TruthBook Religious News Blog

Former N.C. governor tells church the two need not be in conflict.
By Tim Funk
Monday, Aug. 31, 2009

For centuries, they waged war. It was religion vs. science.

Their battles ranged from 17th-century Italy, when the Catholic Church sentenced Galileo to house-arrest-for-life for saying the earth orbits the sun, to the Bible Belt in the 1920s, when Tennessee science teacher John Scopes was prosecuted for teaching evolution.

Militants on both sides are still shouting away, but another, more nuanced voice can also be heard today: that of the scientist who believes in God.

On Sunday, former N.C. Gov. Jim Martin – son of a Presbyterian minister and a longtime chemistry professor – argued that science and religion are compatible, not contradictory, and that faith must evolve along with our understanding of nature.

"I believe the God of Abraham and Moses… was the creator of the universe and all forms of life," Republican Martin told about 230 people at Charlotte's Covenant Presbyterian, his church for 16 years. "I do not believe it was done in six days."

Six periods of time is more like it, Martin said, starting 4.5 billion years ago. And though one-time seminary student Charles Darwin's theory of evolution continues to be dismissed by many evangelical Christians, Martin called it "the best understanding we have available. You can't be a biologist unless you subscribe to that."

A thoughtful article - please click on "external source" to see the whole thing...

Labels: evolution, faith, Jim Martin, religion, science, Tim Funk

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Friday, August 21, 2009

Religion for a Galactic Civilization 2.0

William Sims Bainbridge
Ethical Technology
Posted: Aug 20, 2009

Progress in spaceflight technology has halted at a level that is insufficient for colonization of the solar system, let alone for voyages to the stars. That grim fact was not obvious to me when I wrote the original version of this essay thirty years ago (Bainbridge 1982), but it is apparent now.

The plans to return to the moon will employ the same general principles as the first expeditions over forty years ago, and no new technology is currently under serious development. I recently re-examined the classic motivations for spaceflight, and found that most of them had lost persuasiveness (Bainbridge 2009). Indeed, despite the optimistic tone in much science journalism, it may be the case that stasis has set in across many fields of science and technology, and the motivations needed to break out of this prison seem to be lacking (Horgan 1996). Thus we need a new definition of spaceflight that will energize investment and innovation. I suggest a return to the traditional view: The heavens are a sacred realm, that we should enter in order to transcend death.

Religion shapes science and technology, and is shaped by them in return. It has become fashionable to assume that religion and science simply are opposed, and that science has been winning the battle over the past century. But much historical evidence indicates that religion of a certain kind was instrumental in the rise of science and modern technology (Weber 1958; Ben-David 1971; Merton 1970; Westfall 1973). Religion will continue to influence the course of progress, and creation of a galactic civilization may depend upon the emergence of a galactic religion capable of motivating society for the centuries required to accomplish that great project. This religion would be a very demanding social movement, and will require extreme discipline from its members, so for purposes of this essay I will call it The Cosmic Order.

Despite competition from science, religion has a future. All human societies have possessed religion, because it serves universal human needs (Parsons 1964). People want to feel that life is meaningful and that there is hope for future rewards even as the end of life draws near. The most recent theories in social science argue that religion will arise in all intelligent species possessing society—a structure of social relations among individuals—and which are gripped by strong desires which the current level of technology cannot satisfy (Stark and Bainbridge 1987). Cognitive science theories suggest that religion is wired into our brains as the result of the early course of human evolution, and could not be abandoned without major transformation of human nature (Boyer 2001; Atran 2002; Barrett 2004; Bloom 2004).

Modern industrial society has been marked by secularization, an historical trend in which traditional religious organizations lose influence. This is caused by three main factors. First, the development of science has discredited some traditional beliefs to the general discredit of traditional systems of faith. Second, the development of political radicalism has offered deprived members of society the hope of triumph and glory here on earth, rather than in the supernatural Heaven where they previously sought it. Third, the geographical mobility which many persons experience in modern society tears them away from the congregation in which they were raised, without automatically affiliating them with a particular congregation near their new home.

These factors undercut traditional religion but open the way for novel cults, some of which will become the established denominations of the future. Contrary to what one might think, persons without current religious affiliation are not typically atheistic, secular rationalists. In fact, compared to other groups they are more open to deviant supernatural beliefs, and thus are potential recruits for novel cults. Secularization does not mean a decline in the need for religion, but only a loss of power by traditional denominations. Studies of the geography of religion show that where the churches become weak, cults and occultism will explode to fill the spiritual vacuum (Stark and Bainbridge 1985).

Very recently, throughout the industrialized nations, we have seen a loss of faith in the promises of radical politics, although there is no abating of revolutionary pressures in developing nations. The progressive collapse of utopian politics will remove a major competitor and permit religious revival. While old religions may be at odds with modern science, some of the most recent cults are cloaked in the garb of science. And the most successful new religions have learned to use geographic mobility to their advantage, recruiting aggressively among those individuals who are temporarily adrift in society without an anchor in the community.

Most novel religions are likely to retard rather than promote space exploration, because they focus on "inner space" and mystical experiences rather than on "outer space" and practical action. An extreme example is the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, the Hare Krishna cult, which expressed itself on the subject of spaceflight in a book, Easy Journey to Other Planets. The cover illustration shows drab Apollo vehicles approaching the moon through a bleak and inhuman space environment, contrasted with a Hare Krishna dancer blissfully floating upward through bright celestial bubbles, reaching out his arms to his Lord. In the introduction, cult founder A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami (1970: preface) argues for spiritual rather than technical ascendancy:

The latest desire man has developed is the desire to travel to other planets. This is also quite natural, because he has the constitutional right to go to any part of the material or spiritual skies. Such travel is very tempting and exciting because these skies are full of unlimited globes of varying qualities, and they are occupied by all types of living entities. The desire to travel there can be fulfilled by the process of yoga, which serves as a means by which one can transfer himself to whatever planet he likes—possibly to planets where life is not only eternal and blissful, but where there are multiple varieties of enjoyable energies. Anyone who can attain the freedom of the spiritual planets need never return to this miserable land of birth, old age, disease and death.

Thus, we are urged to reach the stars by chanting "Hare Krishna," rather than by building crass, material spaceships. Since we are going to have religion, whether we want it or not, we’d best have religions which promote scientific discovery and space progress rather than retrograde faiths which oppose them and might even lead to a new Dark Age. Indeed, I suggest that societies will not develop interplanetary civilizations without the transcendent motivations and perspectives which religion can best provide. Quite aware that I enter the arena of wild speculation, I shall sketch briefly the outlines of an argument stating that science and technology naturally contain the seeds of their own destruction, unless controlled by a firm, transcendent rudder like religion.

This is quite an interesting - and lengthy - article. This excerpt is but a small portion, so click on "external source" to access, and enjoy this thoughtful article.

Labels: cosmic citizenship, faith, religion, science, spaceflight

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Friday, August 14, 2009

We believe in evolution — and God

Nearly half of Americans still dispute the indisputable: that humans evolved to our current form over millions of years. We’re scientists and Christians. Our message to the faithful: Fear not.

By Karl Giberson and Darrel Falk

The "conflict" between science and religion in America today is not only unfortunate, but unnecessary.

We are scientists, grateful for the freedom to earn Ph.D.s and become members of the scientific community. And we are religious believers, grateful for the freedom to celebrate our religion, without censorship. Like most scientists who believe in God, we find no contradiction between the scientific understanding of the world, and the belief that God created that world. And that includes Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

Many of our fellow Americans, however, don't quite see it this way, and this is where the real conflict seems to rest.

Almost everyone in the scientific community, including its many religious believers, now accepts that life has evolved over the past 4 billion years. The concept unifies the entire science of biology. Evolution is as well-established within biology as heliocentricity is established within astronomy. So you would think that everyone would accept it. Alas, a 2008 Gallup Poll showed that 44% of Americans reject evolution, believing instead that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years."

The "science" undergirding this "young earth creationism" comes from a narrow, literalistic and relatively recent interpretation of Genesis, the first book in the Bible. This "science" is on display in the Creation Museum in Kentucky, where friendly dinosaurs — one with a saddle! — cavort with humans in the Garden of Eden. Every week these ideas spread from pulpits and Sunday School classrooms across America. On weekdays, creationism is taught in fundamentalist Christian high schools and colleges. Science faculty at schools such as Bryan College in Tennessee and Liberty University in Virginia work on "models" to shoehorn the 15 billion year history of the universe into the past 10,000 years.

Evolution continues to disturb, threatening the faith of many in a deeply religious America, especially those who read the Bible as a scientific text. But it does not have to be this way.

Paradoxical challenges

Such challenges to evolutionary science are paradoxical. Challenging accepted ideas is how America churns out Nobel Prize-winning science and patents that will drive tomorrow's technology. But challenging authority can also undermine this country's leadership in science, when citizens reject it.

Darwin proposed the theory of evolution in 1859 in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. This controversial text presented evidence that present-day life forms have descended from common ancestors via natural selection. Organisms better adapted to their environments had more offspring, and these fitness adaptations accumulated across the millennia. And this is how new species arose.

In 1859 the evidence convinced many people, but not without challenges. Paleontology, the study of fossils, was new; no reliable way existed to determine the age of the Earth, and the physicists said it was too young to accommodate evolution; and Darwin knew nothing of genes, so the mechanism of inheritance — central to his theory — was shrouded in mystery.

But the biggest problem was dismay that humans were related to primates: "Descended from the apes? Dear me, let us hope it is not true," allegedly exclaimed the wife of a 19th-century English bishop upon hearing of Darwin's new theory. "But if it is true, let us hope it does not become widely known."

This is an interesting op-ed piece regarding a belief in evolution and a belief in God being able to co-exist - it is written by two scientists who also happen to be "religious believers." Please click on "external source" for the complete article.

Labels: Charles Darwin, conflict, Darrel Falk, evolution, faith, Karl Giberson, religion, science

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Friday, July 24, 2009

Science, religion is a theme in new Galileo book

Issues from scientist’s 17th-century trial still prevail, author says

By Ed Stoddard
July 20, 2009

DALLAS - The current struggles between religion and science in areas such as evolution and "intelligent design" are thrown into sharp relief in a new book about the Italian astronomer Galileo and his trial by the Roman Inquisition.

Author Dan Hofstadter described the Galileo affair as "the great religion-science clash of 1633 that in some form has persisted into our time."

The focus of the trial was the scientist's embrace of the Copernican view that the Earth revolves around the sun — a view informed by the observations Galileo made with his famous telescope.

Christians had been ordered not to teach or promote the Copernican take on the solar system. It was essentially for this reason that Galileo found himself in hot water with the clerical establishment.

Hofstadter spoke with Reuters about his book "The Earth Moves: Galileo and the Roman Inquisition," and the relevance of this 17th-century episode today.

Please click on "external source for the interview with the author.

Labels: Dan Hofstadter, Ed Stoddard, Galileo, religion, science

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NIH nominee Collins smartly balances top science, real religion

By MICHAEL GERSON
Washington Post

According to one survey, just 7 percent of elite American scientists believe in a personal god — the kind to whom you pray. About 8 percent, however, affirm their belief in personal immortality — indicating that some egos are so large that they fill eternity.

Should it matter that President Barack Obama’s nominee to be director of the National Institutes of Health — the Supreme Court nomination of the scientific world — is part of the believing few?

Francis Collins presents a perfect test case. His qualifications are beyond dispute. As a pioneering gene hunter, he helped identify the genetic markers for cystic fibrosis, neurofibromatosis, Huntington’s disease and adult onset diabetes. He was in charge of the program at NIH that mapped the human genome, the biological equivalent of the Apollo space program.

Collins is also an evangelical Christian who sings hymns while playing the guitar.

For some scientists, this combination of scientific excellence and religious faith is contradictory — like being a geneticist and believing in unicorns or astrology. "You clearly can be a scientist and have religious beliefs," says Peter Atkins of Oxford University. "But I don’t think you can be a real scientist in the deepest sense of the word because they (religion and science) are such alien categories of knowledge."

To which Collins, who has written and spoken extensively on this topic, replies that there are two categories of knowledge, two ways of knowing. And though they are different, they are not "alien" or contradictory.

For a further explanation, and the complete article, please click on "external source."

Labels: Francis Collins, Michael Gerson, NIH, religion, science

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Thursday, July 16, 2009

Pew Research survey on science and public attitudes

July 9, 2009
Russell Krauss

Pew Research just published a survey it conducted in conjunction with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "Public Praises Science; Scientists Fault Public, Media," is how Pew summarizes the results. That's good news as far as the public attitude toward science is concerned. After eight years of Bush administration foot dragging on climate change and the environment, it's refreshing that this evident hostility toward science and knowledge didn't spread beyond Washington. As far as the scientists are concerned, isn't that the attitude of everyone who is an expert in a certain field - that the public is woefully ignorant about the subject? That's human nature.

As part of the study, Pew included a short, 12 question general science quiz which it administered to a random sample of 1005 adults. Pew invites readers of the survey to take the quiz - but do so before reading the report. No peeking. I accepted the challenge, and it took only a couple of minutes to complete, and it was fun to see what sorts of questions they asked. You know the answers or you don't, so it won't take up much time, and then you can compare yourself against the sample by age, sex, and education. More on the results at the end of this post.

The basic survey was conducted among 2001 adults selected randomly from the general population, and 2533 scientists who responded to a mailing to nearly 10,000 members of the AAAS who were likewise chosen randomly. Note, though, the 2533 were not randomly selected, only the pool from which they were drawn. The report is quite lengthy, but well worth reading beyond the summary. I won't repeat the details that were highlighted in the introduction, but there were a few surprises and a couple of jaw-droppers.

Please click on "external source" for the complete article, plus a link to the survey results

Labels: AAAS, Pew Research Center survey, Russell Krauss, science

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Monday, July 06, 2009

Majority think it is possible to believe in God and Darwin

Most people feel it is possible to believe in God and evolution, according to a survey.

01 Jul 2009

The poll carried out by the British Council found that 54 per cent thought that science and religion are compatible.

Only 19 per cent of those questioned said it is impossible to believe in a God while also holding the view that life on earth evolved as a result of natural selection. This is the theory proposed by Charles Darwin exactly 150 years ago in his groundbreaking book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

The study, which surveyed the opinions of more than 10,000 people across 10 countries worldwide including Great Britain, also uncovered wide regional variations in the acceptance of evolutionary theory.

Please click on "external source" for the complete results from the survey

Labels: Charles Darwin, evolution, God, Great Britain, religion, science

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Friday, June 26, 2009

Vatican’s Celestial Eye, Seeking Not Angels but Data

By GEORGE JOHNSON
Published: June 22, 2009

MOUNT GRAHAM, Ariz. — Fauré’s “Requiem” is playing in the background, followed by the Kronos Quartet. Every so often the music is interrupted by an electromechanical arpeggio — like a jazz riff on a clarinet — as the motors guiding the telescope spin up and down. A night of galaxy gazing is about to begin at the Vatican’s observatory on Mount Graham.
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“Got it. O.K., it’s happy,” says Christopher J. Corbally, the Jesuit priest who is vice director of the Vatican Observatory Research Group, as he sits in the control room making adjustments. The idea is not to watch for omens or angels but to do workmanlike astronomy that fights the perception that science and Catholicism necessarily conflict.

Please click on "external source" for the complete article

Labels: astronomy, Catholicism, George Johnson, science, Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope

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Can Science and Religion Co-Exist in Harmony?

June 22, 2009

Some of the nation's leading journalists gathered in Key West, Fla., in May 2009 for the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life's Faith Angle Conference on religion, politics and public life.

Francis S. Collins, the former director of the Human Genome Project and an evangelical Christian, discussed why he believes religion and science are compatible and why the current conflict over evolution vs. faith, particularly in the evangelical community, is unnecessary.

Barbara Bradley Hagerty, the religion correspondent for National Public Radio, discussed how the brain reacts to spiritual experiences and her belief that people can look at scientific evidence and conclude that everything is explained by material means or look at the universe and see the hand of God.

Speaker: Francis S. Collins, Former Director, National Human Genome Research Institute

Respondent: Barbara Bradley Hagerty, Religion Correspondent, National Public Radio

Moderator: Michael Cromartie, Vice President, Ethics and Public Policy Center;

Senior Adviser, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

In the following excerpt ellipses have been omitted to facilitate reading. Read the full transcript, including audience discussion at pewforum.org.

FRANCIS COLLINS: I'll spend most of the time [today] talking about the current conflict that appears, at least in this country, to be a rather unpleasant one, where the voices that are arguing that science and faith are incompatible are actually quite loud -- even shrill at times. I'll offer up from my own perspective why that conflict is an unnecessary one and provide some possibilities of how it might be resolved in a way that I think would be good for our future...

Please click on "external source" to read the entire article, and also, to access the full transcript of this most insightful and important discussion regarding the compatibility of science and religion.

Labels: Barbara Bradley Hagerty, faith, Francis Collins, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, religion, science

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Friday, June 19, 2009

Brain waves or beatific vision?

Tue, Jun. 16, 2009

Mystical experiences under the microscope
By David O'Reilly

Inquirer Staff Writer

As mystical experiences go, Barbara Bradley Hagerty's transcendent moment was not the kind that launches a new world religion. Still, it changed her forever.

The day was June 10, 1995. Hagerty, religion reporter for National Public Radio, was interviewing a terminally ill melanoma patient, Kathy, whose sunny outlook and trust in Jesus seemed to have prolonged her life, inexplicably, for years.

Then, as they talked, "I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand on end," Hagerty writes in her new book, Fingerprints of God, a survey of modern scientific investigation into religious experience.

"The air grew warmer and heavier, as if someone had moved into the circle [of lamplight] and was breathing on us. I glanced at Kathy." She, too, felt something and had "fallen silent in mid-sentence."

"I felt an unseen caress, engulfed by a presence I could feel but not touch," Hagerty continues. "I was paralyzed. . . . After a minute, although it seemed longer, the presence melted away."

What was it she sensed? Jesus? An angelic being? Or, as one researcher later suggested, had the temporal lobe of her brain been briefly hyperstimulated? This, he told her, likely induced the illusion of an unseen presence.

Whatever it was, it proved the "continental divide in my life," Hagerty said during a recent interview. "I decided I should investigate, the way we journalists do."

Her investigation grew into Fingerprints of God, a lucid overview of an essential question: Is mystical experience truly a glimpse of the divine, the eternal, the absolute? Or are the seemingly transformative moments known variously as "enlightenment" or "beatific vision" or cosmic bliss merely swells and quells in brain activity, signifying nothing beyond ourselves?

Please click on "external source" for the complete article.

Labels: Barbara Bradley Hagerty, brain, David O'Reilly, God, religion, science, transcendence

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Friday, May 22, 2009

Book Review: " Fingerprints of God"

NPR reporter Barbara Bradley Hagerty uses journalism’s tools to explore the intersection of spirituality and science.
By Gregory M. Lamb | May 19, 2009 edition

Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality By Barbara Bradley Hagerty Riverheard Books 323 pp., $33.50

Using the reporting and explanatory skills of a talented veteran journalist, Barbara Bradley Hagerty has written a compelling account of her quest to answer an age-old question: Is this all there is?

The result is Fingerprints of God, a book that sails the roiling waters between religion and science and is unlikely to make quick friends among either evangelical Christians or those in the scientific community who conclude that God cannot exist. But for readers who consider themselves to be spiritual seekers, Hagerty treads some fascinating territory.

Rather than dismissing science as the enemy of spirituality, she engages with it, seeking out scientific pioneers, the outliers who are doing intriguing work on the nature of the brain and consciousness. She also talks with ordinary people who’ve had extraordinary personal encounters, such as near-death or out-of-body experiences, that have changed their views of themselves, reality, and on the existence of an afterlife.

Hagerty, the religion correspondent for National Public Radio, comes to a less-than-startling conclusion: Science can neither prove nor disprove these great questions. But she also sees hints of a “paradigm shift” in science now under way – akin, perhaps, to the early 20th century when the work of Einstein and others took a quantum leap away from a universe based solely on 18th-century Newtonian physics.

“Hard science does not mean petrified science,” Hagerty posits. “The paradigm to exclude a divine intelligence, or ‘Other,’ or ‘God,’ to reduce all things to matter, has reigned triumphant for some four hundred years, since the dawn of the Age of Reason,” she continues. “Today, a small yet growing number of scientists are trying to chip away at the paradigm, suspecting that its feet are made of clay.”

Please click on "external source" for complete article.

Labels: Barbara Bradley Hagerty, God, Gregory M. Lamb, religion, science, spirituality

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Friday, May 08, 2009

More From Francis Collins on God and Evolution

May 5, 2009

The scientific blogosphere, as well as the Washington, D.C., rumor mill, are buzzing this week about geneticist Francis Collins's latest project: a new foundation and Web site created "to engage America's escalating culture war between science and faith."

The new venture is funded by the Templeton Foundation, which supports research exploring the interface of science and religion.

—Jocelyn Kaiser

Please click on "external source" for a link to Dr Collins' website, Biologos.

Labels: faith, Francis Collins, Jocelyn Kaiser, science, Templeton Foundation

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Francis Collins: A Scientific Basis for God

May 04, 2009 04:32 PM ET |
Dan Gilgoff | Permanent Link | Print

By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country

Is there a scientific basis for the existence of God? Many believers think so, even as they often dismiss science because they think it's incompatible with their religious beliefs. A recent Gallup Poll, for instance, found that 45 percent of Americans reject evolution, believing that human beings were created more or less in our present form within the past 10,000 years. Despite objections from scientists, many believers argue that there's scientific evidence
for such "Young Earth" creationism.

Francis Collins, director of the human genome project, is an atheist turned Christian who sees a scientific basis for God that not only embraces modern science
but actually relies on it. Collins has just launched a new website and a foundation called biologos, which "emphasizes the compatibility of Christian faith with what science has discovered about the origins of the universe and life."

Unless Christians—evangelicals, in particular—learn to integrate modern science with their religious faith, Collins believes, they are either stuck clinging to untruths about scientific ideas like evolution or, once they do accept evolution, are in danger of having to abandon their faith out of the mistaken belief that evolution and Christianity are incompatible.

Collins was raised without religion. He began questioning his atheism during medical school, when he witnessed patients who were near death but who were deeply comforted by their religious faith. Collins became a Christian in his 20s. "I believe in the literal rising of the body of Christ," he says today. "It's the cornerstone of my Christian faith."

In this very interesting article, Francis Collins' talking points for God's existence are enumerated...please click on "external link" for the complete article.

Labels: atheism, Dan Gilgoff, Francis Collins, God, human genome project, science

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Friday, May 01, 2009

Q & A: Francis Collins

The former director of the Human Genome Project hopes to show compatibility between Christianity and science.
By Daniel Burke, Religion News Service
4/30/2009

A year after stepping down as director of the Human Genome Project, Dr. Francis Collins is embarking on a new venture, one that may be even harder than deciphering DNA.

Collin's new BioLogos Foundation, which launched on April 28, aims to be a bridge in the debate over science and religion and provide some answers to life's most difficult questions.

Please click on "external source" to read the answers to the following questions asked of Dr Collins

What led you to this new project?

Where does the name BioLogos come from?

What kind of answers will the Web site give?

What's the goal for this Web site and foundation?

Can you give an example of the kinds of questions the Web site will be addressing?

Is your target audience fellow evangelicals?

Is the site interactive in the sense that people can pose questions that will be answered?

What about other BioLogos projects?

Labels: Daniel Burke, Francis Collins, religion, science

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Monday, April 27, 2009

RD10Q: Thinking About God Makes Your Brain Bigger

RD10Q: Thinking About God Makes Your Brain Bigger
By Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman
April 24, 2009

A new book argues that spiritual practices, be they secular or religious, are inherently good for you. Meditation and prayer—be it about God, or evolution, or peace, or the Big Bang—will actually change your brain.

Ten Questions for Andrew Newberg and Mark Waldman on How God Changes Your Brain, (Ballantine, 2009).

What inspired the two of you to write How God Changes Your Brain? What sparked your interest?

Our newest brain-scan research showed that different forms of meditation and spiritual practice can actually improve memory, and it may even slow down the aging process itself. We had also gathered enough data to draw a more comprehensive picture of how spiritual practices affect and change different parts of the brain, and we wanted to share this new perspective with the general public. We also wanted to present evidence showing how the religious landscape of America is moving from traditional values to a more spiritual and science-based vision of the universe.

What’s the most important take-home message for readers?

Spiritual practices, secular or religious, are inherently good for your body, and especially your brain. Meditation and prayer—be it about God, or evolution, or peace, or the Big Bang—will strengthen important circuits in your brain, making you more socially aware and alert while reducing anxiety, depression, and neurological stress. And meditation can be adapted in endless ways. You can use it to become more motivated to succeed in business. You can apply it to communication to reduce relationship conflicts. You can do a sixty-second meditation involving yawning to quickly relax your body and mind. Indeed, you can use the same technique to bring a roomful of children, students, or CEOs to attention with their brains becoming acutely attuned to each other: a fancy way of saying that yawning can actually evoke social empathy with many living species on this planet.

Please click on "external source" to access the entire interview with the authors.

Labels: Andrew Newberg, brain, God, How God Changes Your Brain, Mark Robert Waldman, science

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Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Book Review: Solution to "The God Wars" Found in Award-Winning Book

WEBWIRE – Saturday, April 18, 2009

RETURN TO MEANING: THE AMERICAN PSYCHE IN SEARCH OF ITS SOUL redefines religious meaning and its importance for a Scientific Age. (http://www.andrewcort.com)

"Renaissance man” Andrew Cort (science and mathematics teacher, attorney, and doctor of chiropractic), has written an inspirational and scholarly book that “rescues philosophy from the mathematicians, sex from the hedonists, religion from empty sanctimony, and science from barren materialism,” says George Gilder, noted social commentator.

If there is a God, and God is all-powerful and good, why would God create such a painful and difficult world? Does religion have a credible answer? Morality, as secularists know, does not require a deity. Blind faith, as atheists know, often leads to hatred and violence. Taking scriptural stories as literal accounts of history, as scientists know, borders on the nonsensical. There has to be more.

Please click on "external source" for complete article, and a link to the author's website.

Labels: Dr. Andrew Cort, God, philosophy, religion, science, soul

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10 Minutes with … the Rev. John Polkinghorne

April 15, 2009
NEWS FEATURE
10 Minutes with … the Rev. John Polkinghorne
By Daniel Burke

(UNDATED) Christian thinkers have long employed insights from sociology, literature, and other fields to augment their ideas of how God works in the world.

Yet despite the world-changing insights of science, very few theologians have drawn on physics, biology or geology in the same way.

Renowned Anglican physicist-theologian John Polkinghorne wants to change all that. His new book, “Theology in the Context of Science,” examines what topics like space and time can teach us about God, and how a scientific style of inquiry can benefit theologians.

Polkinghorne, who was awarded the Templeton Prize in 2002 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his work reconciling science and faith, spoke about his new book from his home in England. Some answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Theology and science are highly specialized, often complex disciplines. Is it feasible for someone to become fully versed in both?

A: I’m not saying that every theologian has to approach theology through the context of science any more than a liberation theologian would say that everyone has to live in base community in South America. I wrote the book to encourage theologians to take the context of science more seriously ... without having to master all of the technical details.

This is a transcript of an interview with renowned Anglican physicist-theologian John Polkinghorne, who was the winner of the Templeton Prize in 2002. It is a worthwhile read. Please click on "external source" for complete article.

Labels: Daniel Burke, God, Rev. John Polkinghorne, science, Templeton Prize, theologians

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God and the Multiverse

April 14, 2009, 6:14 am
God and the Multiverse

Please click on "external source" to access the original article in "Seed" magazine. Interesting juxtaposition with Urantia Book revelation.

Today’s idea: Multiverse?theory —?the idea that many universes lie beyond what we can observe — doesn’t really undermine the argument for God as creator as some Christian thinkers contend, scientists and theologians say.

Science and Religion | New “multiverse” theories challenge both humanity’s uniqueness and our central place in the cosmos, Nathan Schneider writes in Seed magazine — so it looks like they could join evolution as another battleground in the culture wars. Christian thinkers have criticized such ideas as “motivated by a refusal to accept evidence of God’s handiwork in the cosmos.”

But among scientists and theologians focused on multiverse theory, many believe that it simply expands the job description for God.

Labels: God, multiverse, religion, science, Seed

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Sunday, March 15, 2009

U.S. Buddhists, Hindus Back Evolution, Says Study

India West, News Report, Ashfaque Swapan
Mar 13, 2009

Despite virtually unanimous support in the scientific community, there is considerable public skepticism in the U.S. about Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, with 39 percent believing in the theory, according to a Gallup poll.

Hindus in the U.S., however, overwhelmingly accept the scientific consensus, with four out of five Hindus agreeing that evolution best explains the origin of human beings, according to a recent study by the Pew Center.

Buddhists, edging Hindus by a slight margin, were the greatest supporters among different religious groups, the survey found.

As the world celebrated the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin Feb. 12, his legacy is a study in contrasts: While there is virtual unanimity among biologists regarding the validity of his theory of natural selection, public opinion continues to show surprising pockets of resistance in some nations.

The resistance has come almost entirely from religious groups, led by Christian groups, who support an alternative theory called intelligent design, which accepts the existence or agency of a supreme being.

However, skepticism among scientists about intelligent design in unanimous.

The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has stated that "creationism, intelligent design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life or of species are not science because they are not testable by the methods of science." The U.S. National Science Teachers Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science have termed it pseudoscience. Many in the scientific community have been less kind, bluntly calling it junk science.

Public opinion in the U.S., however, continues to be surprisingly resistant to Darwin’s theory. According to an August 2006 survey by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, 63 percent of Americans believe that humans and other animals have either always existed in their present form or have evolved over time under the guidance of a supreme being. Only 26 percent said that life evolved solely through processes such as natural selection.

Hindus in the U.S., however, do not share this view. In advance of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birthday on Feb. 12, the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life released a report exploring the evolution controversy in the U.S. The Pew Forum's U.S. Religious Landscape Survey found that views on evolution differ widely across religious groups.

Buddhists and Hindus led the study with 81 percent of Buddhists and 80 percent of Hindus agreeing that evolution is the best explanation of the origin of human life on earth, followed by Jewish (77 percent) and unaffiliated (72 percent) groups. Muslims (45 percent) were the fifth least enthusiastic about Darwin’s theory in the 12-group study, with Jehovah’s Witnesses (7 percent), Mormons (22 percent) and evangelical Protestants (24 percent) being the least enthusiastic religious groups.

Labels: Buddhists, Charles Darwin, creationism, evolution, Hindus, science

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Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Religious Thoughts and Feelings Not Limited to One Part of Brain

By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: March 9, 2009

Brain researchers trying to understand the neural basis of religious belief have concluded that the brain has no special region or network for this task. Rather, it depends on general networks that exist for other purposes.

A team led by Dr. Jordan Grafman of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke questioned volunteers about their religious beliefs while monitoring the blood flow in their brains with a scanning machine. Extra blood flow is assumed to reflect the activity of neurons in a specific region of the brain.

Different networks of neurons sprang into action when subjects were asked their view of three sets of statements about the religious beliefs, Dr. Grafman and colleagues report in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In all three cases the neural activity in the subjects’ brains corresponded to brain networks known to have other, nonreligious functions. These include the theory of mind networks, used to predict other people’s intentions.

Dr. Andrew Newberg, director of the Center for Spirituality and the Mind at the University of Pennsylvania, said Dr. Grafman’s findings were in line with other research that has so far failed to find any specific structure in the brain that is dedicated to religious belief. “Religion has so many different aspects that it would be very unlikely to find one spot in the brain where religion and God reside,” Dr. Newberg said.

But he expressed doubt as to whether the biological correlates of religious belief, as visualized in brain scans like those taken by Dr. Grafman, in fact captured all of what religion is. “There may be other elements that science is not capable of measuring,” Dr. Newberg said.

In his own work Dr. Newberg looks at subjects undergoing religious experiences, like speaking in tongues or meditating. In “How God Changes Your Brain,” a book being published later this month, Dr. Newberg reports that certain regions of subjects’ brains have enlarged areas of neural activation after many months of intensive meditation.

He questioned whether asking subjects questions about religion when they were not in a religious frame of mind would capture much of interest about religious belief.

Dr. Grafman said that religious cohesion for a common purpose, and the ability to infer what others are thinking, would each have been favored by evolution, along with the theory of mind networks that serves both systems.

Labels: belief, brain, God, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, Nicholas Wade, religion, science

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Religion Reduces Anxiety—A Matter of Faith or Fact?

March 06, 2009
by Rachel Balik

This article reference a number of studies, and provides links for further exploration of this most interesting topic.

Two studies show that the brains of religious people have less intense responses to error, suggesting that faith in God can reduce anxiety.

God on the Brain

Many previous studies have tried to determine whether religion has a positive effect on mental health. In February 2008, the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion and the Centre for Anthropology and Mind at Oxford began a three-year study to develop a scientific understanding of why humans believe in God. Researchers will look for evidence that faith in God is a desirable evolutionary trait, and attempt to discover what aspects of religion can be attributed to nature, and which must be taught.

Psychologists compared a group of students trained for a month in mindfulness meditation with another that was taught somatic relaxation. Both techniques reduced stress, but meditation was more effective at reducing “distractive and ruminative thoughts and behaviors,” indicating that it offered a “unique” method for minimizing distress.

Mindful meditation has also been found to alter the structure and functioning of monks’ brains, The Wall Street Journal reported in 2004. Five neuroscientists visited the Dalai Lama to explore neuroplasticity (the brain’s ability to rewire itself) and its relation to meditation. The brains of novice and experienced monks were scanned as they meditated; the experienced monks showed a significantly higher level of gamma waves, a type of brain activity that plays a key role in consciousness.

Religion’s effect on the brain has yet to be fully assessed. However, research suggests that incorporating spirituality into children’s lives can help them navigate the difficult choices of adolescence. Several studies have shown that children raised with a spiritual or religious tradition are less likely to make poor choices about drugs and alcohol.

And in hard times, many find comfort in religion. In September, as the foundation of Wall Street began to crumble, many financiers turned to God and organized religion for support. Churches and synagogues throughout New York City reported a higher number of congregants in business suits.

Labels: believers, God, meditation, mental health, Rachel Balik, religion, science, Stroop

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Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Keeping (Or Finding) The Faith

Keeping (Or Finding) The Faith
Thursday, Feb. 12, 2009

Not all that long ago, you'd have had a hard time finding a research institute, an academic department or even a decent conference exploring the link between spirituality and health. And with good reason. Health is science, spirituality is something else entirely, and people who say otherwise clearly need to sit down with a medical journal or two.

But that's all changing. Everyone's got a stake in getting human health right--whether families and individuals simply trying to stay well or governments trying to build a functioning health-care system that doesn't break the bank. With so much on the line, no one can afford to take options off the table.

For that reason, investigators around the world backed by both public and private money are studying the faith factor in all manner of diseases and conditions. They have examined the spiritual-care needs of children with terminal illnesses and looked at how religion and superstition affect schizophrenia in China and how spirituality influences the well-being of college students in Malta and nuns in India. They have probed the links between religion and psychological woes too: neuroticism in Dutch twins, obsessive-compulsive symptoms in Italians, death anxiety among Egyptian nursing students and substance abuse in adolescents in Jerusalem. They have tried to measure the benefits of Bible therapy for patients with Alzheimer's disease, as well as the impact of religious guilt and congregational criticism on doubting members of the flock. They've looked at the health effects of psychoactive sacramentals (think peyote) and the spiritual preferences of neo-pagans (think Wiccans and druids).

The fact that what began as a trickle of studies has become a torrent doesn't mean that everyone is happy, and many scientists will continue to have nothing to do with what they see as fluff. Still, the movable feast of institutes, academic treatises, self-help books, websites, healing centers and luxury spas with a spiritual bent grows steadily larger. Here is just a sampling of what's available.

Please click on "external link" for the list of spiritually focused healing sites.

Labels: faith, health, science, spirituality, websites

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The Biology of Belief

The Biology of Belief
By JEFFREY KLUGER Thursday, Feb. 12, 2009

This is page one of a four-page article - well worth the read. Please click on "external source" to access the entire article

Most folks probably couldn't locate their parietal lobe with a map and a compass. For the record, it's at the top of your head — aft of the frontal lobe, fore of the occipital lobe, north of the temporal lobe. What makes the parietal lobe special is not where it lives but what it does — particularly concerning matters of faith.

If you've ever prayed so hard that you've lost all sense of a larger world outside yourself, that's your parietal lobe at work. If you've ever meditated so deeply that you'd swear the very boundaries of your body had dissolved, that's your parietal too. There are other regions responsible for making your brain the spiritual amusement park it can be: your thalamus plays a role, as do your frontal lobes. But it's your parietal lobe — a central mass of tissue that processes sensory input — that may have the most transporting effect. (Read "Top 10 Medical Breakthroughs".)

Needy creatures that we are, we put the brain's spiritual centers to use all the time. We pray for peace; we meditate for serenity; we chant for wealth. We travel to Lourdes in search of a miracle; we go to Mecca to show our devotion; we eat hallucinogenic mushrooms to attain transcendent vision and gather in church basements to achieve its sober opposite. But there is nothing we pray — or chant or meditate — for more than health.

Health, by definition, is the sine qua non of everything else. If you're dead, serenity is academic. So we convince ourselves that while our medicine is strong and our doctors are wise, our prayers may heal us too.

Here's what's surprising: a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that faith may indeed bring us health. People who attend religious services do have a lower risk of dying in any one year than people who don't attend. People who believe in a loving God fare better after a diagnosis of illness than people who believe in a punitive God. No less a killer than AIDS will back off at least a bit when it's hit with a double-barreled blast of belief. "Even accounting for medications," says Dr. Gail Ironson, a professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Miami who studies HIV and religious belief, "spirituality predicts for better disease control." (Read "Finding God on YouTube.")

It's hard not to be impressed by findings like that, but a skeptic will say there's nothing remarkable — much less spiritual — about them. You live longer if you go to church because you're there for the cholesterol-screening drive and the visiting-nurse service. Your viral load goes down when you include spirituality in your fight against HIV because your levels of cortisol — a stress hormone — go down first. "Science doesn't deal in supernatural explanations," says Richard Sloan, professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center and author of Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine. "Religion and science address different concerns."

That's undeniably true — up to a point. But it's also true that our brains and bodies contain an awful lot of spiritual wiring. Even if there's a scientific explanation for every strand of it, that doesn't mean we can't put it to powerful use. And if one of those uses can make us well, shouldn't we take advantage of it? "A large body of science shows a positive impact of religion on health," says Dr. Andrew Newberg, a professor of radiology, psychology and religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder of Penn's Center for Spirituality and the Mind. "The way the brain works is so compatible with religion and spirituality that we're going to be enmeshed in both for a long time."

It's All in Your Head
"enmeshed in the brain" is as good a way as any to describe Newberg's work of the past 15 years. The author of four books, including the soon-to-be-released How God Changes Your Brain, he has looked more closely than most at how our spiritual data-processing center works, conducting various types of brain scans on more than 100 people, all of them in different kinds of worshipful or contemplative states. Over time, Newberg and his team have come to recognize just which parts of the brain light up during just which experiences.

When people engage in prayer, it's the frontal lobes that take the lead, since they govern focus and concentration. During very deep prayer, the parietal lobe powers down, which is what allows us to experience that sense of having loosed our earthly moorings. The frontal lobes go quieter when worshippers are involved in the singular activity of speaking in tongues — which jibes nicely with the speakers' subjective experience that they are not in control of what they're saying.

Labels: Andrew Newberg, brain, faith, health, Jeffrey Kluger, medicine, parietal lobe, prayer, religion, science, spirituality

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The Cost of Unbelief

By: Simon Smart
Posted: Tuesday, 10 February 2009, 9:43 (EST)

This is the first of a three-page article - well worth reading. Just click on "external source" to access the entire article.

Australian atheists were recently prevented from running a series of ads on buses with the message, “There’s probably no God, so sleep in on Sundays.” It was a funny ad and should have been permitted, and if the Bureau of Statistics A Picture of a Nation report is anything to go by, there’s a generation of young people who don’t need convincing. According to the latest figures young Australians are increasingly secular with the proportion of people stating ‘no religion’ on their census form up from 6.7% in 1971 to 19% in 2006; the younger generation leading the charge to the beach on Sunday mornings (or perhaps staying under the doona). 23.5% of 15 – 34 year-olds did not specify a religion compared with 7.9% of Australians 65 and older.

No doubt this finding will be good news to those who believe religion has only paranoia, superstition, violence and hypocrisy to contribute to society, and there are plenty of them. Freud famously articulated the notion that religion is a neurosis. Likewise, Psychologist Albert Ellis saw only the pernicious effects of religion on individuals, claiming that ‘Religiosity … is in many respects equivalent to irrational thinking and emotional disturbance.’ (Ellis, 1980, 67)

But the latest scientific data on the effects of religiosity on health, might give us reason to pause. In 2001 Duke University researchers conducted a large survey of 100 evidence-based studies of the correlation between religion and well-being and found that 79 reported a positive correlation, 13 no correlation, 7 mixed correlation and 1 a negative correlation.1 The masses of research completed since then has largely pointed in the same direction.

This is a growing field. It reflects a more serious attempt to integrate ‘whole-person care’ in medical areas that previously gave little importance to the spiritual side of patient management. Of the 141 medical schools in the U.S. and Canada 70% now offer courses on religion, spirituality and medicine.

This is largely a response to the vast amount of data emerging over the last eight years that reveals positive correlations between commitment to religion and better outcomes for dealing with depression and anxiety, strength of immune systems, cardiovascular health and even longevity.

It is well accepted that stress and depression have serious adverse health impacts and studies that show religious coping improves outcomes in this area need to be taken seriously. It is the scientists who are telling us that religious involvement is associated with lower rates of a host of stress-related medical conditions including cardiovascular disease, stroke, immune and endocrine functioning, cancer—especially gastrointestinal, breast and oral—and better outcomes for cancer in general.

It is worth quoting some research to give a small taste of the sort of data being reported:

Labels: atheism, depression, mental health, religion, science, Simon Smart, spirituality

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Monday, February 09, 2009

Scientists and religious leaders call for end to fighting over Darwin's legacy

Prominent scientists and leading religious figures have joined forces to call for an end to the fighting over Charles Darwin's legacy.

By Martin Beckford, Religious Affairs Correspondent
09 Feb 2009

Ahead of the 200th anniversary of the pioneering naturalist's birth on Thursday, they warn that militant atheists are turning people away from evolution by using it as a weapon with which to attack religion.

However, in a letter published in The Daily Telegraph, they also urge believers in creationism to acknowledge the overwhelming body of evidence that now exists to back up Darwin's theory of how life on Earth has developed.

It comes after a survey of 2,000 people conducted by Theos, the religion think tank, found that half believe the theory of evolution cannot explain the complexity of the natural world. One in three said they thought God created the Earth within the past 10,000 years.

The influential signatories of the letter include two Church of England bishops, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain and a member of the Evangelical Alliance, as well as Professor Lord Winston, the fertility pioneer, and Professor Sir Martin Evans, winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

They write: "Evolution, we believe, has become caught in the crossfire of a religious battle in which Darwin himself had little personal interest.

"We respectfully encourage those who reject evolution to weigh the now overwhelming evidence, hugely strengthened by recent advances in genetics, which testifies to the theory's validity.

"At the same time, we respectfully ask those contemporary Darwinians who seem intent on using Darwin's theory as a vehicle for promoting an anti-theistic agenda to desist from doing so as they are, albeit unintentionally, turning people away from the theory.

"In this year of all years, we should be celebrating Darwin's great biological achievements and not fighting over his legacy as some kind of anti-theologian."

Labels: Charles Darwin, evolution, Martin Beckford, religion, science, Theos

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Darwin's 200th anniversary - Lessons still to be learned

The Daily Telegraph called him "the greatest naturalist of our time, perhaps all time". For the Morning Post he was "the first biologist of his day". The Times saluted the rapid victory of Charles Darwin's great idea and said that "the astonishing revelations of recent research in palaeontology have done still more to turn what 20 years ago was a brilliant speculation into an established and unquestionable truth". The Manchester Guardian said that "few original thinkers have lived to see more completely the triumph of what is essential in their doctrine". The St James's Gazette predicted that England's children would one day be taught to honour Darwin "as the greatest Englishman since Newton".

These responses appeared in print on 21 April 1882, after the news of Darwin's death at his home in Down, Kent. The writers were people who knew the Bible, and they addressed readers who had grown up in an overtly devout society. Many remembered the religious and scientific uproar following publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. It argued, with detailed evidence, that life's extraordinary variety had stemmed, over an enormous period of time, from a common ancestry, and that the mechanism was the operation of natural selection upon tiny variations in heredity.

But Darwin's audience heard only part of the story. The clinching discovery of the biochemistry of genetic inheritance and therefore of random genetic mutation - the famous double helix of DNA - was not made until 1953. The mostly anonymous contributors who rushed to judgment that morning had before them only a fraction of the findings that now support the theory of evolution: a theory as confident as the predictions of Newtonian physics at speeds significantly lower than the velocity of light, as sure as the thesis that matter is composed of atoms. They could have been forgiven for their sometimes equivocal salutes.

There can be no such equivocation in the week of a survey which showed that only around half of all Britons accept that Darwin's theory of evolution is either true or probably true. In a democracy, citizens should respect each other's beliefs; and citizens have a right to express their beliefs. But in a democracy, a newspaper has an obligation to what is right. The truth is that Darwin's reasoning has in the last 150 years been supported overwhelmingly by discoveries in biology, geology, medicine and space science. The details will keep scientists arguing for another 200 years, but the big picture has not changed. All life is linked by common ancestry, including human life. The shameful lesson of this 200th anniversary of his birth is that Darwin's contemporaries understood more clearly than many modern Britons.

Two things distinguish a late-Victorian audience from a modern one. Educated Victorians knew much more about their own religion, and the problems of interpretation in sacred scripture. They understood that if the Bible was God's word then the world around them must also be an account of His handiwork, to be scrutinised, glossed and annotated by science. Second, they were prepared to follow and even join in scientific debate about those chapters of Earth history revealed in the rocks. Many of the tribute-payers of 21 April 1882 understood that evolution had not been, in 1859, a new or particularly shocking idea. Others had proposed it; they understood that Darwin had demonstrated it. They foresaw disturbing moral, political and intellectual implications. But they were ready to confront them.

If Darwin's doctrine be true, said the Morning Chronicle, "the result may be contemplated with composure, for the further we get from falsehood, the nearer we get to happiness". Science has advanced, but left a very large number of people behind. Unhappily, 200 years on from the birth of one of the world's greatest scientists, we are still not so far from falsehood.

Labels: Britain, Charles Darwin, DNA, evolution, science

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Friday, January 23, 2009

God and Science: An Inner Conflict

By Robin Lloyd, LiveScience Senior Editor
15 January 2009

God and science are inherently at odds, or so goes the story with roots that reach back nearly 400 years to the Inquisition's trial of Galileo on suspicion of heresy.

The ongoing effort of U.S. creationists to inject doubt about evolution into science classrooms in public schools is an example of that conflict, not to mention the polarizing arguments over the decades offered by numerous members of the clergy, politicians, and some atheist scientists and scholars including Richard Dawkins.

Now a new study suggests our minds are conflicted, making it so we have trouble reconciling science and God because we unconsciously see these concepts as fundamentally opposed, at least when both are used to explain the beginning of life and the universe.

But what is the source of this seeming "irreconcilable difference" — are we hard-wired for it, or is it tenacious cultural baggage?

The experiments

Experiments headed up by psychologist Jesse Preston of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her colleague Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago provide some data to support the argument that the conflict is inherent, or hard-wired. They found that subjects apparently cannot easily give positive evaluations to both God and science as explanations for big questions, such as the origin of life and the universe, at the same time.

To see the rest of this very interesting article, please click on "external link" at the end of this edit.

Labels: evolution, God, Jesse Preston, Nicholas Epley, Robin Lloyd, science

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Thursday, December 25, 2008

Brain Activity Altered during Religious Experience

December 24, 2008 in Mind & Brain

A study in Zygon: Journal of Religion & Science finds that religious experience is associated with decreased activity in the brain's right parietal lobe. Cynthia Graber reports

[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.] Please click on "exteranl link to access the entire podcast.

In America there’s a feeling of Christmas. But that’s not the only winter holiday going on. Jews are lighting Hanukkah candles, Muslims recently feasted on Eid al-Adha, and pagans celebrated the solstice. So it’s a good time for researchers to consider spirituality—from a scientific point of view.

One experience central to major religions around the world is that of transcendence, the idea of almost losing a sense of self to the feeling that there’s something bigger out there. Now scientists at the University of Missouri say they’ve located that experience in our brains. All the people studied, from Buddhist monks in meditation to Francescan nuns in prayer, experience this transcendence. And they all have decreased activity in the right parietal lobe of the brain. That area has to do with senses such as orienting yourself in the space around you. The study was published in Zygon: Journal of Religion & Science.

Interestingly, people with injuries to the right parietal lobe report increased levels of spiritual experiences. The researchers are quick to say that this connection doesn’t minimize the role of religion, and that religious or spiritual experiences might decrease activity in that region and thus increase that special feeling of transcendence. Just in time for the holidays.

Labels: brain, Cynthia Graber, religion, science, spiritual experience, transcendence, Zygon

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Thursday, December 18, 2008

The living dead

From The Sunday Times
December 14, 2008
The living dead

This is a lengthy article which is encapsulated here. Please click on "external link" to view the entire article.

NDEs (near-death experiences)are so common, so vivid and so life-transforming — survivors frequently become more compassionate, religious and serene as a result of what they experience — that scientists, philosophers, priests, psychologists and cultists all want a piece of the action. Their problem is that the human mind is unreachable. We can’t see what’s going on in there. Even if we could rush cardiac-arrest patients into an MRI scanner, we’d only see lights in the brain. We wouldn’t know what they meant. But now NDEs are to be scientifically investigated in a US and UK study involving 25 hospitals. This is co-ordinated by Dr Sam Parnia at Southampton University and is designed to find 1,500 survivors of cardiac arrests — “clinical death” — who tell such stories.

Getting a scientific handle on this phenomenon is fiendishly difficult. Dead people don’t report back, and it is very hard to assess the status of survivor accounts — are they merely hallucinations occurring before the crisis or just after? Perhaps they are no more than the brain’s way of soothing your path to extinction.

Parnia’s study is aimed solely at OBEs in cases of cardiac arrest. It uses a technique known as “hidden target”. In the participating hospitals he is placing pictures on high shelves so that they will be invisible both to patients and staff. But anybody floating near the ceiling would see them. A substantial number of accurate reports of the pictures would seem to establish the reality of OBEs. There are numerous problems with this. Parnia’s study does not have enough money to put laptops on the shelves generating random pictures to ensure that cheating is impossible. Furthermore, previous hidden-target experiments by, among others, Parnia himself and Dr Penny Sartori at Morriston Hospital in Swansea have failed to produce a single positive result. In fairness, this may be because the last thing that a floating dying person, with Jesus behind him and his body being pounded in front of him, will notice is some odd picture left on a shelf. This leaves believers in OBEs with an evidential mountain to climb.

There are plenty of sceptics who will pounce on negative results or even positive ones with any signs of ambiguity. Dr Peter Fenwick, a neuro-psychiatrist who has overseen Parnia and Sartori’s work, admits that, whatever the outcome, there will still be “wriggle room” for sceptics.

Hidden targets are the best key science has for unlocking the true nature of NDEs. If Parnia comes up with positive results, then even the most hardened sceptics will have to pay attention. They will force a serious rethinking of all current ideas about the brain and the mind.

“This is definitely a legitimate scientific inquiry,” says Chris French, professor of psychology at Goldsmiths College, London, and co-editor of The Skeptic magazine.

French’s position is important. He specialises in paranormal beliefs and experiences. In some cases his position is that of outright scepticism. For example, people started reporting alien-abduction scenarios — flying saucers, anal probes — in large numbers only after a single case, that of Betty and Barney Hill, was publicised in Look magazine in 1966. This was clearly a kind of mental virus, made more virulent by the fact that most of the accounts were retrieved under hypnosis. But NDEs were widely reported even before they became known to a mass audience through Raymond Moody’s 1975 book Life after Life. And hypnosis has not been involved in retrieving the accounts. The consistency and clarity of these reports across cultures and time zones convince French that, even if NDEs may not prove the afterlife, they do cast light on the human mind.

And, as in all things, it is the human mind that is at the heart of the matter. If we can float out of our bodies, then the mind is separable from, and, perhaps not dependent on, the brain. Twelve years after Tom Wolfe famously announced in Forbes magazine that, as a result of developments in neuroscience, “Your soul just died,” it may be time to say: “No, it didn’t.”

But is such a thing as a separable mind poss-ible or even conceivable? The answer is yes. In explaining why, it will be necessary to plunge into philosophy and quantum mechanics. Bear with me: it will be as painless as a cardiac arrest and much more interesting. And at the end of it, you might just believe you are immortal.

Labels: Dr Sam Parnia, near-death experience, out of body experience, science, Southampton University

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Friday, December 12, 2008

For Nanotechnology, Religion In U.S. Dictates A Wary View

ScienceDaily (Dec. 9, 2008) —

When it comes to the world of the very, very small — nanotechnology — Americans have a big problem: Nano and its capacity to alter the fundamentals of nature, it seems, are failing the moral litmus test of religion.

In a report published Dec. 7 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, survey results from the United States and Europe reveal a sharp contrast in the perception that nanotechnology is morally acceptable. Those views, according to the report, correlate directly with aggregate levels of religious views in each country surveyed.

In the United States and a few European countries where religion plays a larger role in everyday life, notably Italy, Austria and Ireland, nanotechnology and its potential to alter living organisms or even inspire synthetic life is perceived as less morally acceptable. In more secular European societies, such as those in France and Germany, individuals are much less likely to view nanotechnology through the prism of religion and find it ethically suspect.

"The level of 'religiosity' in a particular country is one of the strongest predictors of whether or not people see nanotechnology as morally acceptable," says Dietram Scheufele, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of life sciences communication and the lead author of the new study. "Religion was the strongest influence over everything."

The study compared answers to identical questions posed by the 2006 Eurobarometer public opinion survey and a 2007 poll by the University of Wisconsin Survey Center conducted under the auspices of the National Science Foundation-funded Center for Nanotechnology and Society at Arizona State University. The survey was led by Scheufele and Elizabeth Corley, an associate professor in the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University.

The survey findings, says Scheufele, are important not only because they reveal the paradox of citizens of one of the world's elite technological societies taking a dim view of the implications of a particular technology, but also because they begin to expose broader negative public attitudes toward science when people filter their views through religion.

"What we captured is nanospecific, but it is also representative of a larger attitude toward science and technology," Scheufele says. "It raises a big question: What's really going on in our public discourse where science and religion often clash?"

For the United States, the findings are particularly surprising, Scheufele notes, as the country is without question a highly technological society and many of the discoveries that underpin nanotechnology emanated from American universities and companies. The technology is also becoming more pervasive, with more than 1,000 products ranging from more efficient solar panels and scratch-resistant automobile paint to souped-up golf clubs already on the market.

"It's estimated that nanotechnology will be a $3.1 trillion global industry by 2015," Scheufele says. "Nanotechnology is one of those areas that is starting to touch nearly every part of our lives."

To be sure that religion was such a dominant influence on perceptions of nanotechnology, the group controlled for such things as science literacy, educational performance, and levels of research productivity and funding directed to science and technology by different countries.

The findings from the 2007 U.S. survey, adds Scheufele, also suggest that in the United States the public's knowledge of nanotechnology has been static since a similar 2004 survey. Scheufele points to a paucity of news media interest and the notion that people who already hold strong views on the technology are not necessarily seeking factual information about it.

Labels: Eurobarometer, nanotechnology, religion, religiosity, science, synthetic life, technology

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Friday, November 14, 2008

Poll finds support among teachers for creationism

Nearly one-third (29 per cent) of teachers in the UK believe creationism and intelligent design should be taught in science lessons, a new survey has found.

Teachers TV surveyed 10,600 education professions and received 1,210 responses, reports The Guardian.

According to the poll, almost 50 per cent of respondents think that excluding alternatives to evolution would be counter-productive.

Andrew Bethell, Chief Executive of Teachers TV, said: 'This poll data confirms that the debate on whether there is a place for the teaching of creationism in the classroom is still fierce.'

The issue is already a hot topic in parts of the US where religious faith plays a greater role in peoples' everyday lives.

Labels: creationism, intelligent design, public school, science, United Kingdom

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Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Near-death experiences, guardian angel research projects connected?

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

by Steve Hammons

This month, news coverage of two research studies related to near-death experiences and belief in guardian angels provoked surprise, skepticism, and for some people, curiosity about transcendent and anomalous phenomena.

Are there cosmic connections between the two research project results?

The Human Consciousness Project at the University of Southampton in the UK began the biggest research study to date of near-death experiences (NDEs) among heart attack survivors who have been resuscitated.

The Baylor University Institute for Studies of Religion also released results of a survey that found more than half of those polled believed they have been helped by a guardian angel during their lives.

There is an obvious link between NDEs and angels.

For those who suspect there may be some truth in both of these phenomena, the connections between them take only a small leap of faith, or even of scientific logic.

If, when we pass on, we go from this existence to some other place, then this afterlife or other dimension is probably associated with the dimension from which angels conduct their activities.

DIMENSIONS AND HEAVENLY WORMHOLES

Some physicists now tell us that the Universe may have many dimensions, including several we may not be able to easily perceive.

The Universe may be a "multi-verse" where layers or interfaces of different realities exist in ways that are both separate and connected.

People who report NDEs often describe going through a tunnel-like experience. This tunnel is often described as consisting of warm and beautiful light – a deeply loving and compassionate light.

In some cases, at the end of this tunnel, they may meet loved ones who had previously passed on. Or, they may encounter other beings.

Dr. Sam Parnia, head researcher of the University of Southampton project, was quoted in the UK newspaper The Telegraph as noting, "What people experience during this period of cardiac arrest provides a unique window of understanding into what we are all likely to experience during the dying process."

These NDE accounts seem to indicate a pathway from our daily reality to another dimension or another kind of reality.

One in five of those respondents identified themselves as not being religious.

Why do so many people have this belief? Wishful thinking? A psychological security blanket? Or, is it something more?

If it is true that they (we) do go to another dimension of reality, what kinds of activities are undertaken there? Are the daily lives of family members and friends back on Earth simply forgotten and left behind? Or, are missions and projects undertaken that have some important meaning?

CONSCIOUSNESS BEYOND DEATH

The NDE study at Southampton University, led by Dr. Parnia, is called the AWARE study, referring to "AWAreness during REsuscitation."

Parnia has done previous research on patient consciousness while experiencing clinical death.

The research will be conducted in the UK and the United States and will involve 25 hospitals. Researchers will look at 1,500 patients who had heart attacks that resulted in cessation of heartbeat and brain activity.

Parnia was quoted in The Telegraph newspaper as saying, "If you can demonstrate that consciousness continues after the brain switches off, it allows for the possibility that the consciousness is a separate entity."

The Telegraph article also quoted Parnia as explaining, "Contrary to popular perception, death is not a specific moment. It is a process that begins when the heart stops beating, the lungs stop working and the brain ceases functioning – a medical condition termed cardiac arrest, which from a biological viewpoint is synonymous with clinical death."

According to Parnia, "During a cardiac arrest, all three criteria of death are present. There then follows a period of time, which may last from a few seconds to an hour or more, in which emergency medical efforts may succeed in restarting the heart and reversing the dying process."

Some recent scientific studies reportedly have found that 10 percent to 20 percent of people experiencing clinical death also claim to have had consciousness and vivid, very interesting experiences during the period between death and resuscitation.

AN ENCHANTED WORLD

The Baylor survey included a wide range of religious topics, not just guardian angel encounters. Christopher Bader was the director of poll. The survey queried 1,700 people.

The response that generated the most interest, however, was the agreement by those polled with the following statement:

"I was protected from harm by a guardian angel."

Fifty-five percent of those surveyed agreed with this statement.

This general response was consistent across educational levels, geographic region and religious denominations.

Bader was quoted in TIME magazine as saying, "If you ask whether people believe in guardian angels, a lot of people will say, 'sure.' But this is different. It's experiential. It means that lots of Americans are having these lived supernatural experiences."

The number of people saying they believed they were protected by an angels was "the big shocker," Bader said.

The TIME article also quoted Randall Balmer, chairman of the religion department at Barnard College in New York. He said the Baylor survey reflects the fact that "Americans live in an enchanted world" and that "There is much broader uncharted range of religious experience among the populace than we expect."

According to an ABC News article on the Baylor poll, Rodney Stark, a professor of social sciences and co-director for studies of religion at Baylor, said, "While I knew there were a lot of people who had such [beliefs in angels], I wasn't prepared for the frequency of it."

NOTE TO READERS: For more information, please visit the Joint Recon Study Group site and have a look around.

Labels: AWARE, Baylor University Institute for Studies of Religion, faith, guardian angels, Human Consciousness Project, near-death experience, religious experience, science, Steve Hammons

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Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Science was once part of religious study

Jerry Bergman
Mennonite Sunday school teacher

Many people today are unaware that Christians, Jews, and Muslims all historically have taught that God has given his people two books, his word, the Bible, and his works, the book of nature. It is for this reason that for centuries clergy were required to study science as part of their seminary training. This is also why many scientists – until recently – were originally trained as clergy and later became scientists. Examples include Charles Darwin, Rev. Adam Segwick, a prominent geologist “who interpreted all sciences as aids to religion” and Rev. Jon Henslow who devoted his life to observing nature “for evidence of divine handiwork.”

This history explains why all branches of science were once called – not science, a word coined relatively recently – but natural theology. Old book lovers soon learn that when looking for old, pre-1900, books on chemistry physics, or biology, they often contain the words “Natural Theology” in the title.

In fact, our modern university system was originally established to train pastors. Only much later did theology – once called “queen of the sciences” – break off into a separate area of study. The language that science uses today to name everything from animals to body parts, as anyone who has studied biology or anatomy knows, is Greek and Latin. This is just one legacy of the ecclesiastical past of science. Even today the No. 1 reason people give for their belief in God is the existence of the wonders and beauty of the natural world, especially the living world.

Some people feel closer to God when communing with nature, leisurely strolling in a forest, or even resting by a stream or river enjoying the sounds of nature. This is a major reason why modern science was birthed in Christian Europe. Cathedrals were designed to imitate an old growth forest, and stained-glass windows designed not only to tell a biblical story but also to mimic the sun shinning through the trees as well.

This other book is important because the dominant reason, even today, why people hold to theism is the argument best articulated by William Paley in his 1802 book appropriately titled “Natural Theology.” Paley argued that if one came across a watch lying on the road, he would conclude that the watch had an intelligent designer. Likewise, one who studies science is led to ask the same question: Who is the intelligent designer of the universe and the life in it? Paley’s book of science argued in over 400 pages that, after studying the wonders of creation, one could only conclude that, like the watch, it must have had an intelligent watchmaker to explain its origin.

Likewise, the living creation must also have a creator behind it. Thomas Aquinas, often regarded as the greatest Christian philosopher who ever lived, eloquently argued that wherever complex design exists there must have been an intelligent designer. Life, the most specified complex machine in the universe, likewise must have had an intelligent designer. The key is not complexity, but specified complexity. A junkyard is complex, as is a modern jet airplane, but only the airplane is complexity specified for a purpose, to rapidly carry passengers in the air from one point to another.

And it is for this reason why ministers throughout history have preached from the book of nature, called science today, and should continue to do so.

As studying an artist’s art works is an important way to learn about the artist as a person, so, too, studying the works of God is an important way to learn about the Creator.

As Proverbs 3:19 says “The Lord by wisdom hath founded the earth; by understanding hath He established the heavens.” Likewise, we can better understand the Lord by understanding the products of his wisdom.

Labels: God, Jerry Bergman, natural theology, nature, religion, science

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Tuesday, August 19, 2008

The healing power of forgiveness

Science measures physical as well as mental benefits
By Sandi Dolbee

August 16, 2008

Paul Livingston doesn't look like a victim. At 6-foot-7 and 330 pounds, he is taller than Michael Jordan and big enough to play offensive tackle for the San Diego Chargers. But 36 years ago, when he was only 6 years old, he became prey for a pedophile custodian at a Catholic school in Orange County.

Last summer, his lawsuit was one of more than 500 claims in a record $660 million settlement with the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

Then, in May, he took another step toward healing: During a weeklong program at a private institute near Napa, Livingston forgave his now-dead abuser.

“When I first heard 'forgiveness,' I could not imagine forgiving someone for doing such heinous acts to children. I thought it would be letting him off the hook,” says Livingston, who lives in San Diego. “Boy, have I been taught a lesson in life. Forgiveness is not about letting them off the hook. It's about continuing on with our journey. It frees up our soul, in a way. You let go of the anger.”

He says he can feel the difference. His acid reflux is gone. He's stopped yelling at his daughter. Livingston has discovered what science has been saying for years: Forgiveness is good for you. Literally.

FORGIVENESS

What it is: Researchers studying the health benefits of forgiveness generally define it as the process of letting go of the pain, anger and resentment caused by an offense.

What it isn't: Forgiveness isn't denying the hurt, nor is it having to trust someone who is not trustworthy or staying in a relationship that is not healthy. It is not instant; premature forgiveness could be a sign of low self-esteem or other problems.

Why it matters: Hundreds of studies have linked forgiveness to improved physical and emotional well-being. In controlled tests at the University of Wisconsin Madison, for example, researcher Robert Enright sums up the findings in two words: "Forgiveness works."

A new science is exploding. It's not about measuring the big bang or excavating the ice on Mars. This science is more homeward bound, dealing with a word that religions have exulted and people have largely eluded.

Since its emergence in the 1990s, the new science of forgiveness has mushroomed into hundreds of studies by researchers testing aspects ranging from the physical and mental health effects on college students seething over being dumped by their dates to abuse victims reeling from betrayal and people rendered paralyzed in accidents.

In journal after journal, year after year, the cumulative evidence is enough to even convince a team from “CSI.” Bag 'em and tag 'em: People who learn to forgive seem to have fewer cardiovascular problems and stress-related ailments, and generally feel happier than those still holding a grudge.

Just last month, the journal of Mental Health, Religion and Culture reported that people who forgave had decreased odds of depression – women more so than men. Another study published this year found that men generally have a harder time forgiving than women.

Religion & Ethics Editor Sandi Dolbee was one of 10 participants this summer in the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science and Religion.

Dolbee's project was on the science of forgiveness, particularly how the ancient religious virtue is being popularized by studies showing that it has mental and physical health benefits.

Perhaps it's ironic that the midwife for this birth was a theologian and ethicist. The late Lewis Smedes, of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, knew the God stuff. He knew the world's religions considered forgiveness a virtue. From Hinduism's Bhagavad Gita to the Koran of Islam to Christianity's Lord's Prayer, scriptures extol forgiveness as a heavenly attribute.

But Smedes was convinced that forgiveness was good for the forgiver, as well. And he wanted researchers to put it to the test. Everett Worthington Jr., a psychology professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who became a pioneer in forgiveness research, remembers Smedes' message this way: “We can do this. We can study it scientifically.”

The first challenge for researchers was the word itself. Just what is forgiveness?

“Forgiving does not mean excusing, forgetting or pretending that an offense never occurred,” says Julie Juola Exline, associate professor of psychology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. “Forgiveness also does not imply that you trust the person who hurt you. Forgivers still seek le gal justice in some cases, and they may take steps to protect themselves from being hurt again.”

Instead, forgiveness is a letting go of the “bitter, grudging, vengeful feelings.”

It is a decidedly secular definition, far short of the radical forgiveness preached by Jesus, who told an offender to go and sin no more and offered forgiveness to his executioners even as he was dying.

“I think Jesus was an exemplar of forgiveness,” says Ken Pargament, a clinical psychologist at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. “We're not Jesus. For other human beings, forgiveness is a process.”

Part of that process is empathy, “putting yourself in the perspective of the person who hurt you rather than just demonizing them,” Pargament says.

Earlier this year, a Mayo Clinic journal reported that people who held grudges had increased blood pressure and heart rates, part of a mounting body of evidence, including a previous study of more than 2,000 twin pairs in Virginia that found that forgiveness related to less nicotine dependence and less drug abuse.

Other research found that HIV-infected patients took better care of themselves if they successfully forgave themselves and others. So did recovering alcoholics. People suffering spinal-cord injuries tended to cope better with their health situation and their treatments if they had forgiven.

Charlotte vanOyen Witvliet, an associate professor of psychology at Hope College in Holland, Mich., decided to see what physical effects people exhibited when they remembered the transgressions against them. She focused on heart rate, blood pressure, facial muscles and sweat levels.

When people remembered the transgressions, the bio-markers showed elevated stress and tension. When she had them think about forgiveness, she says the results were significant. “It had this fascinating quelling effect,” she explains.

Witvliet also made headlines with a study of forgiveness involving 213 Vietnam military veterans experiencing post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Her team found that vets who had trouble with forgiveness experienced more problems with PTSD.

As for the immune system, the theory is that unforgiveness is a personal stressor, which means every time it is felt, it triggers a stress reaction. Cortisol, a hormone produced by the adrenal glands, rushes to the body's defense, contributing energy, suppressing inflammation and even regulating the deposition of fat in the body. Too much cortisol, however, can interfere with the immune system over time. “Our bodies aren't designed to operate that way,” is how Worthington puts it in an interview from Virginia.

Researchers aren't ready to pronounce forgiveness as a cure. While forgiveness seems to contribute to a healthier existence, mentally and physically, the field of research is still too young to know exactly what part it plays in the human jigsaw. “I think we've got a long way to go,” says Witvliet, the Hope College researcher.

This is particularly true about long-term research, which could better define the role of forgiveness and unforgiveness in cumulative health and disease.

But those who have toiled in this field the longest – psychologists such as Worthington in Virginia and Robert Enright of the University of Wisconsin Madison – are bullish.

In an e-mail from Northern Ireland, where he spent much of the summer working on a forgiveness curriculum for schoolchildren, Enright says he now is more impressed with the power of forgiveness to heal than when he began his research two decades ago.

Worthington also is adamant. “It is not going to be refuted,” he says. “It's going to be refined.”

Labels: forgiveness, health, Lewis Smedes, Sandi Dolbee, science

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Monday, August 04, 2008

Why We Must Teach Evolution in the Science Classroom

Saturday, 2 August 2008, 03:00 CDT

By Laura Lorentzen

OUR COUNTRY HAS LAWS THAT SEPARATE church and state. Public institutions like schools must be neutral on the subject of religion, as required by the Constitution's First Amendment. Our courts have mandated that creationism is not an appropriate addition to the science curriculum in public schools; yet supporters of intelligent design press to have antievolutionary discussions enter the science classroom. Creationists even advocate that, when leaching evolution, educators should add the disclaimer that it is "just a theory."

Let's consider why all of us as educated persons, scientists and nonseientists alike, should take note of what science is taught - and not taught - in our public schools. In common language, a theory is a guess of sorts. However, in scientific language, a theory is "a set of universal statements that explain some aspect of the natural world... formulated and tested on the basis of evidence, internal consistency, and their explanatory power."1 The theory of evolution meets all of these criteria.

On the opposite side of the argument, "intelligent design fails on hold basic tenets of a scientific theory; design cannot be observed, and it cannot be tested," writes Mary Crowley in the New York Academy of Sciences Update magazine.2

The National Science Teachers Association (NTSA) argues the importance of teaching evolution in one of its own, most fundamental, writings - its position statement: "If evolution is not taught, students will not achieve the level of scientific literacy they need." The NSTA recognizes that evolution is a major unifying concept across multiple disciplines of science, and the National Science Education Standards, updated in 1996, recommend evolution as a means to "unify science disciplines and provide students with powerful ideas to help them understand the natural world,"1 Indeed, the evolutionary perspective is vitally important in modern molecular and cellular hiology, not to mention biomedicine - for example, the nature of disease and targeted treatments - and other scientific disciplines.

As we discuss fundamentals of science education for students, let's also discuss how we prepare our teachers for their role in the science classroom and broader educational system. Are we sufficiently preparing them to teach evolution? Are we equipping them with the knowledge and resources to withstand an onslaught of antievolutionary pressure from the public? Some support, such as various published materials available from the National Academy of Sciences, exists. However, much more is needed in terms of information and public education. For example, Nehm and Schonfeld's 2007 study of more than 40 pre-certified secondary biology teachers in New York City showed that, even after a semester-long graduate evolution course, the majority of science teachers "still preferred that antievolutionary ideas be taught in school."4 As our "science teachers are an important 'missing link' between scientists' understanding of evolution and the general public's ignorance of, or resistance to, the idea,"5 we must do more.

The curriculum taught in our science classrooms should be that which is based on measurable, quantifiable fact. Nonscientific content has its place as well, such as philosophy or religion classes. Let's just be certain that evolutionary theory is a standard feature of our science classroom lesson plans so that we ensure our students' literacy, competitiveness, and futures in the global world of scientific study.

1 National Science Teachers Association [NSTA] position statement on the teaching of evolution, http://www.nsta.org/about/positions/ evolution.aspx.

2 "Teaching evolution and the nature of science" Sept/Oct 2006, p.7.

3 National Academies Press, http://www.nap.edu/ openbook.php?record_id=4962&page=104.

4 Journal of Science Teacher Education 18:699.

5 Brooks 2001, Newport 2006, as cited in Nehm and Schonfeld 2007.

LAURA LORENTZEN, PhD, is associate professor & chairperson, New Jersey Center for Science, Technology & Mathematics Education at Kean University, Union, New Jersey. While her doctorate is in the biomedical sciences, her master's degree research was determining the molecular evolutionary relationship among lower metazoan animals.

Labels: creationism, evolution, intelligent design, Laura Lorentzen, National Science Teachers Association, religion, science

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Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Study Entices Thoughts Of Hands-On Healing

By HILARY WALDMAN | Courant Staff Writer
July 28, 2008

Steeped in white-coat science since she earned her Ph.D. in cell biology at Columbia University 20 years ago, Gloria Gronowicz is about the last person you'd expect to put stock in the touchy-feely discipline of energy medicine.But then the University of Connecticut researcher saw it with her own eyes, under a high-power microscope in her own laboratory, where, once, only well-accepted biological building blocks — proteins, mitochondria, DNA and the like — got respect.

Therapeutic Touch performed by trained energy healers significantly stimulated the growth of bone and tendon cells in lab dishes.

Her results, recently published in two scientific journals, provide novel evidence that there may be a powerful energy field that, when channeled through human hands, can influence the course of events at a cellular level.

Gronowicz and others said more studies are needed to figure out how and why Therapeutic Touch seems to stimulate cell growth — and if the findings can be applied to patient care.

Through history and across cultures, spiritual healers have long believed that the laying on of hands could cure disease and relieve pain. In the last 30 years or so, many forms of energy healing — sometimes called Reiki, Qigong, Therapeutic Touch, or Healing Touch — have found their way into hospitals and other clinical settings.

Still, it is often derided as hocus-pocus, although some medical practitioners have come to accept it as a harmless diversion that, if nothing else, might relieve stress.

Even when early studies showed some evidence of healing in patients treated with energy therapies, it was impossible to say whether the improvement was a result of the touch. More likely, critics suggested, the nurturing therapy simply improved the patient's frame of mind, promoting a healing response.

Gronowicz was in the doubting camp. She had spent her career studying the biology of bone cells. Her work with hormones, growth factors and tissue engineering has shed light on the very elements of bone — a slow, sometimes tedious effort she hopes might someday help doctors find treatments for crippling diseases.

But when a colleague asked her to collaborate on an experiment looking into the power of Therapeutic Touch, she was curious. As a full professor in the department of surgery, with tenure and respect, Gronowicz had the stature to dabble in an endeavor that some of her scientific colleagues might criticize as a fool's errand.

She applied for a National Institutes of Health grant to fund an experiment designed to isolate the mind/body conundrum from the question of energy healing by applying Therapeutic Touch techniques to presumably inanimate bone cells cultured in an incubator.

At first, even the NIH's branch that funds research in alternative and complementary medicine turned her down. Eventually, she received $250,000 for her study.

To put Therapeutic Touch to the test, cell cultures were divided into three groups.

One dish of cells was treated by a trained healer. A second set of cells was treated by untrained students who were instructed to hold their hands over a petri dish for 10 minutes twice a week. A third dish of cells stood ignored in its metal stand.

After the treatment, the dishes were returned to an incubator. Scientists who later examined the cells under the microscope didn't know which group each dish had been in.

To Gronowicz's astonishment, the cells treated by trained Therapeutic Touch practitioners grew faster and stronger than those that received the sham treatment, or none at all.

"Therapeutic Touch stimulated growth in bone, tendon and skin cells at statistically significant rates," Gronowicz said.

She tested the cells using several different biological markers for growth, and each test confirmed her finding. In one test, Gronowicz found that cells treated with Therapeutic Touch grew at double the rate of untreated cells.

In addition to seeing increased cell division under the microscope, the bone cell cultures treated with Therapeutic Touch also absorbed more calcium, the essential mineral for growing strong bones. Her findings were published in the Journal of Orthopaedic Research and The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.

Gronowicz also looked at bone cancer cells. Cancer occurs when cells grow out of control, so a treatment that stimulates growth could be detrimental to people with cancer. But unlike healthy cells, bone cancer cells did not appear to be stimulated by the touch therapy — an interesting, though not fully explained, finding, Gronowicz said.

Beyond growing bones, the findings may begin to explain why people with strong social support systems appear to be healthier and recover from disease better than those who are isolated. Maybe it's not all in their heads.

"In this case, the bones didn't know, that's why what she did is so intriguing," Chesney said. "To our knowledge, those cells didn't know who was a healer and who wasn't."

Labels: energy medicine, Gloria Gronowicz, healing, Hilary Waldman, laying-on-of-hands, Reiki, science, Therapeutic Touch

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Saturday, July 12, 2008

Sir John Templeton: iconic innovator in finance and religion

He was a shrewd stock picker. But his priority was spiritual wealth.

By Gary Moore

from the July 11, 2008 edition

Sarasota, Fla. - Sir John Templeton was many things to many people.

To the general public, he was one of the past century's greatest investors and philanthropists – a man who revolutionized both mutual fund investing and the effort to explore the nexus between science and religion.

After his passing this week, he will likely be remembered by the rational and affluent West as a poor boy from Tennessee turned Rhodes scholar and Dean of Global Investing.

Christians might remember him for his Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, and as someone who puts first things first: Faith, patience, prudence, and ethics were foremost in his thought.

Scientists might remember him most for his Templeton Foundation, which gives millions to study the links between science and religion.

Traditional Europe might remember Sir John, as his friends called him, as a great philanthropist who was knighted by Her Majesty as he valued historic treasures such as Oxford and Westminster Cathedral enough to invest in their futures. And the East will probably remember John as a spiritual creature who valued his Creator above all else, as he'd "been convinced that nothing exists except God."

I will remember him as a good Samaritan who paused to help me during a painful time on Wall Street. His historical and global perspective assured me that markets assuredly rebound – and that it's most wise to, as the poem goes, "keep your head when all about you are losing theirs." That was sage advice then, and it's sage advice today.

We would all be correct in our differing memories of John Templeton. Yet we live in an age of strained relationships, where differences seem intractable. So we might be most enriched if we remember his holistic approach to life.

John worked very intentionally to live the spiritual qualities he prized. And while he may have valued reason, prosperity, tradition, and spirituality, he gave top priority to love, the connecting force that holds us together despite our differences – even the largest ones.

He once startled me by describing how difficult it had been to love Joseph Stalin. He later worked at loving Saddam Hussein. That effort showed how seriously he took the biblical injunction to love his neighbors, including enemies, as himself.

That began with humbly loving God. The Jewish scriptures, which John loved and studied late in life, tell us: "As [a man] thinketh in his heart, so is he."

In the West, it is common to think of science as being about this world and religion about the next. But John saw reality as a single whole. So his foundation now invests his wealth in scientifically testing that proposition, just as the scriptures say Solomon "tested truth."

We financial types often think of investing as a selfish activity and charity as an altruistic one, so we leave ministry to the ordained clergy. John thought of us as "ministers of prosperity."

The Christian Scriptures say to put your mind on those things that are good, pure and lovely. So John refused to read or watch most media as he knew they might fill his mind with negativity.

But John wasn't just a contrarian for the sake of being different. He simply understood a truth that still escapes most investors: "The time of maximum pessimism is the best time to buy, and the time of maximum optimism is the best time to sell."

That perspective proved prescient in the late 1990s when he predicted that 90 percent of the new Internet companies would be bankrupt within five years. He added that US stock markets would likely stagnate for a decade. Those were enriching lessons in the school of life.

Yet John was ever hopeful about financial and spiritual progress. A few years ago, he asked me to co-write an article about why the Dow Jones Industrial Average might rise to 1 million by the year 2100.

I was skeptical at first. But then I remembered that John often spoke to us in financial parables, and I realized that the Dow would only need to rise about five percent per year in order to achieve that goal. He was saying that America will be fine but developing nations may also achieve greater parity during this century.

He would be even more pleased if his foundation helps us achieve even greater spiritual progress, the most important progress of all. That is more likely as we now have his example that the ancient values of faith, hope, and especially love still promise a more abundant life for our modern world.

• Gary Moore is an investment adviser who wrote two books about John Templeton, including "Spiritual Investments: Wall Street Wisdom from the Career of Sir John Templeton."

Labels: finance, Gary Moore, God, John Templeton, love, science, spirituality

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Templeton's Legacy of Humility

Billionaire investor John Templeton, who died Tuesday at age 95, might have had more money than God, but he knew better than to mistake wealth for wisdom.

"We should admit that no human being has ever known one percent of the infinity of God. We are terribly ignorant," Templeton told me in 2002.

Humility is a wonderful trait in a billionaire, or any person of faith. How do we find more of it? Templeton spent a good deal of his fortune trying to figure that out.

The Wall Street Legend was the first and only billionaire I ever met. I interviewed him in his hometown, Winchester, Tenn., better known as the birthplace of Dinah Shore.

I wanted to ask him for a stock tip. He wanted to talk about science and religion. Just my luck.

"When new discoveries are made about science, do we not merely discover more about God?" he said. "All of nature reveals something of the Creator."

I've always thought so. Like Templeton, I've never thought of science and faith as rivals. Science can tell us how, faith can tell us why. Science deals with facts, faith deals with truths.

But I didn't grow up in the shadow of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, which pitted religion against science a mere four counties east of where Templeton was being raised in the Cumberland Presbyterian church.

Templeton said he was fascinated by the trial, but he was equally enthralled by the natural wonders around him. He began to wonder Why couldn't God create an evolving universe that operated on both physical and spiritual laws.

After he made his fortune, he set out to make a contribution. In 1987, he established the John Templeton Foundation to encourage the use of scientific methods to discover more about the spiritual realm. Foundation grants are being used to study such virtues as forgiveness, gratitude and humility.

What Templeton wanted more than money was meaning. What he wanted more than certainty was wisdom -- knowledge tempered by humility.

"I grew up as a Presbyterian," he told Business Week in 2005. "Presbyterians thought the Methodists were wrong. Catholics thought all Protestants were wrong. The Jews thought the Christians were wrong. So what I am financing is humility. I want people to realize you shouldn't think you know it all."

That's more valuable than any stock tip.

Labels: faith, God, John Templeton, science

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Friday, July 11, 2008

JOHN TEMPLETON - 1912-2008: He spent his fortune advancing religion in relation to science

THE NEWS TRIBUNE
Published: July 9th, 2008

John Templeton, an investor and mutual fund pioneer who dedicated much of his fortune to promoting religion and reconciling it with science, has died. He was 95.

Templeton died Tuesday from pneumonia at Doctors Hospital in Nassau, Bahamas, said his spokesman Donald Lehr.

Templeton created the $1.4 million Templeton Prize – billed as the world’s richest annual prize – to honor advancement in spiritual matters. Winners have included Mother Teresa, Billy Graham and Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Templeton wanted the monetary value to surpass that of the Nobel Prize to show that advances in spiritual fields were just as important, Lehr said in a statement. Next year’s prize is expected to be almost $2 million, he said.

Templeton was born in Tennessee, graduated from Yale University and became a Rhodes scholar, earning a master’s degree in law at Oxford University. He later moved to Nassau and became a naturalized British citizen.

The Associated Press

Labels: John Templeton, science, spirituality

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Tuesday, June 10, 2008

The Surprising Spirituality of SETI

By Brandon Keim June 09, 2008 |

There's a surprising amount of overlap between seekers of extraterrestrial life and seekers of God.

Not that the folks at SETI are actually hoping to detect the deep-space transmissions of a bearded deity from SGR 1900+14, handing them off to Vatican astronomers for inscription on silicon tablets. Far from it. But in my reporting for an article on the religious implications of finding extraterrestrial intelligence, I noticed that much research was produced in collaboration between scientists and theologians.

Why this partnership between parties whose relationship typically amounts to a truce, and an uneasy one at that?

In part it's practical: Christianity boasts a small but rich history of so-called astrotheology, particularly within the Catholic Church. It makes sense that they'd run in some of the same circles as the SETI crowd. And since discovering aliens would prompt religious self-examination -- if God is universal, maybe the image of God isn't a hairless biped called homo sapiens -- and perhaps devotion, it's probably good that they're already talking.

But after speaking this morning to Lutheran theology professor Ted Peters and then to Douglas Vakoch, the generally secular (he's Unitarian) director of interstellar message composition at SETI, I couldn't shake the feeling that something else was going on -- some union of the like-minded, nominally separated by their titles and duties.

Towards the end of the interview, after Vakoch had explained the incredible unlikelihood of both receiving and comprehending interstellar signals, I asked him what it's like to dedicate a career to something that would almost certainly not be realized in his own life, and perhaps not ever.

"One of the greatest misconceptions about SETI is that we know in our hearts that there is life out there, and the question is whether we're going to be the generation that finds it. That's false," he said. "SETI requires an acceptance of ambiguity. If there's a virtue to SETI, it's that it's making ambiguity acceptable at a time when people are focused on the concrete and short-term. It is very often uncomfortable not having the answers, but we need to accept that. We try to recognize that, in this domain, with what we now know, the best we can do, the most honest thing we can do, is live with a sense of ambiguity."

"That sounds deeply spiritual," I told Vakoch. He asked what I meant. "The act of coming to peace with the unknowable," I said.

"It's not necessarily a matter of being at peace with it," he replied. "There's a passage in the Bible -- 'Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.' In a sense, I think science and religion are not ultimately in opposition to one another. They are both attempting to understand things as they are. They understand different aspects of what is."

Now, before those of us conditioned by ugly fights against anti-evolution classroom sabotage paint Vakoch as a young earth creationist who stole a SETI lab coat, he's certainly not insisting that religious principle trump testable hypothesis. He's talking humbly about the Big Questions, and acknowledging the difficulty of answering them -- something that truly religious people tend to do, too.

Labels: astrotheology, Brandon Keim, extraterrestrials, God, religion, science, SETI

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A Matter Of Belief or Evidence

By January W. Payne
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Page one of two: Please click on external source for complete article

An integral part of many people's lives, religion defines patterns of worship and socialization, but its impact, if any, on health is unclear. Some studies show a benefit to religious practice, while others -- including much of the research into prayer -- fail to prove its health value.

The question of the role something as unquantifiable as religious belief might play in health troubles some scientists in an age when mainstream medicine is turning ever more toward epidemiological science to define research protocols and to determine the validity of treatments.

That said, it's not hard to understand why being religious might be good for the body, experts say. Religious people often attend regular services; this puts them in a socially supportive environment, which has widely acknowledged health advantages. And some religions promote healthful diets and discourage unhealthy behaviors such as drinking alcohol and smoking.
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"Religions package many of the ingredients of well-being to make them accessible to people," said Richard Eckersley, a visiting fellow at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University in Canberra. And the "psychological well-being" that religion can promote is "linked to physical health through direct physiological effects, such as on neuroendocrine and immune function, and indirect effects on health behaviors, such as diet, smoking, exercise and sexual activity."

Interest in researching the impact of religion and spirituality on how we live seems to be surging. David Myers, author of "A Friendly Letter to Skeptics and Atheists" (to be published in August) and a professor of psychology at Hope College in Holland, Mich., did a database search to compare recent and past interest in the topic. Between 1965 and 1999, 1,950 study abstracts mentioned religion or spirituality, he found. Myers's search for the same terms in abstracts published between 2000 and 2007 came up with 8,719 hits, he said.

Among that research is some evidence that religion and spirituality offer health benefits and even longer life spans. A national survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and mentioned in Myers's book found that people who did not attend religious services were 1.87 times more likely to have died during an eight-year period than those who attended services more than weekly. The life expectancy for infrequent attendees was age 75, and it was 83 for those who attended frequently.

A 1996 study looked at the association of Jewish religious observance with mortality by comparing secular and religious kibbutzim in Israel. Belonging to a religious group appeared to prolong life, and the lower mortality rates seen in the religious group were consistent for all causes of death, the authors wrote. And a 2003 study published in Psychosomatic Medicine found that meditation might alter brain and immune function in positive ways, an effect similarly seen in research involving Buddhist monks.

But researchers have had trouble replicating such statistics in the randomized studies that are the gold standard for medical research. It's hard to show conclusively whether or how a belief system affects one's health; other life experiences might provide benefits to health so similar to religion and spirituality that it's hard to differentiate.

Despite the lack of scientific evidence, some common religious practices are widely thought to enhance health.

It's not unusual for people to pray for their own health and for that of others. In a 2004 survey of more than 31,000 people, 45 percent said they'd prayed for health reasons, 43 percent prayed for their own health, and 25 percent reported that others had prayed for them. About 10 percent said they'd participated in a prayer group for their health, according to the results, released by the National Center for Health Statistics and the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

But science says that prayer might not help a person who is ill. A 2003 update to an earlier systemic review of clinical trials on distant healing found that intercessory prayer, which involves someone praying for the healing of a person located elsewhere, with or without that person's knowledge, probably doesn't offer specific therapeutic healing effects.

Any benefit seen from prayer might come from the fact that "knowing that your friends and family are praying for you is part of social support, . . . and [that is] probably really helpful to people, independent of if there is a higher being that answers those prayers," said David G. Schlundt, an associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, who has researched the connection between faith and health.

Labels: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, David G. Schlundt, David Myers, faith, health, January W. Payne, prayer, religion, science

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Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Marvelling at God's handiwork

As religion-versus-science debate rages, 3 physicists come out on side of God

Don Lajoie, Windsor Star
Saturday, May 31, 2008

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God versus science. That most ancient of debates has been raging in academic circles, popular culture and in the media with increasing ferocity since the fundamentalist religion-inspired attacks of 9-11.

Three scientists from the University of Windsor, professors Gordon Drake, Mordechay Schlesinger and Tim Reddish of the school's physics department, have stepped gingerly on to the slippery rocks of the discussion, coming out -- some might say surprisingly -- on the side of God.

The religiosity of the three scientists may be surprising, since some statistics, including a Scientific American study in 1999, show that, while up to 90 per cent of the general North America population profess some belief in a God, only about 40 per cent of scientists do. And the numbers of scientists believing in God keep dropping, particularly among "eminent" scientists, with as few as 10 per cent believing.

However, poll results on the topic vary. A Rice University survey in 2005 demonstrated that only 38 per cent of natural scientists polled considered themselves to be "non-believers."

"Why should a physicist, studying the laws of nature, countenance a belief in God?" asked Drake, a practising Anglican, recently named principal of Canterbury College. "Because, as physicists, we're more aware of what we don't know. And the book of the unknown keeps getting larger."

Added Schlesinger, a Jew: "You can look at it another way. Our modest success in scientific research allows us to marvel at God's handiwork."

Reddish, a Christian with a Protestant background who does not adhere to any particular denomination, said God gave him a mind to use and "it would be a disservice to not use it to the fullest extent." His rumination, he said, leads him back to God. "My faith enhances my life."

Their declarations of faith out of the way, the three doctors of science sat down recently to state their case.

Drake began by suggesting the latest flareup in the old debate has its roots in the terrorist attacks of 9-11 on New York and Washington.

The fact the suicide pilots claimed to be acting out of Islamic fundamentalist zeal led to a backlash against all religion as an abomination to mankind, leading to intolerance, violence and war, he suggested. The backlash resulted in a spate of books such as God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris.

The atheist point of view has become ever more visible on cable news and talk radio, usually countered by an equally animated "believer's" position.

"The debate has existed since creation," said Drake. "But 9-11 intensified it, gave it focus, the idea that religion could do more harm than good, that God could make you fly into a building.... But should you throw out religion because of 9-11? It's the same as asking should you throw out science because of the atomic bomb."

They said that the debate has been framed on the premise that science and religion are polar opposites used to explain existence and the two ideas cannot be reconciled. But, they say, that premise, put forward in Dawkins' book, is flawed.

Labels: atheism, Don Lajoie, God, Gordon Drake, Mordechay Schlesinger, religion, science, Tim Reddish

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Sunday, June 01, 2008

Don't write off religion just yet - Book Review

JOHN GRAY
May 31, 2008

THE DEVIL'S DELUSION
Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions
By David Berlinski
Crown Forum, 237 pages, $27.95

Despite being at variance with historical experience, the idea that science and religion are opposites is embedded in modern Western culture, and it has been given a new lease on life in the writings of the current wave of "scientific atheism." Writers such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris have popularized the Enlightenment view that a reductive type of materialism is the only picture of the world compatible with the results of scientific inquiry. Promoting Darwinism as an intellectual orthodoxy - a creed rather than a provisional hypothesis - these writers renew the old quarrel between science and religion. Though controversy has been intense, it can hardly be described as having made any large intellectual advance on the debate that raged in Victorian times.

There is actually very little that is new in the so-called new atheism, whose claim to be based on science is as dubious today as it has ever been. A critique of the contemporary assault on religion is therefore much needed, and in The Devil's Delusion, David Berlinski gives us a polemic that is powerful, erudite and often savagely funny. Berlinski - a mathematician and well-known critic of evolutionary theory, though not a proponent of "intelligent design" - has two targets in his sights: the conventional belief that religious thought is intrinsically superstitious and the materialist philosophy that Dawkins and his fellow "brights" - as members of the atheist community fondly describe themselves - mistakenly identify with science.

The first of these targets is dispatched with in a barrage of devastating arguments. Berlinski quotes Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg as declaring "Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." Berlinski comments on this, forcefully and unanswerably: "Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for Zyklon B, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental ballistic missiles, military space platforms, and nuclear weapons? If memory serves, not the Vatican."

Nothing infuriates atheists more than the observation that people who scorned traditional religion in all its varieties were responsible for some of the worst atrocities of the last century. But Berlinski is pointing to an undeniable truth. The former Soviet Union was an atheist regime from the moment of its inception to the day it collapsed. Applying Marx's philosophy, its leaders looked forward to a time when religion would be eradicated from human life. Lenin and Stalin's "liquidation" of remnants of the old society - in plain words, the mass murder of tens of millions of people, artists and intellectuals, peasants and workers, priests and rabbis - was not done only with the aim of maintaining power.

Atheism was - according to the founders of the Soviet state, and in fact - always an integral part of the communist project. Despite the vehement denials of Dawkins and Hitchens, terror in communist Russia - and Mao's China - was also meant to bring about a utopian society in which religion would no longer exist.

Lenin's Bolsheviks were not a bunch of skeptics. They were fanatical believers in a vision of a future world, more fantastic than any religious myth, which they claimed was based on science. The same is true of the Nazis, who in claiming that race was a scientific category, opened the way to history's supreme crime. The atrocities perpetrated by atheist regimes during the 20th century did not come from believing in nothing. They are testimonies to the destructive ferocity of faith when it is detached from traditional religions and invested in pseudo-science.

Berlinski's second target is the materialist theories of evolution and of the origins of the universe advocated by contemporary atheists, and here his polemic is less successful. No doubt correctly, Berlinski argues that Darwin's account of natural selection and current theories of cosmology leave a good deal that is not adequately explained. More contentiously, he suggests that these gaps in understanding may give support to ideas of intelligent design. Here Berlinski follows atheists such as Dawkins in thinking of religion as a type of explanatory theory, different from that which is presented in prevailing science.

The truth of the matter is that religion and science are not competitors, but fundamentally different responses to the human situation. Religion begins where science leaves off. Theories of how humanity or the universe came about are strictly beside the point. Claiming to have a better explanation of the natural world than orthodox science - as creationists do - does nothing to advance the cause of faith.

Religion expresses the human need for meaning, not a demand for explanation. For those who have it, faith entails understanding the limits of the human mind and an acceptance of mystery. Even if all the problems of science are some day solved, humans will still be searching for purpose in their lives, and for that reason alone they will need religion.

John Gray is the author of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia and is emeritus professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics.

_____________________
From The Devil's Delusion,

Chapter 3.

The idea that we must turn to the sciences in order to assess our religious beliefs owes much to the popular conviction that so long as we are turning, where else are we to turn to? The proper response is a question in turn. Why turn at all? And if we must turn, why turn in the wrong direction? To ask of the physical sciences that they assess the Incarnation, or any other principle of religious belief, is rather like asking of a rather powerful Grand Prix racing car that it prove itself satisfactory in doing service as a New York taxicab.

The claim that the existence of God should be treated as a scientific question stands on a destructive dilemma: If by science one means the great theories of mathematical physics, then the demand is unreasonable. We cannot treat any claim in this way. There is no other intellectual activity in which theory and evidence have reached this stage of development.

If, on the other hand, the demand means merely that one should treat the existence of God as the existence of anything would be treated, then we must accept the fact that in life as it is lived beyond mathematical physics, the evidence is fragmentary, lost, partial, and inconclusive. We do what we can. We grope. We see glimmer.

From The Devil's Delusion,

Chapter 3.

Labels: atheism, David Berlinski, John Gray, religion, science

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Friday, May 30, 2008

Putting Faith Under the Microscope

By Christy Hall Robinson Thursday, May 29, 2008

Has science made belief in God obsolete? Two scholars debate the Templeton Foundation’s latest ‘Big Question.’

When confronted with the inexplicable and uncontrollable, people often invoke a higher power to make sense of the world around them. But at a time of staggering advances in areas such as genetics and reproductive technology, has science made belief in God obsolete?

The Templeton Foundation posed that question as the third in its series of “Big Questions.” It asked 13 leading scientists, scholars, and commentators—from across the religious and political spectrum—to respond in essay form. At a recent American Enterprise Institute event, two of the essayists, Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine and a monthly columnist for Scientific American, and William D. Phillips, a professor at the University of Maryland and a Nobel Laureate in physics, squared off in person.

Shermer, who wrote in his essay that the “veracity of a proposition is independent of the number of people who believe it,” said that, while science probably makes God obsolete, it certainly has not made belief in Him obsolete. According to a 2007 Harris Poll, 82 percent of adult Americans believe that there is a God. In 1916, Shermer noted, a survey found that 40 percent of practicing scientists believed in God. That figure is roughly commensurate with the percentage of scientists today who affirm faith in God.

Phillips, himself a scientist and a practicing Christian who talks openly about his faith, wrote in his essay that “a scientist can believe in God because such belief is not a scientific matter.” At the AEI conference, he was eager to find common ground with Shermer, particularly on the lack of empirical proof of God’s existence. Phillips said that examining belief in God from a scientific vantage point was the wrong approach, since one cannot measure God scientifically. “I do not believe that science is ever going to prove the existence of God,” he explained, “nor do I believe that science is ever going to disprove the existence of God.” The real question, Phillips said, is not a scientific one, and it should not be dealt with in a scientific paradigm. He maintained that people want to experience religion the way they do art, music, or love.

Shermer, however, insisted that religion cannot be separated wholly from science, because “at some point, if you believe in God, you just have to believe that he’s…entering our world. And if he’s entering our world, isn’t he doing it in some measurable way? And now we’re back to the natural world.” Phillips, while assuring Shermer that he believes God does work in the world—he is a theist, not a deist—said that he “has a hunch” that God does so in “undetectable” ways.

If one cannot trace God’s actions or presence in the world, “what’s the difference between an invisible God and a nonexistent God?” asked Shermer.

“For you, none,” Phillips replied. “But for me, I claim that I can feel God’s presence in my life.”

He continued: “The problem here is that you’re thinking . . . the whole question is about whether or not God exists. I already have an answer to that. It’s not a scientific answer. My question is: what does God want me to do?” Shermer, recognizing that Phillips’s insistence about the question not being a scientific one was a refusal to engage the issue on the given terms—whether science makes belief in God obsolete—suggested that the conversation was at an end.

Shermer said that he understands the draw of transcendence, of finding “something grander than me.” Religion is the ultimate source of explanation, Shermer added, and while he may not need it, he understands why other people do. Phillips was unflappable. “It’s not like I’m without my doubts, but I’m comfortable with those doubts,” he said.

Christy Hall Robinson is an associate editor at the American Enterprise Institute.

Labels: belief, Christy Hall Robinson, faith, God, Michael Shermer, science, Templeton Foundation, William D. Phillips

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Friday, May 16, 2008

The Vatican and Little Green Men

Thursday, May 15, 2008 2:10 PM
Sharon Begley

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.

Labels: aliens, extraterrestrials, science, Sharon Begley, Vatican

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Thursday, May 01, 2008

Separate But Equal?

Can science tell us anything about religion?

Ronald Bailey

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.

Labels: Dean Michael Zimmerman, evolution, Jay Gould, religion, Ronald Bailey, science

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Monday, April 07, 2008

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.

Labels: Brian Williams, Center for the Study of Law and Religion, creationism, evolution, faith, intelligent design, Murray Peshkin, revelation, science

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Einstein's Idea Of Religion

5 Apr 2008

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.

Labels: Albert Einstein, God, Max Jammer, religion, science, Spinoza, theology

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Monday, March 24, 2008

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.”

Labels: 2008 Templeton Prize, God, Hasan Zillur Rahim, Michael Heller, religion, science

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Friday, March 14, 2008

Physicist-priest wins $1.7 million prize

March 13, 2008

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.”

Labels: cosmology, God, Michael Heller, religion, science, spiritual reality, Templeton Prize, universe

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Sunday, January 27, 2008

Research and religion can be a difficult mix

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

Labels: Dr. Essam Heggy, fundamentalism, Muslim world, religion, research, science, Susan Taylor Martin

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Friday, January 18, 2008

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.

Labels: intelligence, mind, reality, religion, science, Stephen W. VandeCarr

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Saturday, January 12, 2008

Prayer and spirituality said to aid healing

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."

Labels: American Nursing Association, faith, healing, health, intercessory prayer, Rebecca Rosen Lum, science, spirituality

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Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Islam’s Forsaken Renaissance

Posted Jan 8, 2008

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.

Labels: Islam, Koran, Mahathir bin Mohamad, Muslims, religion, renaissance, scholarship, science

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Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Evolution, God, and Neanderthals in Teen Fiction

“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.

Labels: Barbara J. King, evolution, fiction, God, religion, science, teenagers

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Friday, January 04, 2008

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

www.HealthNewsDigest.com

Labels: Anne Harrington, health, mind-body connection, religion, science

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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...

Labels: creationism, evolution, intelligent design, National Academy of Science, public school, religion, science, Will Dunham

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Tuesday, December 18, 2007

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.

Labels: faith, health, prayer, religion, science

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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

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Collins: Faith, Science Compatible

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.”

Labels: Francis Collins, God, human genome project, religion, science

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Thursday, November 22, 2007

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."

Labels: Catholic, embryonic stem cells, ethics, human cloning, Nancy Frazier O'Brien, National Catholic Bioethics Center, science

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Friday, November 16, 2007

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

Labels: creativity, Israel, Jurgen Wolff, Project Mind Foundation, science, spirituality

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Monday, November 12, 2007

Has science affected belief in a personal God?

By GARY STERN
THE JOURNAL NEWS

(Original publication: November 10, 2007)

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.

Labels: atheism, cosmos, Gary Stern, God, John Haught, science

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Saturday, October 27, 2007

A deeper look at gratitude

A deeper look at gratitude

Saturday, October 27, 2007

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.

religion@dallasnews.com

Labels: gratitude, happiness, religion, Robert A. Emmons, science

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Monday, October 22, 2007

'The Jesuit and the Skull' - Book Review

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. *

Jonathan Kirsch, author of, most recently, "A History of the End of the World: How the Most Controversial Book in the Bible Changed the Course of Western Civilization„©," is at work on a history of the Inquisition.

Labels: Amir D. Aczel, evolution, Jesuit, Jonathan Kirsch, religion, science, Teilhard de Chardin

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Sunday, September 16, 2007

Nobel winner speaks about science, religion

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 this free mind," he said, referring to "the creator" who might have had a hand in designing the universe?

"Maybe free will and humans are on another dimension," he suggested, "a spiritual dimension. We need to be open-minded. Is there extraterrestrial life? We don't know how life began on Earth.

Is there life out there? We'll continue looking." "Scientists and religious people wonder how we're going to change as human beings," Townes said, and brought up the fact that humans have the capability to genetically engineer or alter themselves.

How refreshing to hear a brilliant mind say, 'I don't know' " when it comes to questioning why certain things are in science or religion.

"He dares us to think new thoughts," Walsh said and called Townes "a brilliant man."

Labels: Charles Townes, David James Heiss, faith, religion, science

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Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Madeleine L’Engle, Writer of Children’s Classics, Is Dead at 88

By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: September 8, 2007

Madeleine L’Engle, an author whose childhood fables, religious meditations and fanciful science fiction transcended both genre and generation, most memorably in her children’s classic “A Wrinkle in Time,” died on Thursday in Litchfield, Conn. She was 88.,

“A Wrinkle in Time” was rejected by 26 publishers before editors at Farrar, Straus & Giroux read it and enthusiastically accepted it. It proved to be her masterpiece, winning the John Newbery Medal as the best children’s book of 1963 and selling, so far, eight million copies. It is now in its 69th printing.

In the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Marygail G. Parker notes “a peculiar splendor” in Ms. L’Engle’s oeuvre, and some of that splendor is owed to sheer literary range. Her works included poetry, plays, autobiography and books on prayer, and almost all were deeply, quixotically personal.

But it was in her vivid children’s characters that readers most clearly glimpsed her passionate search for answers to the questions that mattered most. She sometimes spoke of her writing as if she were taking dictation from her subconscious.

“Of course I’m Meg,” Ms. L’Engle said about the beloved protagonist of “A Wrinkle in Time.”

The St. James Guide to Children’s Writers called Ms. L’Engle “one of the truly important writers of juvenile fiction in recent decades.” Such accolades did not come from pulling punches. “Wrinkle” has been one of the most banned books in the United States, accused by religious conservatives of offering an inaccurate portrayal of God and nurturing in the young an unholy belief in myth and fantasy.

Ms. L’Engle, who often wrote about her Christian faith, was taken aback by the attacks. “It seems people are willing to damn the book without reading it,” Ms. L’Engle said in an interview with The New York Times in 2001. “Nonsense about witchcraft and fantasy. First I felt horror, then anger, and finally I said, ‘Ah, the hell with it.’ It’s great publicity, really.”

The book begins, “It was a dark and stormy night,” repeating the line of a 19th-century novelist, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton. “Wrinkle” then takes off. Meg Murry, with help from her psychic baby brother, uses time travel and extrasensory perception to rescue her father, a gifted scientist, from a planet controlled by the Dark Thing. She does so through the power of love.

The book uses concepts that Ms. L’Engle said she had plucked from Einstein’s theory of relativity and Planck’s quantum theory, almost flaunting her frequent assertion that children’s literature is literature too difficult for adults to understand.

“Wrinkle” is part of Ms. L’Engle’s Time series of children’s books, which includes “A Wind in the Door,” “A Swiftly Tilting Planet,” “Many Waters” and “An Acceptable Time.” The series combines elements of science fiction with insights into love and moral purpose.

Ms. L’Engle’s other famous series of books concerned another family. The first installment, “Meet the Austins,” which appeared in 1960, depicted an affectionate family whose members displayed enough warts to make them interesting. (Perhaps not enough for The Times Literary Supplement in London, though; it called the Austins “too good to be real.”)

By the fourth of the five Austin books, “A Ring of Endless Light,” any hint of Pollyanna was gone. It told of a 16-year-old girl’s first experience with death. Telepathic communication with dolphins eventually helps the girl, Vicky, acquire a new understanding of things.

“The cosmic battle between light and darkness, good and evil, love and indifference, personified in the mythic fantasies of the ‘Wrinkle in Time’ series, here is waged compellingly in its rightful place: within ourselves,” Carol Van Strum wrote in The Washington Post in 1980.

“Why does anybody tell a story?” she once asked, even though she knew the answer.

“It does indeed have something to do with faith,” she said, “faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”

Labels: author, children, Christianity, faith, Madeleine L'Engle, religion, science

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Friday, September 07, 2007

The Banquet Where Science Dines with Religion

Michael Holleran

In the current debate between science and religion, Plato’s Symposium has a lot to offer. First of all, it reminds us that we should exhibit the good fellowship and enthusiasm of brothers and sisters (OK, they excluded women in those days) and of kindred explorers of the boundless marvels of the universe. Allied with this, it proposes that reality is a banquet (a frequent alternate translation of “symposium”)—unbelievably tasty and enormously filling. The image and implication of intoxication is a telling one since one can and should be inebriated and delighted by the splendor of the real, as opposed to sinking into the dour servitude of gouty dogmatism of whatever flavor.

If we adopt this stance, we discover that not just love but also truth is a “many-splendored thing.” That is a primary lesson we need to grasp before proceeding any further in the debate between science and religion. We need to stretch our minds and hearts and let them roam free outside of the narrow prisons and blinkered perspectives in which we tend to incarcerate them, and let ourselves embrace and be braced by the currents of reality around us.

So, as we enter the dining hall, let us begin by establishing our rules of etiquette, our epistemological table manners, so to speak. Those who prefer appetizers (science, let us say—no value judgment implied!) have every right to their tastes, and they may refrain from dessert, if they wish (religion, let us suppose). Others may leap right to the dessert, and skip the appetizers. Many will say, perhaps rightly, that both groups are missing out on something tasty; but, what they eat is their own decision. What we cannot allow is a discourse in which one group chastises the other as idiots or hypocrites because of their particular preference. De gustibus non disputandum. So, both science and religion beware!

What therefore might the intellectual gourmet’s assessment of these various courses, whether in the culinary or university sense? Modern civilization has discovered (despite its roots in Aristotle, who didn’t yet make all the necessary distinctions) the magnificence and the unimaginable fruitfulness of empirical science, and its mathematical models. The scientific method, based on observation, hypothesis, and experiment, has rightly brought untold benefits into our lives. It has its proper object—material and measurable reality—and its particular methods.

Similarly, religion has brought almost unfathomable depth, excitement, perspective, guidance, and compassion into the world. It, too, has its own object (God and the spirit world, and all in relation to God) and its own methods (ultimately human spiritual experience), though often employing philosophical systems or artistic means to help express the inexpressible. Of course, since notoriously fallible and fickle human beings are the ones who actually practice science or religion, much that is nasty has been introduced in the name of both (nuclear bombs and inquisitions, for example). Yet that is not a defect of the food but of the diners and their appetites—not a fault of the field itself but of those who are walking in the field.

Still, if these various fields yield wondrous crops within their own spheres, their seeds will not sprout outside of them. Science, for example, never can nor ever should speak about God. It is completely outside its realm of competence. The existence and operations of God can never be either proved or disproved by science. The experience of God, however, or discourse about God, is certainly not outside the competence of human beings, with their multilayered reality. Thus, although science cannot speak about God, a scientist may do so, if she or he wishes, only simply not as a scientist, but as a person. For the same reasons, God neither can nor should be invoked within scientific discourse, as a cause or explanation of any sort, simply because God is not an object of empirical science, and can never be proved scientifically. It does not mean that God may not be a legitimate cause on another level of discourse (philosophical, theological, or mystical). But God should not be called in to bail out or short-circuit science in its own domain.

The problems arise, of course, when there is an apparent conflict of interests, when one seems to be treading on the other’s turf. In other words, the boundaries among these various categories of discourse, or rather, our perception and understanding of them, may often be somewhat sloppy and in need of challenge. Such difficulties have arisen quite spectacularly in history on a number of occasions (Galileo and Darwin, for example, which we can explore another time in more detail). In these instances, what seemed to have been the province of religion turned out to be the province of science. Or, to express it differently, these clashes provided an enormously exhilarating opportunity for those with open minds to re-examine their understanding of certain elements of their religious belief, and grow to a maturity of appreciation that was unthinkable before. Thus, the whole reassessment, over the past 200 years, of how to read the scriptures in Christianity—not as treatises in science or history but as bearers of spiritual insight and truth—was facilitated, and to a degree, even made possible, by the scientific revolution. To be sure, as Francis Collins rightly asserts in his Discover Interview in the February issue, St. Augustine reminded his readers 1,600 years ago that our understanding of the six days of Genesis should never be slavishly literal (in fact, Origen had pointed out the same more than a century before that), or taken to be a scientific or historical eyewitness account of how events unfolded. Rather are we dealing with a mythical and mystical treatise whose depth of truth is vastly more challenging and astonishing as a metaphor of our spiritual journey than just as an account, however glorious and poetic, of the origins of our material universe. Immense and innumerable currents of Jewish and Christian mystical writing bear this out. And, as the Dalai Lama has famously said in recent years, if other beliefs of religion were to be challenged by science, then, upon examination, we would have to humbly integrate the insights, certain that religion itself would only profit in the end.

Historically speaking, however, we know that proponents neither of religion nor of science often exhibited this tranquil breadth of spirit, this self-possessed openness to challenge and change, that circumstances genuinely required. Indeed, official positions and widespread popular understanding were often rife with fear and its concomitant dogmatism, and this remains so today in many quarters. Once again, however, this is the fault of the practitioners, and not of science or of religion itself.

Another possible area of conflict, which is considerably more contentious, is that of morality. I would propose that scientific research is intrinsically amoral; by its own rules, science would simply go out and do whatever it is capable of doing at any time. This is a limitation, but not a fault. Problems arise, however, because its object is often part of a much more complex reality. For example, not only do people do science, but people are often the object of science. What is more, they are not simply the subjects and objects of science, they are also the subjects and objects of psychology, art, ethics, philosophy, theology, and mysticism. Hence, these other levels of exploration and discourse have the right not to do science but to challenge the scientist, when a value known and embraced at another level is threatened by a science that is fundamentally without values. This is obviously the case in the life sciences: biotechnology, biochemistry, etc. Even if cloning, stem cell research, and reproductive advances represent scientific progress, are they truly and necessarily progress for the totality of the human person and for life in society? These are crucial questions that have to be faced out of respect for the complexity of our human and epistemological reality. But likewise, there must be caution on the other end of the spectrum: Are we so sure about our ethical and spiritual understanding of the human person that we would be justified in imposing limits on science in such and such a case? Humility and circumspection are needed on both sides.

Perhaps what is best in our humanity is what can likewise help reconcile science and religion in practice: the sense of wonder, of openness, of exploration, the exhilarating intoxication that I mentioned above. These sentiments are the inspiration, both Maritain and I would argue, for both science and religion—indeed for any passionate pursuit. Grounded in this sort of breadth of spirit, which is secure, serene, and confident in itself, we can hopefully learn— whether in science or in religion or in any human endeavor—not only to tolerate but to glory in the experience of not knowing. The feverish demand for instant certitude seems a Western neurosis. After all, whether we consider ourselves loyal scientists or loyal members of a religious tradition or both, an awestruck sense of respect before the unknown is the only loyal attitude towards whatever reality is the object of our exploration. As Maritain pointed out, there is more mystery in a grape between the teeth than in all of our discourses that would attempt to explain it. So, may we avoid anorexia of the spirit, and let the “banquet” continue!

Labels: conflict, Michael Holleran, morality, Plato’s Symposium, religion, science

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Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Einstein's God, or The Hopes for Secular Spirituality

Deepak Chopra
Posted August 27, 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

(to be continued)

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

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Friday, August 24, 2007

Secularists, what happened to the open mind?

Many of the leading voices among atheists and the ‘unreligious’ reveal a disdain for religion that can only damage today’s dialogue. Speaking with people of faith, instead of about them, would enrich both sides of this philosophical divide.

By Tom Krattenmaker

Critical thinking might be to secularism what faith is to devout religious believers. Thinking rationally, questioning assumptions, embracing complexity and eschewing the black-and-white — these habits of mind are, to the champions of non-belief, a keystone of the secular worldview and a crucial part of what separates them from religious people.

So why, when it comes to matters of religion, do secularists so frequently leave their critical thinking at the door?

As the atheist writer and religion scholar Jacques Berlinerblau recently put it, "Can an atheist or agnostic commentator discuss any aspect of religion for more than 30 seconds without referring to religious people as imbeciles, extremists, mental deficients, fascists, enemies of the common good ... conjure men (or) irrationalists?"

The behavior is unbecoming a school of thought that emphasizes rational complex thinking — and that has so much to offer if its practitioners can only live up to their own ideas about the value of an open mind.

The worst tendencies of atheists (who, by definition, believe God does not exist) and secularists (who are best described as "unreligious") were framed for me during a recent e-mail exchange I had with a staff member of a humanist organization.

Discussing the relationship between science and religion, I had expressed my view that religion should leave scientific research to the scientists and devote itself, along with the fields of ethics and philosophy, to the mighty issues of the human condition: good and evil, the meaning of life, the nature of love and so forth. To which my correspondent replied: Why would something as inherently foolish as religion deserve a place at the table for discussions of that magnitude?

As someone who has studied religion and attended progressive churches, I was aghast. I had expected an articulate and intelligent advocate for the non-religious worldview to display a more nuanced understanding of that which she stood against.

But, sadly, this is how the conversation often goes when secularists take up the issue of religion. The tendency has perhaps reached its crescendo — or low point — with the appearance and best-selling success of Christopher Hitchens' book God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

Like earlier books by atheists Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, Hitchens holds up the worst tendencies and misdeeds of religious people like an ugly piñata, on which he then performs the predictable act. But his demolition of religion dishonors the tradition of critical thinking and intellectual seriousness that supposedly define secularism. Berlinerblau suggests that Hitchens and other in-your-face atheist authors are becoming the "soccer hooligans of reasoned public discourse."

Not that Hitchens and his like-minded fans don't have a point. They are correct in criticizing those who have used religion to create suffering in the world. And those acting in the name of their faiths have indeed furnished far too many case studies. Unfortunately, the forms of religion most often in the spotlight these days lend credence to the idea that religion is a dark-ages anachronism that must be eradicated if the human race is to advance.

Nevertheless, I find myself wanting to leap to religion's defense when I encounter broadsides against all religion. Yes, many religious people behave in foolish and obnoxious ways, and some do cause harm in the name of their belief system. Yet the same could be said of non-believers. When a Stalin, Pol Pot, or Hitler commits monstrous deeds in connection with an ideology opposed to religion, does that somehow prove the inherent delusion and danger of non-belief?

My point is not to demonize secularists or atheists. There is too much of that already. According to a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll conducted in February, fewer people would vote for a well-qualified atheist for president (45%) than an African-American (94%), a Jew (92%), a woman (88%), a Hispanic (87%), a Mormon (72%), a thrice-married person (67%) or a homosexual (55%).

It is unfair and just plain wrong to equate secularism with immorality or insufficient patriotism. Nevertheless, secularists would do well to listen to Berlinerblau, one of the few atheist voices calling for secular engagement with religious believers and more rigorous understanding of their religions.

Berlinerblau, a Georgetown University professor and author of The Secular Bible: Why Non-believers Must Take Religion Seriously, says he has made little headway in persuading his fellow atheists to try understanding religion in its full complexity and to make alliances with moderate religious believers around issues of mutual concern. Apparently, it's more satisfying and commercially advantageous to preach to the converted and launch one-sided diatribes against religion.

Yet both achieving a more constructive national dialogue and making progress on our most pressing problems depend on just the opposite happening. Neither the secular nor the religious camp is going to drive the other out of business. So how's this for an idea: Cooperate.

Yes, it is highly unlikely that non-believers will soon join hands with theologically conservative believers for a round of John Lennon's Imagine (which imagines a world with "no religion"). But couldn't they engage with religious moderates and progressives, who tend to approach their faith in non-literal ways that do not require the suspension of rational thought, and who frequently lean in the same political direction as secularists do on the big issues of the day? Do secularists really want to antagonize these potential allies by sneering at their faith?

I hope not. Secularism's clear thinking has much to offer a world riven by unthinking ideologies and hatreds. And even though it defines itself in opposition to religion, surely secularism is capable of understanding that religion is more — at least capable of more — than irrational indulgence in supernatural fantasies. Learning more about religion would be a good start.

Secularists put their "faith" not in a god, but in the finest capabilities of the human mind. It would be a shame if their defining faculties failed them now.

Tom Krattenmaker, who lives in Portland, Ore., specializes in religion in public life and is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors. He is working on a book about Christianity in professional sports.

Labels: atheism, cooperation, faith, reason, religion, science, secular, Tom Krattenmaker

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Why Being Out Of The Body Is All In The Mind

August 24, 2007
Mark Henderson, Science Editor

To many people who have had an out-of-body experience, they are profoundly spiritual events that reveal how the mind extends beyond the material confines of the body and strengthen beliefs in religion or the paranormal.

The sensation of watching your own body from a distance, however, need owe nothing to the supernatural, research has proved.

With a combination of virtual-reality goggles and tactile stimulation, researchers in Britain and Switzerland induced volunteers to feel that they have left their bodies to view themselves from a few metres away. The illusion is said to feel as if the subject’s consciousness has been “teleported” elsewhere.

The results could eventually have commercial, medical, scientific and military applications. Similar virtual-reality technology could help surgeons to operate on patients in distant hospitals, and scientists to control humanoid robots on the Moon or Mars. Though scientists behind the experiments said they had no ties to military research, the work could be used to improve remote-controlled weaponry.

Henrik Ehrsson, of University College London, who performed one of the two studies published in the journal Science, said they shed important light on the nature of consciousness.

“Out-of-body experiences have fascinated mankind for millennia,” he said. They raised fundamental questions about the relationship between human consciousness and the body, and had been much discussed in theology, philosophy and psychology. “Although out-of-body experiences have been reported in clinical conditions, the neuro-scientific basis of this phenomenon remains unclear.

“The invention of this illusion is important because it reveals the basic mechanism that produces the feeling of being inside the physical body. This represents a significant advance . . . the experience of one’s own body as the centre of awareness is a fundamental aspect of self-consciousness,” Dr Ehrsson said. “If we can project people so they feel and respond as if they were really in a virtual version of themselves, just imagine the implications.”

In his study, volunteers wore goggles, and cameras were placed 2m (6ft) behind the subject, with the feeds connected to the subject’s eyes. The participant thus saw an image of his or her back. Dr Ehrsson stood behind the subject and held two rods. He used one to prod the subject and the other to jab underneath the camera. The participants said they felt they were sitting where the cameras were placed, and that the figure they were watching was another person or a dummy.

“This was a bizarre, fascinating experience for the participants - it felt absolutely real for them and was not scary. Many giggled and said, ‘Wow, this is so weird’.” He said that when he took part, he felt himself move suddenly out of his body. “I see the object coming towards me, feel the touch, then ‘boof!’, I feel a striking sensation that I’m over there looking at myself.”

Out-of-body experiences are often associated with neurological conditions such as migraines and epilepsy, as well as with drug abuse and serious injuries, particularly to the head. They probably come about because the brain is misled by circuits that are not working properly.

In the second experiment, a team at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne fitted volunteers with similar goggles, then trained the cameras on a mannequin. The backs of the subject and the mannequin were stroked - though the subject could see only the mannequin. They were blindfolded and moved away, then asked to walk to return to their position. They tended to move towards where they had seen their “virtual bodies”.

Susan Blackmore, of the University of the West of England, said: “Out-of-body experiences should be understood not as evidence for the supernatural, but as a fascinating experience that potentially we can all have.”

Labels: consciousness, Mark Henderson, mind-body connection, science

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Sunday, August 19, 2007

For Fun: In Praise of Scoops on Heaven, Hell and, Yes, God

By Peter Steinfels
Published: August 18, 2007

The next time laments are heard and verdicts rendered about the media’s lack of attention to religion, will someone please remember Weekly World News?

As everyone whose life experience has not been limited to upscale food stores or buying groceries online knows, Weekly World News was the supermarket tabloid printed only in black and white but carrying articles as colorful as the most fevered imaginations could produce.

When those articles did not feature a resurrected Elvis, the love life of Bigfoot or space aliens meeting secretly with leading politicians, they often dealt with religion: “Baby Born With Angel Wings” (accompanied by photo). “Quick Test Tells If You’re Going to Heaven or Hell!” “Adam & Eve’s Skeletons Found — in Colorado!”

In newspapers like this one, the flamboyant tabloid’s demise has been duly noted, with nostalgic tributes to its fondness for swamp monsters and its high moments of creativity (“Florida Man Screams From the Grave, My Brain Is Missing!”).

In The Washington Post on Aug. 7, Peter Carlson provided an unusually full and amusing account of the tabloid’s rise and fall, the cast of characters on its staff and its “unique philosophy of journalism: Don’t fact-check your way out of a good story.”

But no one has sufficiently mourned the loss to religion reporting.

Fifteen years ago, this column hailed Weekly World News’s unusual achievements in this area. The column was the result of an epiphany — O.K., the tabloid would have found another word — that occurred halfway between a hotel room and a Midwestern convention center where delegates of one of the nation’s Christian denominations were debating some policy, probably about the Bible and homosexuality.

Memory fails to recover the exact headline of Weekly World News on sale that morning at the coffee shop. It was something along the line of “Angels Discovered Piloting UFO’s.” Now here, it was suggested to bleary-eyed fellow reporters (no doubt from a long night of prayer), was a real religion story.

Even in 1992, the otherworldly revelations had not gone entirely unnoticed by religion scholars. Two years earlier, The Christian Century had published an article documenting how much remarkable religious information could be gleaned from the tabloid.

Q.: What does God look like?

A.: God “has fiery green eyes, flowing brown hair and stands 9 feet tall.”

Q.: What does God sound like?

A.: “A hundred baritones and a symphony orchestra rolled into one,” as recorded by a Soviet space probe.

Q.: Where is heaven?

A.: Heaven is 28,000 light-years from Earth, according to another space probe.

Q.: Where is hell?

A.: Nine miles below the surface of Earth, according to Soviet engineers drilling in Siberia (the Soviets played a curiously large part in these discoveries). Weekly World News reassured readers that those engineers had capped the hole after smelling smoke and hearing the cries of the damned.

Q.: How do you get to heaven?

A.: Through the Bermuda Triangle — did you have to ask? This was attributed to a Dutch physicist, who also reported that the passage to heaven was open 16 times a year.

Q.: How much does the human soul weigh?

A.: “The human soul weighs 1/3,000th of an ounce.” This detail was not the discovery of Soviets but the next best thing, East German scientists.

In describing the tabloid’s challenges in recent years, Mr. Carlson mentions that real news “frequently rivaled anything that WWN writers could concoct”: Hollywood actors catapulted to high office, a president’s sex life spelled out in a government document, religious fanatics flying hijacked airplanes into buildings.

Weekly World News held a kind of funhouse mirror up to much popular American belief. Without meaning to, it offered a far more effective critique of the nation’s religious literalism than anything the so-called New Atheism, burdened by its obvious animosity, has served up.

The tabloid’s writers matter-of-factly exaggerated literalism’s demand for factual detail to the point of parody: God’s exact height and hair color, the soul’s exact weight, the exact distance to heaven and hell and, as those excavated skeletons of Adam and Eve indicate, the exact location of the Garden of Eden — about 40 miles south of Denver.

Articles also captured the complex relationship of religious literalism in the United States with science. Rather than being antiscience, that strand of Christianity looks to science for confirmation of its beliefs, to the point it seems of implicitly accepting science’s claim to be the ultimate measuring stick of reality.

So the tabloid’s fantastic religion articles, no less than its reports of extraterrestrial visitors or grasshoppers the size of bobcats, were full of quotations from anonymous “experts.” Sometimes these were clergy members, like the ones who allegedly but not very imaginatively declared the baby born with angel wings “a sign from God.” Sometimes they were “famed” biblical scholars.

But scientists were much better, those Soviet physicists, for example, or the “atheist” East German medical types who determined the weight of the soul. Or if the phenomenon at issue was in defiance of all known science, the tabloid could at least conjure “a baffled scientist” to attest to its truth.

Mr. Carlson reports that Weekly World News writers “quoted sources identified as ‘a baffled scientist’ so often they started joking about an institution called the Academy of Baffled Scientists.”

In 1992, Sal Ivone, then the managing editor, was willing to explain his tabloid’s unusual fondness for religion articles in terms of “post-industrial culture” and “a hunger for myth.” Then Mr. Ivone got practical. “Adam and Eve,” he said, “aren’t going to sue us.”

Labels: Peter Carlson, Peter Steinfels, religion, religious literalism, science, Weekly World News

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Articles of Faith: Conflict between religion, science seems everlasting

Last updated August 17, 2007

By Anthony B. Robinson
GUEST COLUMNIST

Who would have thought that on a summer Saturday night in Seattle a professor of philosophy could pack the house?

Alvin Plantinga, a professor at Notre Dame, did just that for a talk on science and religion last weekend. The crowd turned up at Rainier Beach Presbyterian Church in southeast Seattle where Plantinga's daughter, Jane Pauw, is the pastor. The topic was, "Science and Religion: Why Does the Debate Continue?"

... the topic of science and religion remains a hot one. Moreover, Seattle audiences have been treated to a string of appearances by authors such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennettand Christopher Hitchens. All three represent the popular, if simplistic to the point of silly, viewpoint that religion is the source of the world's problems and getting rid of it is the path to salvation.

Religion and science are two different ways of knowing. Both have a place. Religion tends to deal in the "Why?" questions. Why is there a world? Religion answers, "God." No one has to accept that answer, but it is an answer that science can neither confirm nor deny. Science works on the "How?" questions. How have the world and its diverse life forms come to be? Science answers that the world has evolved slowly over time through the mechanism of natural selection. There's nothing about that answer that rules faith in a Creator out or in. After all, for believers, there's no reason that God can't make use of natural selection.

Plantinga argued that there is no intrinsic conflict between religion and science. Conflicts arise when spokespersons for one or the other make claims on behalf of science or religion that are exaggerated. For example, said the professor, it is perfectly appropriate that scientific work proceed without religious assumptions or references. Plantinga called that "secularism with respect to science."

But that's different than "scientific secularism," which argues that scientific method and knowledge are enough for all human understanding and that a secular approach to all of life is either satisfactory or required. In making the argument of "scientific secularism," that science is enough and that anything else is illegitimate, people go too far.

Turning to the hot button topic of evolution, Plantinga, who described himself as a "serious Christian," again saw no intrinsic conflict between religion and science. He argued that it is perfectly possible to credit Darwin's thesis of evolution through natural selection by genetic mutation and still hold to the Christian doctrine of creation, which believes that God created life and humans in God's image.

Plantinga said that scientists such as Dawkins who want to read religion out of the picture offer a faulty argument. In his book "The Blind Watchmaker," Dawkins argues that we know of no irrefutable objections to the possibility that all of life has come into being by way of unguided Darwinian process. But from this premise Dawkins jumps to an unwarranted conclusion, namely, "All of life has come to be by way of unguided Darwinian processes." Dawkins claims too much.

Some proponents of religion also claim too much. For example, they argue the Genesis story of creation over a seven-day period is a factual account of how the world came to be. Plantinga noted that a Christian as eminent and ancient as Augustine cautioned fellow believers not to treat the Genesis story of creation as a factual explanation or to waste their time developing calculations based on it.

So why does the conflict between religion and science rage on? Misunderstanding and exaggerated claims for either science or religion by their more zealous proponents is one explanation. Another is what's at the root of many, perhaps most, of our world's conflicts: fear and the lust for power. Religion has a word for that, "sin." And that is one religious doctrine, perhaps the only one, which is empirically, that is to say scientifically, verifiable.

Anthony Robinson's column appears Saturdays. He is a speaker, consultant and writer. His recent books include "Common Grace: How to be a Person and Other Spiritual Matters," and "Leadership for Vital Congregations."

Labels: Alvin Plantinga, Anthony B. Robinson, evolution, God, religion, science, secular

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Friday, August 10, 2007

Inter-faith dialogue

LIVE’N’LEARN

Tariq Ramadan took part in a debate on inter-faith dialogue two weeks ago.
The dialogue between the panel of three (Tariq Ramadan, Soondursun Jugessur, Michael Atchia) some days ago and the audience (at Q-Bornes Town Hall under the auspices of the Conseil des religions) pointed to these:

? Inter-faith dialogue is possible and desirable;

? it is a vehicle for the spiritual and moral dimension in society, the family and an important factor for peace in the world;

? it must include everyone, even those with no declared faith and agnostics;

? it must go to villages and suburbs, to those in need, the masses, the young, and not remain among the elite and already convinced.

?Rooted in one’s own faith (which each must deepen), inter-faith dialogue enables each one to reach out, know, understand and share in other faiths, with huge results for everyone’s ability to better serve society and live in peace.

What is inter-faith dialogue?

The term refers to “co-operative and positive interaction between people of different religious traditions”. Its aim is to unite global communities by sharing common elements, while accepting the differences (in religion and culture) to achieve harmony and enable people to live in peace.

A changing world

The face of religion on Planet Earth is rapidly changing. As a result of world-wide movements of people (whether for tourism, international workforces or immigration), most cities and many countries are fast becoming environments of multicultural and multi-faith environments, not to mention multilingual, as is the case in that inner London primary school where there are kids totalling 56 mother tongues, besides English! This worldwide movement of people has provoked a meeting of cultures and religions, a new phenomenon in history.

This historic encounter of religions is accompanied by another remarkable process: the interfaith dialogue movement. People belonging to the great faiths of the world are now talking to one another and understanding one another as never before, rather strongly contrasting with the set image of religion as a source of friction, conflict, terrorism (refer to the times of conflicting relationships in history between Christians-Muslims, Muslims-Hindus, Jews-Muslims, Catholics-Protestants, Christianity and science, etc.

New visions

I will take the concept of peace as an example: a typical western definition is that peace equals “freedom from war or violence” (Oxford dictionary). Peace activists in the west (and indeed the world over) prefer the eastern view of peace as a state of accord, understanding, harmony, fellowship, tranquillity, serenity, order, a state of non violence, unaggressiveness and uncontentious behaviour, as a state of plenty, of health, of happiness, etc. That definition combines elements from different religious traditions, as a sort of inter-faith, operational and multi-faceted. The former (Oxford definition) understandably arises from the aftermath of two World Wars, at the end of which peacetime was celebrated, after 80 million unnecessary deaths!

Religion and secularism

We must differentiate here between lip-service to religion (or the blind practices of formulae/rites, whether in Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism or any of the hundreds of new faiths-sects-religions) and being a true believer in search of meaning to life, essential values to live by and the intimate relationship with God. This is a paramount difference between wearers of the signs and badges of a religion and believers, who are always humble in the face of the immensity of the universe and the universal.

Modern society is fast replacing all references to revelations from sacred books or guidance for life obtained from divine inspiration by a huge set of secular laws, rules and regulations. But these belong to two different spheres, which can certainly co-exist. For example, most states are secular, meaning that affairs are conducted without reference to one or any religion. This is the case in France, India, the USSR of old, China, Mauritius, according to the Constitution. But surely and certainly those men and women elected or appointed to do the job can be (and should be) people of faith (not necessarily religious people).

The difficulty arises when a state defines itself as an Islamic State (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan), a Jewish state, a Hindu kingdom (Nepal until recently), a Buddhist one (Tibet, until 1950) or any of the numerous Christian kingdoms of Europe from the middle ages into the 20th century, with sequels showing in the struggle between Catholic and Protestants in Northern Ireland.

So, homage must be paid to movements like those of Mother Teresa or that of the Brahma Kumaris. Each is inspired by one religion (Christianity and Hinduism respectively) but are universal in their openness to all and service to all.

We therefore see the necessity of inter-faith as well as inter-cultural dialogue in modern society. This dialogue can be a determinant factor for the ability of communities to live in peace and harmony, especially important in multi-religious societies like ours and in recent years in very many societies.

As a man of science, I am searching for truth, I try to understand the mechanisms and processes operating in nature. I do this purely by using the experimental method of observation, detached, neutral objective. Such is the scientific method, the example par excellence of secularism. It is only at this price that science can produce results which can then be applied to improve the quality of life of man. As a believer, I have neither nightmares nor conflicts between my work as a scientist and the grace of God in my life. The key word that comes to mind is complementarity.

The spiritual dimension is an integral part of true and complete education, no doubt about that! How does this operate in school systems is an ongoing and difficult subject. Extremes are regrettable, such as in French state schools where religion is ”out-of-bounds” or in some religious schools where adhesion to a given faith is a must. In both cases faith (which is a way of life “proposed”, not “imposed’ ) can develop freely. The experiment conducted by some of us (including Henri Souchon) in the QEC of the 1970s is still vivid in the minds of many: side by side with sectoral religious education (each one in her own faith), we devised and proposed courses in the encounter of religions, an attempt to learn the “facts and deeper meaning” of the religions of others. This was in a small way a good beginning to inter-faith dialogue. Where has this dialogue reached now?

Labels: culture, interfaith, Michael Atchia, peace, religion, science, society

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New field of neurotheology opens door for scientific study of belief

By Hannah Elliott
Published August 8, 2007

NEW YORK (ABP) -- If scientists could chart physical changes that happen in the brain during prayer, would it mean that prayer is something that happens only in the mind? And if brain scans show unique molecular activity during meditation, does that mean all religious belief is imaginary?

Scientists -- and some theologians -- are studying those questions using neurotheology, an emerging discipline that addresses the correlation between neurological and spiritual activity.

Some say neurotheology proves that God created the brain. Others believe "the brain created the god." At the root of the debate, some say, is the threat that faith could be reduced to nothing more than chemical reactions in the brain.

The coupling of science and belief has become increasingly prominent in popular media. Time and Newsweek magazines have both recently run long stories exploring the newly recognized discipline. And current studies at Wheaton College, Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania are using neuroimaging to locate brain regions activated during emotional or spiritual events.

The quest is to find a neurological basis for out-of-body or enlightenment experiences, including trances, time perception, oneness with the universe and altered states of consciousness. But neurotheology can also help explain the more mundane habits of a religious life: prayer, beliefs, meditation and senses of the presence of the supernatural.

Paul Simmons, a clinical professor of family and community medicine at the University of Louisville School of Medicine, said the brain is intimately related to relationships with and perceptions of God -- so neurotheology is a good way to help theologians use all of their capacities to study God. The underlying question, the former pastor and ethics professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary said, is whether that experience is "just a mental state or have you gotten in touch with a transcendence?"

"Our brain is basic to all that we are, all that we understand, all that we perceive," Simmons said. "We can't avoid that in theology any longer. At least, we must be aware of the fact that many of our claims made about religion are actually based on science."

Theories about correlations between the brain and beliefs are nothing new. Historians have speculated that figures like Joan of Arc, Saint Teresa of Avila, Fedor Dostoevsky and Marcel Proust had aliments like epilepsy, which in turn led to their obsessions with the spiritual world.

Modern scientists differentiate between the brain and mind by defining the brain as physical and chemical, while the mind has to do with thoughts and ideas.

Plato's ideas focused on both the brain and the mind. Aristotle argued that God is pure mind, and since people have a brain they can think "God thoughts," Simmons said. "Aristotle thought you could think pure thoughts and thus get right in touch with God."

Beginning in the 1950s, scientists used electroencephalograms, or EEGs, to record electrical activity in the brain. By placing electrodes on the scalp, they could study brain waves concurring with elevated states of consciousness. In the 1980s, they stimulated different areas of the brain with a magnetic field, causing subjects to claim senses of ethereal presences in the room.

The first modern book published on the subject came in 1994. Called Neurotheology: Virtual Religion in the 21st Century, it was promoted in a theological journal called Zygon. And Newsweek recently citied a 1998 book -- published by MIT Press, no less -- called Zen and the Brain. Since then, scholarly journals have devoted issues to religion and the mind, including studies using data from meditating Buddhist monks and praying Franciscan nuns.

The reason for the renewed interest, according to neurotheology pioneer Brian Alston, is that the people writing about it have changed the terms of the field. This popular type of neurotheology focuses on beliefs, he said.

Studies since the 1960s have consistently reported that between 30 percent and 40 percent of people have felt "very close to a powerful, spiritual force that seemed to lift you out of yourself," Newsweek reported. According to the Gallup Poll, 53 percent of Americans say they have experienced a "sudden religious awakening or insight" at least once.

But has the fascination with the brain and belief come from an oversimplified version of neurotheology? Some have criticized Time's article as equating science with Darwinism and religion with God -- over-generalized definitions for such complex subjects.

"It's oversimplified, but at the same time, there's a large kernel of truth in there," Simmons said. "The issue is whether a religious experience is a matter of brain circuits or God. Religiously inclined people will say, 'Well, that's God using our brain manifesting [itself] in brain activity.'"

Alston, who wrote What is Neurotheology?, said popular writing has certainly oversimplified the dialogue between science and theology. Theology does not just deal with the religious and the spiritual -- it has much broader implications, he said.

The word "neurobelief" -- instead of "neurotheology" -- is a better way to characterize the discipline, Alston said. Neurotheology should represent beliefs that are broader than just religious and spiritual, he added. It should represent beliefs that are cultural and political as well.

"What neurotheology tries to do is say, 'Look, here are ways that all this works together. Instead of seeing these things as enemies, let's look at these as things that can relate,'" he said. Part of the issue, he said, is that, "in the Western world, we have created a dichotomy between what we consider to be physical and what we consider to be spiritual."

That divide has been implicated in some of the criticisms of neurotheology. The key problem with neurotheology is its attempt to unify two strikingly different perspectives on human beings within one discipline, Alston wrote in a paper presented at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association last year.

Some critics believe that even if neuroscience and theology are brought together within the discipline of neurotheology, the differences will inevitably lead to one discipline -- namely theology -- dominating the other, Alston wrote.

David Wulf, a psychologist at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, has written that religious experience is actually normal brain functions happening under duress -- not communication with God.

Another prominent thinker, Massimo Pigliucci, a professor of ecology and evolution at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, has published essays questioning the discipline itself. In an essay titled "Neurotheology: A Rather Skeptical Perspective," Pigliucci wrote that he had two problems with neurotheology: "First, it is no theology at all. Theology is the study of the attributes of God.... [T]he neurological study of what happens to the brain during mystical experiences cannot tell us anything about God because all we can do is to measure neural patterns...."

The other problem, Pigliucci wrote, is that it violates Occam's razor, the rule of logic that what "can be done with fewer...is done in vain with more. That is, when faced with multiple hypotheses capable of explaining a given set of data, it is wise to start by considering the simplest ones, those that make the least unnecessary assumptions."

That logic would leave God out of the equation.

For scientists to conclude that "the self and the world at large are in fact contained within and possibly created by the reality of [an] Absolute Unitary Being" leaves the "boundaries of both science and philosophy to plunge into pure metaphysical speculation," Pigliucci wrote.

If "we realize that mystical experiences originate from the same neurological mechanisms that underlie hallucinations ... I bet dollar to donut that the reality experienced by meditating Buddhists and praying nuns is entirely contained in their mind and is not a glimpse of a 'higher' realm, as tantalizing as that idea may be," he concluded.

Simmons called that criticism "on target." Neurotheology doesn't deal with theology as it is traditionally done -- trying to get religion and experience together with reasonable consistency, he said. Progress in the field will come mostly in mental health, he said.

Alston, who studied ethics and philosophy at Yale Divinity School, says criticism of neurotheology depends on who is receiving the information. Much of it has to do with the difference between the physical brain and the metaphysical mind. Some experts believe that ideas in the mind cause action, while others say chemicals in the brain cause action -- and if chemicals are altered in the brain, behaviors will change, Alston said.

Either way of thinking is okay, since neurotheologists aren't interested in changing firmly held beliefs, he said.

"What I'm trying to do with neurotheology is to explain that each of these has a way with relating to the subject matter," he said. "It once again depends on the standing point of a person in terms of if they're a biologist and what their tools are and if they are a psychologist and what their tools are."

And with the stakes so high in this new and complex discipline, there's likely to be no shortage of opinions from either camp.

Labels: brain, Brian Alston, Gallup Poll, God, Hannah Elliott, neurotheology, prayer, science, spirituality

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Saturday, July 28, 2007

Curious Obsessions - Book Review

Barney Zwartz, Reviewer
July 28, 2007

Exactly what constitutes Jewishness has been much debated, but most people would be surprised at the Semitic self-identification of a group of more than 80 New Zealand Maori (a Polynesian race).

Author: Rachel Kohn
GenreSociety/Politics, History, Spirituality/Religion
Publisher ABC Books RRP $32.95

Exactly what constitutes Jewishness has been much debated, but most people would be surprised at the Semitic self-identification of a group of more than 80 New Zealand Maori (a Polynesian race). In 1999 they planned to visit Israel to convince the Government to accept them as citizens under the law of return, saying they were descendants of Ephraim, one of the 10 lost tribes, which they argued made their way to the South Pacific nearly 3000 years ago.

Alas, this passing reference in Rachael Kohn's Curious Obsessions is the lot - we never learn whether they got there or what the rabbis decided.

But that is the especial pleasure of this broad and entertaining survey of oddities in the nexus between science and spirituality. She wanders down all sorts of historical byways that to their advocates at the time seemed like the highway.

The 10 lost tribes - removed in a typical Middle Eastern piece of ethnic cleansing by an Assyrian conqueror in the eighth century BC - don't get much attention today. But, Kohn points out, the New World fascinated the Europeans for centuries partly because they were convinced the natives were descended from the lost tribes. It was believed by linguists, historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and theologians, fuelled the exploration of North and South America and generated the religious movement we know as Mormonism.

Many of the obsessions Kohn investigates proved fruitful, others were blind alleys. But she has chosen her themes cleverly so that they have, as she says, a continuing and lively currency today, be it utopias, lost civilisations, or the secrets of health.

Feminism, we learn, got a big boost from an archaeological myth, that of the earth-mother fertility goddess - useful in the 1970s when women were searching for an alternative to God, the "Patriarchal Enemy". Ancient figures such as the 25,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf were taken to prove that gentler, nature-based matriarchal cultures existed. Not so, says Kohn: modern scholarship has dismissed the idealised view of goddess religion as pure invention.

One of the most interesting chapters, When Religion Became Science, discusses the rise of spiritual technology, an apparent contradiction in terms that has made many people lots of money. Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science made salvation an empirically verifiable state - good health. Kohn also discusses theosophy, Steiner and Scientology.

She draws an interesting line between the biblical Nephilim, a lost race of giants (in fact a mistranslation of the Hebrew), and Hitler's obsession with the lost Aryans, arguing that "academic disciplines such as psychology, biology and philology conspired with religion and literature to invent a past and forge a people that would stop at nothing".

This book covers a wide terrain lightly; it cannot go under the surface. That's fair enough, but it's mildly irritating that we are frequently left tantalised. But perhaps it's no bad thing for an author to leave us pleading "tell me more".

Rachael Kohn is a guest at next month's Age Melbourne Writers' Festival. Barney Zwartz is The Age religion editor.

Labels: Barney Zwartz, Ephraim, lost tribes, Maori, Nephilim, Rachel Kohn, religion, science, spirituality

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Monday, July 23, 2007

Science and Reason Provide Good Answers To "How"

Science and reason provide good answers
By Sheri Glowinski Matamoros

I grew up in a Catholic family. Although I tried hard to be a good Catholic, I knew early on that Catholicism, despite its many beautiful rituals that still to this day influence me, wasn't what rang true for me.

I've explored many different "brands" of religion along the way. Although many parts of many religions appealed to me, I felt frustrated with feeling that I had confined myself to any one particular "whole" of a religious doctrine that didn't resonate completely with me. I could never understand how there could be so many different belief systems - most exclusively claiming to be the one true answer - and only one of those really be the correct "answer."

How could so many people worldwide who gently believe so deeply and honestly in their religion - be it Christianity, Buddhism, Islam - be wrong? If there really is one true answer, isn't it possible that there are many different, yet equal, paths to that answer?

These questions give sustenance to my own spiritual quest. I personally look to many sources to explore life's transcending mystery of which I am a part.

I believe that science and reason are appropriate conduits to answer the essential "hows" of life and it is exciting to me to explore these types of questions in a scientific, systematic manner.

I also feel that to have science without a sense of spirituality, or vice versa, is to have tunnel vision.

A system of "checks and balances" is needed to provide depth of vision. And so I also find truth in the rhythms of the natural world. In this realm, I feel the pulsing of life, a connection to everyone and everything on some level.

We all share the same atoms, after all, albeit in beautiful unique combinations. Here I find retreat and replenishment for my occasionally weary soul. Here I find soothing when I need reminding that death, in all its forms, is a natural part of the rhythm of life.

It is also here that I am constantly reminded that I am not separate, either from the earth upon which I depend or from my neighbor. Indeed I am responsible for every step that I take, whether that step be toward something productive or something harmful, to myself or to others.

What I do here on Earth matters, and I try to live my life with this as my guiding principle.

And so, in summary, this is what I've come to believe in my search for truth: There is one underlying source of life that makes itself known differently to different people and that ultimately, it's not so much in what (or who) a person believes, it's what that person does with her beliefs that really matters.

Labels: Catholic, reason, religion, science, Sheri Glowinski Matamoros, spirituality

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A Teacher With Faith And Reason

By Jeff Jacoby,
Globe Columnist
July 22, 2007

DID YOU hear about the religious fundamentalist who wanted to teach physics at Cambridge University? This would-be instructor wasn't simply a Christian; he was so preoccupied with biblical prophecy that he wrote a book titled "Observations on the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John." Based on his reading of Daniel, in fact, he forecast the date of the Apocalypse: no earlier than 2060. He also calculated the year the world was created. When Genesis 1:1 says "In the beginning," he determined, it means 3988 BC.

Not many modern universities are prepared to employ a science professor who espouses not merely "intelligent design" but out-and-out divine creation. This applicant's writings on astronomy, for example, include these thoughts on the solar system: "This most beautiful system of sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and domination of an intelligent and powerful Being . . . He governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done."

Hire somebody with such views to teach physics? At a Baptist junior college deep in the Bible Belt, maybe, but the faculty would erupt if you tried it just about anywhere else.

...the National Science Education Standards issued by the National Academy of Sciences in 1995 classified religion with "myths," "mystical inspiration," and "superstition" -- all of them quite incompatible with scientific study. Michael Dini, a biologist at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, made headlines in 2003 over his policy of denying letters of recommendation for any graduate student who could not "truthfully and forthrightly affirm a scientific answer" to the question of mankind's origin. Science and religion, he said in an interview at the time, "shouldn't overlap."

But such considerations didn't keep Cambridge from hiring the theology- and Bible-drenched individual described above. Indeed, it named him to the prestigious Lucasian Chair of Mathematics -- in 1668. A good thing too, since Isaac Newton -- notwithstanding his religious fervor and intense interest in Biblical interpretation -- went on to become the most renowned scientist of his age, and arguably the most influential in history.

Newton's consuming interest in theology, eschatology, and the secrets of the Bible is the subject of a new exhibit at Hebrew University in Jerusalem (online at jnul.huji.ac.il/dl/mss/Newton). His vast religious output -- an estimated 3 million words -- ranged from the dimensions of Solomon's Temple to a method of reckoning the date of Easter to the elucidation of Biblical symbols. "Newton was one of the last great Renaissance men," the curators observe, "a thinker who worked in mathematics, physics, optics, alchemy, history, theology, and the interpretation of prophecy and saw connections between them all." The 21st-century prejudice that religion invariably "subverts science" is refuted by the extraordinary figure who managed to discover the composition of light, deduce the laws of motion, invent calculus, compute the speed of sound, and define universal gravitation, all while believing deeply in the "domination of an intelligent and powerful Being." Far from subverting his scientific integrity, the exhibition notes, "Newton's piety served as one of his inspirations to study nature and what we today call science."

For Newton, it was axiomatic that religious inquiry and scientific investigation complemented each other. There were truths to be found in both of the "books" authored by God, the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature -- or as Francis Bacon called them, the "book of God's word" and the "book of God's works." To study the world empirically did not mean abandoning religious faith. On the contrary: The more deeply the workings of Creation were understood, the closer one might come to the Creator. In the language of the 19th Psalm, "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork."

To be sure, religious dogma can be a blindfold, blocking truths from those who refuse to see them. Scientific dogma can have the same effect. Neither faith nor reason can answer every question. As Newton knew, the surer path to wisdom is the one that has room for both.

Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.

Labels: Cambridge University, Isaac Newton, Jeff Jacoby, religion, science

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Science And Politics Can Mean Nothing Without Faith

The Times
July 21, 2007

Geoffrey Rowell

As Bishop for the Church of England in Europe I am privileged to visit many significant places. Last month I found myself in what were at first sight two very contrasting contexts. Early in June I was in Geneva and was taken to visit CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, where a huge accelerator is under construction that will enable experiments to be conducted into fundamental particles, the sub-atomic world of energy at the heart of seemingly solid matter, and which can also provide us with understanding of the origins of the Universe. The great accelerator is being assembled from parts made across the world with a precision that enables them to fit perfectly and completely together – an image of human communion and cooperation that is startling in a world which is so often divided. When lowered, again with wonderful precision, into the circular tunnel, several kilometres in diameter, this extraordinary machine will enable physicists to search for the Higgs particle – a particle believed to exist but which has not yet definitively been shown to exist. So from beginning to end this experiment, and the huge cost of the equipment needed for it, is a work of faith.

It was Michael Polanyi, the philosopher of science, who recognised that for a scientist to test a new hypothesis they had to have faith in that hypothesis. Faith seeking understanding was as true of science as of religion, though a faith that was indeed a reasonable faith shaped by compelling evidence. Belief, he argued, was the source of all knowledge. “Tacit assent and intellectual passions, the sharing of an idiom and of a cultural heritage, affiliation to a like-minded community: such are the impulses which shape our vision of the nature of things on which we rely for our mastery of things.” We need what he called “a fiduciary framework” if we are to have any knowledge. Without it, knowledge is impossible. As St Augustine said: “I believe in order that I may understand.”

A few weeks later I spent some time in Romania, an Orthodox country, which suffered much under the communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu. As with Russia, there has been a renaissance of religion after the fall of communism. Orthodoxy is deeply rooted in the identity of that country; it is a significant example of what Newman said about living religion – it is “a mould in which nations have been cast”. What gives a country identity is an overarching story with a transcendent reference that explicitly and implicitly binds people together. “Religion”, after all, means that which binds. When that “overarching story” becomes merely a matter of opinion, societies dissolve. In the Book of Proverbs we read that “where there is no vision the people perish” –or, as the Hebrew more precisely means, “the people unravel”. Without a shared faith and a shared vision springing from an understanding of human nature and human flourishing that encompasses life and death, sin and redemption, we are reduced to merely political arrangements.

We have to live by faith, for we can live in no other way. The question is, in what shall we put our faith? The seductive attractions of advertisers, the many gods and lords of fashion, of possessions that possess us, the addictions that undermine our human integrity, all compete for our allegiance. In the end, the Christian gospel teaches us that the God who is love, and who comes down to the lowest part of our need, is the God who made us for Himself. “You are made to love, as the sun is to shine,” said that sunniest of poet-priests, Thomas Traherne. When my niece says in her wedding today the simple words “I will” to her husband, and two young people give themselves to each other “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death is do part” they will witness to their faith in the God of love made known in Jesus Christ and an openness to the reality of His transforming grace. When the distraught and weeping Mary Magdalen, whom the Church commemorates tomorrow, heard in the garden on the first Easter Day her name called by the Risen Christ, her life was turned around. She was caught up into the life of the new creation of the God who is the conqueror of sin and death, and was told to share the good news of that new creation. It was that faith and that good news that shaped England and Europe, and has shaped countless lives and still has power to do so today.

The Right Rev Dr Geoffrey Rowell is the Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe

Labels: European Particle Physics Laboratory, faith, Geoffrey Rowell, God, Higgs particle, hypotheses, Jesus, religion, Romania, science

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Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Educated marry science, belief

Published: 07.17.2007
Diane Glass
Tucson Citizen

Science and religion may be mutually exclusive, but they can, and do, live happily married in the human spirit.

Most of the time. The rest of the time, there's a lot of bickering. Science demands proof, and literalist fundamentalism demands wholesale belief.

Not surprisingly, fundamentalists are increasing in number.

Wouldn't it be nice to wake up and know that the milk you drink is good for you and not a cancerous time bomb? And wouldn't it be nice to know that if you didn't accept Jesus as your savior, you wouldn't be sent to hell?

It would, but I'm not sure anyone will ever know the answers to those questions.
That's why you'll find a lot of families at church who don't share all the views of the church they attend.

The data show that the more educated the individual, the more he or she shies away from literalism. But in Volume 26 of the "Review of Religious Research," the data also show a positive correlation between a parishioner's educational level and church attendance.

It's possible to participate in the social aspects of religion without buying the horse and the cart.

There are sources of truth not found behind a priest's confessional door. And there is still room for magical thinking in a rational world.

But fundamentalism demands a moral imperialism that is unyielding to outside interpretation. It insists that those of us who cannot accept a single belief when interpreting the mysteries in life will miss the beauty of taking that giant leap.
I'd argue that literalists are the ones missing out. They miss out on the wonder of accepting the multiple truths that enrich our lives.

Someone who can embrace the unknown and science is someone who thinks independently, is more tolerant and more open and feels comfortable with real mystery.

Labels: Diane Glass, education, fundamentalism, religion, science

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Thursday, May 24, 2007

Creationists are not alone

Many Americans share GOP candidates' views

By Chris Cillizza And Shailagh Murray
The Washington Post

May 07. 2007 8:00AM

When former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado and Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas each raised his hand in response to a question from moderator Jim VandeHei during Thursday night's Republican presidential debate in California, signaling that they did not believe in evolution, it raised more than a few eyebrows among journalists.

A recent Newsweek survey presented people with three explanations for the origins of human life: that humans developed over millions of years, from lesser to more advanced forms of life, while God guided the process; that God played no hand in the process; and that God created humans in their present form.

The first option is a sort of hybrid creation-evolution endorsed by Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, during the debate.

"I believe in evolution," he said. "But I also believe, when I hike the Grand Canyon . . . that the hand of God is there also."

The second option is evolution as explained by science, and the third summarizes the idea of creationism.

Nearly half the sample, 48 percent, said the creationism option was closest to their beliefs, and 30 percent chose the hybrid option. Just 13 percent of the sample chose evolution alone as the best approximation of their view of human development.

Those results have been mirrored in a series of Gallup polls that have asked the same question several times over the past 25 years. They probably shouldn't be that surprising given that, in exit polling conducted on Election Day 2006, more than 80 percent of Americans said they either attend church "weekly" (45 percent) or "occasionally" (38 percent). Or when you take into account that a 2004 ABC News poll found 61 percent said the creation story in the Bible - that God created the world in six days - is "literally true."

The reality is that many Americans see themselves as believers both in a higher power and in science. In a Time poll conducted last fall, 49 percent said it is possible to believe in both evolution and "divine creation by God," whereas 41 percent said the two ideas are incompatible.

Labels: creationism, evolution, Gallup, God, science