own ideas?
And a Quote to consider: "Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can play weird - that's easy. What's hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple complicated is commonplace - making the complicated simple, awesomely simple - that's creativity." Charles Mingus, jazz great
NEW YORK - At this "atheist moment," when books that ridicule the notion of a personal God are making best-seller lists, believers must acknowledge that the challenges posed to faith by modern science are very real, a panel of experts said this week at Fordham University.
The long-standing belief in the West that the universe has purpose and meaning has been replaced in the corridors of science by a focus on nature's processes that are not only intricately complex, but mindless and pointless.
"This leaves us, it seems, with an impersonal and purposeless universe," said John Haught, the main speaker, a Roman Catholic theologian who writes about the relationship of science and religion.
Close to 300 people overflowed Pope Auditorium at the Jesuit university's Columbus Circle campus on Tuesday for what promised to be a timely and provocative program: "After Darwin and Einstein: Is belief in a personal God still possible?"
The squeezing out of a personal God, for some, by advances in science may represent an update on Time magazine's famous 1966 cover story "Is God Dead?" which proclaimed that "the basic premise of faith - the existence of a personal God, who created the world and sustains it with his love - is now subject to profound attack."
The science-based questioning of today, though, come from only a segment of the country. Polls consistently show that about half of all Americans do not accept the theory of evolution.
Haught surveyed the views of Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan and others who dismissed any notions of a personal God. He also explained that if the 13.7-billion-year history of the cosmos was divided into 30 volumes of 450 pages each - with each page representing 1 million years - human development would not pop up until the very last page.
But Haught also reviewed ways of looking at the cosmos that leave room for a divine creator. The physical chemist Michael Polanyi, he said, suggested that since DNA is a carrier of codes, there is something informational about the universe that transcends matter.
The Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin Pierre, he said, wrote that since the universe becomes increasingly organized and coherent, people must think of the promise of the future and not just the billions of years of dust that came before us.
Fordham philosophy professor Brian Davies, a Dominican priest, said in response that "contemporary science seems to suggest that people are woven into the fabric of things, that the universe was in a sense pregnant with us long before we emerged."
But a lot hinges, he said, on what people mean by a personal God. People talk about God as if he's a "top person" or a better "guy on the street," not the ongoing creator of all being, Davies said.
Science writer John Horgan, a lapsed Catholic/agnostic, described belief in a personal God as "narcissistic," particularly when there's no explanation for the existence of evil.
But he did concede that "reality seems awfully designed and too good to be here by pure chance."
No one gave much time to the popular idea of "intelligent design," which holds that God designed the universe as it is.
"Design is a deadly idea," Haught said. "I don't want to think of God as drawing up a blueprint. We live in an imperfect universe riddled with evil and suffering."
What underlies reality, Haught said, turning more personal, is the promise of something better and God's fidelity to his creations.
"We live in a universe that is still coming into being," he said.
Q&A WITH ...If happiness is a choice, then why doesn't everyone simply make that choice?
Robert A. Emmons answers that question in his new book, Thanks! How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier. He suggests specific techniques for implementing a consistent lifestyle of gratitude. And it is a choice, but it takes practice, he adds.
After years of work on studying the subject scientifically, Dr. Emmons, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis, offers the findings he says demonstrate that gratitude can produce a healthier, happier lifestyle.
While some people may view happiness as merely a vague feeling, Dr. Emmons believes that one's perceptions can be manipulated to achieve contentment. He spoke recently with Special Contributor Anita Curtis by e-mail. Here are excerpts.
How does one look at gratitude as a science?
Science means that we apply scientific tools – observation and measurement – to the examination of, in this case, the feelings, perceptions and expressions of gratitude. It means that we replace armchair philosophy and moral rhetoric regarding gratitude with empirical observation of what gratitude is and the results of what it does in people's lives.
Were there findings that surprised you?
Yes, the physical health findings. That people keeping gratitude journals slept 1/2 hour more per evening, woke up more refreshed and exercised 33 percent more each week compared with persons who are not keeping these journals.
Is gratitude related to one's religious beliefs?
Gratitude is at the core of all the major religions. Virtually every religion emphasizes gratefulness or thanksgiving. It is part of the ethical foundations of world religions which state that people are morally obligated to give thanks to their God and to each other.
It's easy to be grateful for good things that come to us. How can we also be grateful in times of loss?
We realize that there is more to life than our losses, and gratitude for life gives us a realistic perspective by which to view our losses and not succumb to victimhood or despair. The ability to perceive the elements in one's life and even life itself as gifts would appear essential if we are to transform tragedies into opportunities.
How can negative emotions be replaced with positive ones? Is it really just a matter of choosing which to focus on?
This is true. For example, one simply cannot be relaxed and stressed at the same time, nor grateful and resentful at the same time. Relaxation drives out anxiousness and vice-versa. You have to gain control over your emotional destiny by choosing to replace negative thoughts with positive ones. But you just can't think happy thoughts or grateful thoughts, because emotions follow from particular thought patterns. So, perceiving life as a gift or things in one's life as gifts is the royal road to gratitude.
What do you consider the most important attribute or attitude one should develop to find joy and contentment in life?
I believe that gratitude is the best approach to life. When life is going well, it allows us to celebrate and magnify the goodness. When life is going badly, it provides a perspective by which we can view life in its entirety.
On paleontologist priest Teilhard de Chardin's search to reconcile faith and science.
By Jonathan Kirsch October 7, 2007
The Jesuit and the Skull
Teilhard de Chardin, Evolution, and the Search for Peking Man
Amir D. Aczel
Riverhead Books: 304 pp., $24.95
The clash between science and superstition is one important theme of Amir D. Aczel's biography of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, "The Jesuit and the Skull." A respected paleontologist, Teilhard was a member of the team of scientists who discovered the remains of Peking Man, a promising candidate for the "missing link" in human evolution, at Dragon Bone Hill in 1929. It was only one episode in an adventurous, tumultuous life that coincided with the wars and revolutions of the early 20th century.
Aczel, who has written on key figures in mathematics and science, is gifted at explaining complex concepts and introducing the men and women who first articulated them in fast-paced, story-driven accounts. For example, he makes good use of the mysterious disappearance of the Peking Man during the chaotic first days of World War II, an episode reminiscent of "The Da Vinci Code."
Then too, the Frenchman's life story is so deeply soaked in conflict and contradiction that it sometimes reads like an invented one. Tall, dapper, handsome and aristocratic, Teilhard was a charismatic figure who inevitably attracted the attention of the women around him. But as a Jesuit priest who had taken a vow of chastity, he refused to enter into the sexual union that some of them sought. And because his vows included one of obedience, his most important work, his philosophical writings -- an effort to embrace both a mystical faith in religion and the hard facts disclosed by scientific inquiry -- remained unpublished during his lifetime because the Roman Catholic Church decreed that they were heretical.
Teilhard's most vexing problems revolve around his membership in the Society of Jesus. His popularity and success in the secular world prompted his superiors to send this most cosmopolitan of men into exile in the wilds of Asia and Africa. And because he elected not to break his vow of chastity or withdraw from his order, the love he shared with a sculptress eventually withered and died.
Yet Teilhard, who kept images of Christ and Galileo beside his bed throughout his life, wanted to reconcile the mysticism of religion with the rationality of science, especially with regard to evolution. "[T]he ideas of evolution became so powerful that they convinced him that everything in the universe [was] in constant flux, ever evolving as decreed by God," explains Aczel. "The goal was a point where everything would converge to form the body of Christ. This was Teilhard's Omega Point."
Teilhard also was willing to abase himself to his superiors in a desperate effort to prevent his work from being placed on the list of banned writings called "the Index."
A certain elegant irony lies just beneath the surface of Aczel's superb story. Teilhard took pleasure in scientific trips to Spain and France to view cave paintings -- the first stirrings of religious imagination that are regarded as a line of demarcation between prehistoric hominids, essentially apes that walked upright, and the early human beings we must recognize as our direct ancestors.
Tens of thousands of years later, the worst features of organized religion distorted and delimited the life and work of this visionary whom the inheritors of the Inquisition saw as a dangerous heretic. Only after Teilhard's death were his most important works printed, and only because he put the manuscripts beyond church control by bequeathing them to one of the women who had befriended him. On Easter Sunday in 1955, he died of a heart attack in New York. Later that year, "The Phenomenon of Man," the first of his many books, at last was published, despite every effort of the church to prevent it. *
Physicist Charles Townes visited the University of Redlands this week and gave several lectures
DAVID JAMES HEISS, Staff Writer Article Launched: 09/14/2007
REDLANDS - Perhaps there are more than four dimensions - possibly 11, according to some scientific theories.
Humans and religion might fall into those seven "unknown" dimensions - in a spiritual dimension, perhaps, suggested Charles Townes, 1964 Nobel Prize-winning physicist who is visiting and giving guest lectures at the University of Redlands this week.
Townes, 92, won the Nobel Prize in physics for developing the laser.
"Science and religion are much more parallel and similar than people think, and are destined to come closer and closer together," said Townes...
"Questions of science and faith are basically the same. We tinker with things and so on. As an astronomer, I can observe the stars, but I can't tinker with them. We watch people and observe them and make observations. But what about intuition? It's very common in science.
It's very important to science and very important to religion. Then there's revelation. There's logic and reason. They make sense in both science and religion. They're all parallel."
"All the laws of science have to be right for us to be here. How did that happen? Some people don't want to say that it's that simple.
"Quantum mechanics and general relativity work amazingly well, but are logically inconsistent with each other," he said.
Quantum theories include dark matter, an unseen force that seems to pull stars and galaxies together with mass five times denser than what humans know, and dark energy, an invisible phenomenon that seems to push galaxies farther and farther away - yet their effects "must have 75 percent of the total mass of the universe," Townes said.
Another phenomenon he addressed was free will.
"Free will is simply not allowed by science," Townes said. "I can move my hand this way and that and any way I want. Very few scientists could disagree that free will exists. There are many things we don't understand. Where is thi
