USA Today reports on the efforts of “prayer warriors” who have taken to the sky for the spiritual benefit of the people of Ohio.
CINCINNATI — Ten small single-engine airplanes circling over Ohio on Friday afternoon will be on a special mission. They’ll be taking part in PrayerFlight, airplanes filled with people praying for the health and welfare of the state’s 11 million residents. […]
The prayer warriors, from all religious affiliations, pray silently and aloud while aloft. They ask God to guide leaders, pray for people in schools and hospitals, and ask for salvation. […]
The second flight had eight planes with 26 people, including six youths from Teens for Christ, a ministry of teenagers from 22 high schools. This time the group prayed over seven Ohio counties.
Samantha Ciminillo, 18, of Lima, a member of Teens for Christ, took one of the December flights. It was her first airplane ride. “You see rows and rows of houses, and you know they are full of people you are praying for,” she said. […]
For now, Ciminillo is looking forward to Friday. “God works through the power of prayer,” she said. “I’m expecting big things to happen.”
Now, as a connoisseur of sophisticated theology, I am well aware that the vast majority of religious believers share a philosophically nuanced image of the divine, such as one might read about in the London Review of Books. God is viewed as a manifestation of immanent transcendence (some tension there, to be deliciously savored!), a precondition of the universe’s existence, standing outside our ordinary categories of substance and imagination. Happy times they are, as these typically devout folks chat away over dinner about the progress of our understanding from Tertullian to Levinas, relaxing over dessert with anecdotes about Ricoeur’s hermeneutic speculations.
But, in the interests of complete honesty, we must admit that there are still a few folks out there — one or two, scattered about the landscape — who indulge in a somewhat more literal vision of the traditional religious stories. People who believe that God is some kind of person, sitting up there in the sky, looking down on us and passing judgment. A being quite frightfully anthropomorphic, whose omniscience and omnipotence correspond roughly to those associated with the beard of Gandalf and the strength of Superman, respectively.
It’s a funny kind of philosophy, and I do wonder how carefully people examine their own beliefs. If a human being were to manifest the kind of need for constant worship and gratitude that this God exhibits, we would call them pathological (or perhaps “Mr. President,” but that’s another topic). It’s a scary idea, that God has the power to exert great influence over what happens in our daily lives, but chooses to do so or not on the basis of a handful of people flying around in airplanes, praying their hearts out. (“Sorry, Kentucky; I’d love to help out, but the flightplan didn’t quite take the prayer team over your airspace.”) Subtle interventions to be sure; maybe this person’s cold won’t evolve into pneumonia, that one will get cancer but it won’t be very painful. And if it weren’t for the praying, those unsuspecting folks below would be out of luck; one imagines God doing a weary shrug, in a “Don’t look at me, I’m just enforcing the Cosmic Rules, which, yeah, I’m sort of responsible for in the first place, but still, rules are rules, you know?” kind of way.
And then there are people who believe that things don’t happen for a reason, nor are events influenced by anyone looking at us from on high. The creation of good and evil, justice and mercy, beauty and terror, are all in our hands, as complicated conglomerations of particles obeying the laws of Nature. I kind of like it that way.
This was a very entertaining post, so thanks.
But let me draw out an analogy — let’s imagine that most people in the world subscribe to some version of a thing called “physics”. While a tiny elite plays around with sophisticed model of the universe involving unseen dimensions and abstruse mathematical constructions like Calabi-Yau manifolds and n-categories, the vast majority subscribe to a cartoon version of Aristotle’s physics — objects only move under the application of force and slow down when the force is reoved, living things move on their own while inanimate things get pushed around, heavier things fall faster than light ones, etc.
It’s easy to mock the naive version of physics even though it seems to get the world’s peasantry through their unrewarding daily lives. But whatever you think of naive physics, it doesn’t really impinge much one way or the other on the inherent value or lack thereof of the sophisticated form of physics practiced by the elite.
Maybe it’s confusing to call both of these things “physics”, but we are stuck withe terminology our language gives us.
> But whatever you think of naive physics, it doesn’t really impinge much one way or the other on the inherent value or lack thereof of the sophisticated form of physics practiced by the elite.
Except that the ‘naive majority’ has convinced the politicians to use Aristotlean physics when making policy decisions, and has forbidden all public aid to any foreign NGO that practices (or even mentions) non-Aristotlean physics to third-worlders who desparately need such information. They’re trying as hard as they can to outlaw many non-Aristotlean practices and expressions. They congregate outside Newtonian clinics shouting hateful quips from Aristotle at patients. Now are they impinging?
You are misreading the analogy. The point is: if there are a diversity of beliefs labeled x, then debunking some of them does not debunk all of them. The common if somewhat lame strategy of people who don’t like any of x is to pick the worst elements of x and attack them, smearing by implication all of x.
On the other hand, people who believe in some element of x will often hide in the vagueness of the definition of x, so when their falsifiable belief (an anthropomorphic god) is attacked they can retreat to a more defensible position ( a vague transcendentialism), without actually modifying their belief. It works both ways.
From Vince, # 46
“I was at a particular physicist’s talk and he said something like “We can’t observe individual quarks, but we know they exist because the theory of QCD does a remarkable job in predicting the results of experiments, and so in that respect, quarks must exist. Likewise, if string theory also does a remarkable job in predicting the results of experiments, and the multiverse concept still persists in string theory, then we should regard the multiverse as existing as well, even though, like quarks, we can’t directly observe them.” So this kind of disturbs me. I’m not sure why I’m bringing this up. Perhaps because I read somewhere in this thread about science being another religion, or whatever. Anyway, it reminded me of this talk. The question I had was how do we know we can’t formulate a theory that works just as well but that does not contain the baggage of things completely outside our universe (like other universes) which we can’t even observe? What is the connection (if any) between a “belief” in the existence of these other universes based on a successful scientific theory, and a belief in the existence of things “outside” our universe (like a heaven or hell), based on something completely different from scientific arguments which also cannot be observed?”
I really, really appreciate this entry from Vince. For one thing, it is vulnerable. Vince asks a question and he really wants to know what other people think. He wants to think and talk about this, and I really want to do so, also.
Secondly, I love it because surely the question of “what makes a scientific theory different” from other kinds of theorizing is one of the most fascinating questions we face these days in philosophy (and in science). I wanted to hear what you-all scientific types think about that difference. (I approach it from within philosophy and literary theory, though I am fascinated with the history of science.) In fact, that’s mostly why I wrote to begin with.
But I gotta say to SOME of you that a look at the history of science itself will dissuade you from answering the question by saying the scientific kind of theory is “objective” and everything else therefore has to be “opinions.” Yes, of course, there is a great difference between opinions, which we all have, like Sean’s informed guess about which view of the singularity will win out, and on the other hand, genuine rigorous theorizing within any way of knowing. And there are other kinds of rigorous knowledge, I believe, that come to us through anguish and life journeys, and if it is humble and evidentiary (that is, if we can say “this is why I hold this, and only on this basis”)then it ought not to be ruled out of the conversation either.
What are other different and potent avenues for coming to know about reality besides science? All of the arts and sciences, I’m thinking, and I would say theology and I’m starting to think mysticism, though it’s not my way, all of which are highly formalized and disciplined and evidentiary in their own ways, if you start looking into them. Do you think musicians don’t have to hypothesize and do experimental testing? But they have a different kind of “falsifiabilty.” And in every field, reality — just like God — IS a moving target. But that doesn’t mean we don’t get anywhere.
I thought that the New Physics established that a physicist cannot claim that physics KNOWS (or better, CAN know) that a physical theory “is” a description of physical reality, or that whatever reality itself “is” can be described by physics as “objective physical fact.”
Isn’t physics nowadays a very rigorous attempt to formalize the kind of reality it has selected to address, but assuming that any truly scientific model is not the simple truth about that reality and is never “proven,” but onely “not yet falsified”; it has to be always open to future developments, which themselves will be judged by scientific critieria (which are always evolving).
As an attempt to formalize what it is trying to know, it will be AS GOOD AS IT PROVES TO BE IN THE FUTURE, AS JUDGED BY THOSE WHO WORK IN THE DISCIPLINE, which means in terms of the standards the discipline has worked out for its endeavor. In those terms, then, I think that a working expert physicist can legitimately say “quarks must exist.” But it’s not an absolute truth-claim like Newtonian science used to make — or at least people used to think it did. I’ve read a lot, as much as I can, and that’s where I thought physics was tentatively at, at this point?
This would mean that science is certainly not “just (like) a religion” (in the sense Vince meant)nor is it “just a socially-constructed model” with no relationship to a reality at all. That’s what makes science so powerful, so amazing. But at the same time Einstein and the Copenhagen physicists realized (I thought) that it was no longer possible for science to make those older classical claims that a formula or a physical theory is the equivalent of the reality it tries to formulate. A physical theory is neither objective nor subjective, because those terms don’t tell us much any more. We’ve moved beyond them; they proved to be way too crude. A physical theory instead appears now to be a rigorous and well-supported approximation which methodologically the reality must always have escaped because we could always make better measurements, and even then we would only know that, what we had measured, and not “the thing itself.”
There have to be intentional observers (us) taking measurements and making statistical summations about the reality, and that doesn’t make the results “subjective,” but it does limit them to what humans know by taking measurements and making summations!! Okay, stop. I really like what I just said. What do you think? Is any *human* knowing able to be thought of as the equivalent of “the ways things are,” as if we had attained a universal perpective? Is *human* scientific knowing the equivalent of ultimate rality? Or is it what it claims to be (I think), a rigorous HUMAN attempt to know better as much of reality as we can formalize selecting a certain kind of reality and using certain kinds of methods for measuring it?
Given Einstein and QM, I don’t see how one can determine if a scientific proposition is “right” or “wrong” scientifically? We can only determine what we think (validly) we must say is the “best theory” right now, based on the interpretive frameworks we have right now. That is the glory and the profound honesty of science, and I wish all religious people were equally honest about what they claim to know, and how they claim to know it. But many are! For every reactionary Fundamentalist in Ohio, there are also many Evangelicals (believe it or not!) and Orthodox and Episcopalians and Jews and Buddhists and so on who hold what they take to be their own hard-won knowledge with a proper epistemological humility and are not trying to invade science classrooms. I’m sorry you-all don’t see them very much: we are trying to get our voices out there….
At this point in the history of science, as far as I know, physics does not NOW claim to set out to look at ALL of reality or to use a method that is a universally applicable method for dealing with all of reality, and especially with the large swaths of human experience that it does not even claim to address, except on the physical level. Does any of this make any sense, in terms of Vince’s pondering?
Maybe these questions and considerations pale next to the immediate political climate, but they are perhaps more enduring questions, for the future?
Janet, quantum mechanics and relativity have had precisely zero impact on how we judge the truthfulness of scientific claims. What they did was to change the relationship between the state of a physical system and what we can possibly observe about it; before we thought we could observe everything with arbitrary precision, now we know better. But that has nothing to do with how a certain theory is judged to be right or wrong.
In particular: we could never prove that a scientific theory was right, even back in Newton’s time, and we still can’t. That’s not how science works, as I will talk about in a half-written blog post. All we do is gain higher and higher (or lower and lower, as the case may be) levels of confidence in our descriptions, based on the coherence between the theories and the set of all the data we have. At some point we reach a level of confidence in which it’s unreasonable to doubt that the theory is correct within its domain of validity, and we move on.
I don’t think Blumberg’s comments are relevant to the reason why so many people are religious.
I believe that religion exists because people don’t feel comfortable seeing themselves as physical objects subject to the laws of physics (i.e. mere machines). Even though it is impossible for us to escape the laws of physics, we can pretend that we are somehow not subject to the laws of physics because we don’t have the technology yet to make objects with similar capabilities as the human brain.
If we were all robots made in some factory (but with exactly the same mental capabilities as we have now) then I don’t see how we could still be religious. Humans need concrete hands on evidence of scientific facts before they are prepared to throw out beliefs based on superstition that are contradicted by the science.
In response to Sean # 55
“In particular: we could never prove that a scientific theory was right, even back in Newton’s time, and we still can’t. That’s not how science works, as I will talk about in a half-written blog post. All we do is gain higher and higher (or lower and lower, as the case may be) levels of confidence in our descriptions, based on the coherence between the theories and the set of all the data we have.”
I don’t know whether to say “I stand corrected” or “I rest my case.”
How does what you describe as science differ in any way, in terms of intellectual legitimacy and rigor, from what goes on in a non-scientific way of knowing?
From what you say — that science isn’t associated with impossible truth-claims any more (or never was) — then science seems to differ only in WHAT it is trying to look at and in HOW that community accordingly goes about trying to understand it.
Which was my point.
I look forward to your post, because there IS a difference, but I think it’s really hard to say exactly what the difference is. (In a Berube post it’s interesting that he says he’s a “realist” about physical fact but not about social fact. But he lets them both be fact, not in the sense of proven fact but in the sense of attempted deep description of what’s going on….)
Here’s the Feynman quote I couldn’t quite remember:
“Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Here’s another one:
“This method [science] is based on the principle that observation is the judge of whether something is so or not. All other aspects and characteristics of science can be understood directly when we understand that observation is the ultimate and final judge of the truth of an idea.”
How does this compare with “other ways of knowing”? What is the religious or spritual way of “knowing”?
Janet,
Interestingly there was a PBS documentary on last night regarding the Peoples Church (Jim Jones) tragedy where 909 people died by drinking cyanide laced kool-aid because they were religious followers of Jim Jones. This is where I have a “big” issue with the phrase “other ways of knowing”.
It is not knowledge it is belief. And that is the difference between science and religion. You can put them both under a meta-catagory of mythology if you like but just because somebody says the represent God does not make it so or make it part of knowledge.
Elliot
Janet, science has a well-established (although never explicitly spelled out) way of judging its truth-claims. We make hypotheses, use them to make specific and unambiguos predictions, test them against data, and discard those hypotheses that come up short. It’s a cycle that gets us closer and closer to the truth, without any guarantee that we ever reach it.
If you give me an example of some other way of knowing, I can tell you how science compares to it. Just one, very specific, way of knowing, with some established procedure for understanding things that is different than the scientific one.
Just to be clear: I’m a huge believer that there are many different ways of thinking about the world, and many interesting topics of discussion other than scientific ones. There are moral questions, logical questions, aesthetic questions, etc. But as a way of understanding the workings of the material universe, I don’t think there are any serious alternatives to science.
Well, not everyone possesses the sort of insight an experimental psychologist brings to the table regarding matters of hard science. No doubt your abnormal psych text had entire chapters devoted to random fields in the context of statistical mechanics and non-commutative probability, for instance.
#60 from Sean:
“Just to be clear: I’m a huge believer that there are many different ways of thinking about the world, and many interesting topics of discussion other than scientific ones. There are moral questions, logical questions, aesthetic questions, etc. But as a way of understanding the workings of the material universe, I don’t think there are any serious alternatives to science.”
I think I’m starting to get a clearer idea, Sean, of why you said back in “The God Conundrum” that people believing in God is not “reasonable” and “makes you crazy.” It’s that you think of belief in God as claiming God to be a way to “understand the workings of the material universe,” and that’s what I didn’t get before, because it’s so foreign to my understanding and experience of Christianity in general — around the world and historically.
Most Christians do NOT agree with the Fundamentalists’ attacks on science. (It’s quite peculiar to North America. Americans are so literalistic.) Teilhard de Chardin of course did early ground-breaking work in evolutionary theory, which he wrote about from a deeply Christian perspective too. (We’ve studied him in my church.) A couple Christian physicists I know go over to India every year because the Dalai Lama invited them to teach Western science to his monks! They’re Greek Orthodox; I’m Episcopalian; Teilhard was Roman Catholic. And I taught at a non-denominational Evangelical university where the students have always of course been taught evolution and all the science faculty are excellent and publishing scholars.
Funny story. A colleague of mine, an inexperienced teacher just out of grad school, was teaching about chromosomes early in her very first GE intro-to-science course, and a freshman girl raised her hand and said: “I don’t understand. The Bible says God made Adam first and then Eve, but then why does the man have the XY chromosomes and the woman is XX. It seems like it would be the other way around.” Well, my friend was so astonished that she just gulped and said, “I’ll have to get back to you on that.” She went to her department chair for advice and the two of them couldn’t stop laughing. A few days later he came up to her in the hall and said: “Hey, I figured out what you should say to that student. Tell her Adam was the experiment, and Eve was the control.”
Elliot on Apr 11th, 2007 at 2:14 pm
Janet,
Interestingly there was a PBS documentary on last night regarding the Peoples Church (Jim Jones) tragedy where 909 people died by drinking cyanide laced kool-aid because they were religious followers of Jim Jones. This is where I have a “big” issue with the phrase “other ways of knowing”.
—————-
Yes, I saw that, Elliot. It was a tragedy. I’ll get back to you with a clarification of what I mean on “ways of knowing.” Sean asked me for “one clear example” and I’m choosing one.
Whenever I hear the terrible things (like Jonestown) that people hold against “religion,” I can’t help but think of all the historical inhumanity that has to be attributed to the old-school “scientific attitude,” but rather than trade examples back at you, I try to just be glad it is changing.
Okay — I can’t resist. For just one small example: did you know that scientists and scientific medical professionals refused to believe that babies could feel physical pain until the past 20 years or so, or that they could suffer depression from the loss of their mothers until WW II? They (all men, of course) were just following the Cartesian idea that had ruled science for 250 years, that animals and immature humans are just physical, mindless machines, and do not have “mind.”
That same mind-body dualism was everywhere in the Enlightenment and justified the inferiority of women and slaves, who clearly lacked the capacity for true “mind,” i.e. thinking scientifically — i.e. “objectively.” My mother boiled bottles and used infant formula like all the other mothers in the 50s because they were told (again by male scientists) that it was the scientific way — much more “sanitary” and “enlightened” than nature’s way…. And please, don’t forget the atom bomb, while we’re at it…were the crusades worse?
No, I feel ashamed even bringing these things up, because I know that human beings are really screwed up and prone to delude themselves, especially in the name of “good causes,” whether they are called scientists or religious people, and every evidence available supports this as a reasonable viewpoint!
Augustine thought that the greatest enemy of the spiritual life was our proneness to embrace illusions, especially arrogant and self-serving delusions about ourselves. I loved the quote about “science is a constant revolution.” Yes! It resonates, too, because being a Christian is supposed to mean that you are opening yourself to an endless process of conversion that always calls your motives into question and shatters your self-serving fantasies. And most of all just when you thought you were getting to be quite the fine person indeed!
I went back and reread “The God Conundrum.” It’s a LOT longer than I remembered!
And it has some really great stuff in it. I’m still trying to figure out where the fundamental tension or disconnect that I feel, reading it, is located, precisely. I may have treated it reductively before, and if so, I apologize.
Janet,
Interesting you bring up Teilhard de Chardin. A theology based on the possiblilty that God does not exist in our past or present but “might” exist in our future is certainly an interesting possiblity and one that could not be disproven by sceince or any other method. This gets directly to what may be a more and expansive interesting question: “Than does God exist?” which is “Is there meaning or purpose intrinsic in our existence and that of the Universe at large?”
Elliot
Janet,
I wanted to respond to some of your earlier comments, but I thought I was a little too late to join the discussion. But since you are still leaving your comments, and since Sean took care of some of the more general issues, this might be a good occasion to write about what you wrote from my personal point of view.
I enjoyed your comments. I really do. But I have to say that, just as you seemed to be frustrated by what Sean wrote, I felt a little frustrated by the comments you left here and also to “The God Conundrum.” I apologize in advance if I sound offensive. English is not my native language and I cannot control all the nuances.
You used the words like “Anglo-American intellectual tradition”, “the Anglo-American rationalist-empiricist tradition”, and “the good-old British empiricist tradition” to characterize the position of scientists and atheists like Sean or Dawkins. The implications may be (1) these scientists/atheists take their positions because of their Western cultural tradition, (2) science/atheism is biased because it has its origin in the Western tradition, (3) someone from a different cultural tradition is likely to (if not necessarily to) take a different position, and (4) someone in some different discipline (like you, Janet) may be able to escape from such bias.
Janet, you sound like you are a North American, or at least a Westerner more broadly. I am Japanese, so I am from somewhat different cultural background. One can argue that you and Sean have more in common than Sean and me. Yet, you and Sean have very different views and my view is very close to Sean’s. You sound like a nice person and all, but when you criticize people for taking “a basically Anglo-American intellectual tradition” for granted, or “other way of knowing”, you are not being a spokesperson for a non-Westerner like me.
Why science appeals to me and other non-Westerners? I think the main reason is that science makes sense, even to the people outside of the West. The modern science may have its origin in the West, but it can cross the cultural borders. There is fairness and openess in science that is hard to find in other fields. You can think about the reason, but I think science deserves some credit for this.
How about religion? So, you are Christian. You are in the Judeo-Christian tradition just like many Americans, and Westerners in general. So, why can you criticize others for taking “a basically Anglo-American intellectual tradition” for granted?
What I don’t like about religions, aside from the fact that I think they are irrational, is that every religion is regional. If there is a god, why would it spread its message only to a part of the word and not the entire human population? Choosing any religion is unfair, because you are favoring one cultural tradition over others by doing it. Atheism is fair, because everyone is born an atheist.
Dear Hi,
I’m sorry that I sounded to you like I was “criticizing” people for being in an Anglo-American intellectual tradition. I enjoy learning from people in every tradition, especially when they are open and tolerant. And the cosmicvariance folks seem very much that way. So I was surprised by the vehemence of so many folks who are witty and devoted to their discipline critizing faith in God and in such broad terms. I was trying to point out that we are all coming from somewhere and need to be humble about our viewpoints, especially when we claim our view is “reasonable” and the other people’s aren’t. Of course, I do know that Fundamentalists are not open and tolerant (that’s why they are called fundamentalists). But I’ve gone back and looked more at Dawkins and I am deeply disturbed by the way he tars eveyone with the same brush and is basically attacking the very core of many people’s identity. Maybe I’ve come not to expect much better from the religious extremists, but from scientists? They have a right to state their conclusions, but to go on the attack this way, against a whole category of people, and especially in the name of Reason is deeply disturbing to my liberal values as an educator and citizen. This does not bode well for our country and I’d ask folks to really think about this.
Dawkins says Christians “believe” in the face of contrary evidence and pride themselves on that. Well, Christians have been trying to tell the Fundamentalists this very thing for decades. It is harmful to them and it is not the historic understanding of faith. But how can we even begin to sort this all out and understand each other with these huge generalizations being slung about? How does anyone who hasn’t spent a lifetime understanding a tradition get the right to make sweeping uninformed negative proclamations about it? We have to listen to each other as individuals — as Martha Nussbaun said over on 3quarksdaily.com about Moslems. Doesn’t Dawkins realize that people’s traditions and their sense of the sacred go to the core of their very identities? It would be like saying: “I don’t think it is reasonable for you to love your mother so stop.” Even if you had a dysfunctional mother (and many people have a dysfunctional-parent kind of God), you don’t just stop loving her. People are deeply, deeply formed by their histories and traditions and disciplines.
PS It is fascinating for me to have a comment from someone outside the North American tradition who feels excluded or stereotyped by me as one who would not love science. I never thought of that or intended it! Thank you for writing. How can I get at how dangerous it is to claim “Reason is on our side” without accidentally overgeneralizing myself? I have to work on this. A crusade or jihad in the name of God isn’t any worse than one in the name of Reason (think of Manifest Destiny or colonialism), and I think Sean, for instance, would probably agree, based on his comments on Northern Ireland. I’ve taught the history of the West and science-and-religion courses all my life and am working on a book right now, so that’s why I got so interested in this discussion. I’m learning a lot and it’s worrying me to see this much polarization going on. But I wasn’t criticising folks for being formed in a particular intellectual tradition, but trying to warn about using it as a foundation from which to attack others.
Well, here’s an amazing example (from within the Christian community) of how to respectfully carry on genuine discussion with those we deeply disagree with, without dismissing an entire institution and way of life. It’s from “Soulforce,” a group that’s been traveling to Christian campuses to affirm the full humanity of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered students on those campuses. You’ll find the following at http://www.soulforce.com/blogs/. Reflecting on visits last week to Seattle universities, one soulforce member writes:
“Ironically, the assumptions that lead us to accept the Bible as inerrant and perfect are the same assumptions that stop us from fully including lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals into our churches and schools. At its base is the assumption that our worldview is shared, unchanging and unwavering, throughout all time and every category we would claim for our own. It is a form of prejudice. And the foundation of it all is fear: fear of our ability to cope with change, fear of having to wrestle with new ideas and situations, fear of losing our Self, fear of being alone, fear of being wrong.
“Faith cannot grow in concrete ground. It needs good, tilled earth. So we must wrestle with the earth we are blessed with, to sift it and question it, to tug at its roots and examine them, to prepare its branches for the grafting of new truths and revelations, to water it with thought, and nourish it with fervent study. Uncertainty cannot scare us, and—like Scripture asserts—we must prepared to submit our deepest truths to the ways of God. If we are to become the new creature, transformed, we cannot fear. There is no fear in love; that is the lesson—Northwest University included—must learn.”
This is now Janet again: here’s the part I would emphasize for scientitsts to consider:
“At its base is the assumption that our worldview is shared, unchanging and unwavering, throughout all time and every category we would claim for our own. It is a form of prejudice. And the foundation of it all is fear….”
Now Sean’s blog on how science operates (“What I Believe that I Cannot Prove”) dispells these kinds of assumptions about science. So how can someone like Dawkins in good faith use science to dismiss an entire group of people who vary greatly from one another and many of whom operate (within their faith) with the openness and humilty evidenced by soulforce.
Janet,
You continue to attempt to put belief on the same plane as knowledge. Just isn’t going to work. I know if I drop the cup of coffee in my hand it will fall to the ground. I do not believe that a virgin gave birth 2000 years ago or a dead man arose from a grave after 3 days.
Nobody is saying that faith communities don’t have the power to do good things in the world. They most certainly do. But you cannot elevate faith and belief to the level of knowledge.
And on the issue of tolerance for Gays etc., science tells unequivocally, that this in not a “choice” so therefore is not subject to moral judgement.
Dawkins can say anything he likes. It doesn’t make it correct or incorrect. He doesn’t speak for “science”. Perhaps on his commentary you should take the biblical “turn the other cheek” suggestion.
Regards,
Elliot
Janet,
You say
What are the assumptions about science that Sean dispells? I agree that Dawkins should not “dismiss an entire group of people.” However, there is a widely held belief in a deity who is engaged in our everyday lives through supernatural powers. That belief is one that Dawkins is justified in dismissing, on the basis of science, no matter how much we might admire the belief’s defenders.
I’ve been reading your posts and I just can’t quite figure out what you are trying to say. Is it that God exists, or that science can’t address the question of God’s existence, or perhaps that the answer to that question can have different equally valid answers when address in different frameworks of knowledge, or that the existence of God is somehow personal. Perhaps it is not the actual question that bothers you, but rather the arrogance of science to claim it is the only way to answer this question. I just can’t tell. It seems interesting though, so I’m hoping I can figure it out.
BTW folks, remember that there are really three main players in these kinds of discussions: science, philosophy, and religion. The latter two are not identical. Science is a process for investigating the world that was developed to do a job for mostly practical reasons. Ironically, the notions of what science should be and what its implications are, are in fact “philosophy” and not science itself. Philosophers take what we already know in experience, and try to draw conclusions about things – some of them issues we don’t have easy access too, other than our thoughts. It is “larger” than science. A philosopher could have a discussion with Plato about whether we should believe in God that would be far different than the sort of discussion a fundamentalist would have. Religion comes from a tradition and is not really the same thing, and is a sort of tangential approach.
Gavin says to Janet: “I’ve been reading your posts and I just can’t quite figure out what you are trying to say. Is it that God exists, or that science can’t address the question of God’s existence, or perhaps that the answer to that question can have different equally valid answers when address in different frameworks of knowledge, or that the existence of God is somehow personal. Perhaps it is not the actual question that bothers you, but rather the arrogance of science to claim it is the only way to answer this question. I just can’t tell. It seems interesting though, so I’m hoping I can figure it out.”
Janet responds: Thank you so much! I should pay you a kick-back, because I just got my own weblog up and running five minutes ago, and it addresses exactly these issues. I hope you’ll visit and tell me if it helps.
It really takes my course on the history of theory — which is a great branch of philosophy — to make it clear what I’m trying to say, so I’m putting transcripts from my course on my site. A lot of what I’m saying is well-known within my fields but I want to bring that high-level theory down (in my own way) to the issues that really matter to us in our ordinary lives. And I really want to hear what all you scientific types think about it, when you’ve heard my fuller arguments. And there are points I try to make that you could really help me with. I don’t know how to do a pingback yet, but here’s my web address: http://www.deepgraceoftheory.wordpress.com Tomorrow’s post is going to be a meditation on Sean’s posts on Dawkins and how science knows, and on “Soulforce” visiting Christian campuses.
Eliot,
Thanks for visiting my new weblog on science and faith. I appreciate your thoughtful distinctions between science, philosophy, and religion. By Session Two of my course transcripts, we’ll have some new vocabulary for talking about these three and I’d like to know what you think.