religion

24 Dec 09

It’s ever so human to believe that our observations are correct, and that the other person shares our world view, our likes and dislikes. That presumption makes us feel perfectly comfortable leading with our mouths, not editing ourselves. Teachers assume that their students won’t mind being an elf, even if it is in opposition to their religious beliefs; storekeepers assume that a man must have brought home a woman, albeit one with very short hair and two earrings; teenage girls believe their prom dates are straight. Security guards see a black man driving a car and assume he is a chauffeur.
Here’s the thing about blinders: You have to consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, you have them on before you can take them off.

22 Dec 09

Stop the Intersection of Church and State on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

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photography visual religion politics photos

19 Dec 09

ZEEK: Articles: View from Galilee: Why a Woman of the Wall Joined a Kibbutz

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jewish israel religion pluralism politics

13 Dec 09

‘Eight Days,’ the Reactions - by Hadara Graubart > Tablet Magazine - A New Read on Jewish Life

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hannukah music politics religion culture

03 Dec 09

Georgetown/On Faith: Darwin, God, and the drama of life - John F. Haught

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science religion evolution philosophy intelligent design

I propose, however, that religious thought can make significant contact with Darwin's science if instead of focusing on design it turns its attention to the drama of life. The typically design-obsessed frame of mind through which so many devout theists, as well as staunch atheists, are looking at the question of God and evolution is a dead end both scientifically and theologically.
the very features of evolution--unpredictable accidents, predictable natural selection, and the long reach of time--that seem to rule out the existence of God, are essential ingredients in a monumental story of life that turns out to be much more interesting theologically than design could ever be
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- The most important issue in the current debate about evolution and faith is not whether design points to deity but whether the drama of life is the carrier of a meaning.
- the apparent absence of perfect order at any present moment is an opening to the future, a signal that the story of life is not yet over.
- Dramatic stories, unlike complex living systems or elaborately structured molecular states, have the potential to carry a truly deep significance. But it is the nature of stories that they have comic twists and tragic turns, and that they take time to unfold.
- A theological reading of evolution, I am suggesting, looks for an alternative to the rigor mortis of perfect design, and this is why Darwin's ragged portrait of life is not so distressing after all.
- According to a biblically inspired theology of nature, beneath life's diversity, descent, and flawed design, stirs an evolutionary drama that has been aroused, though not coercively driven, by a God of infinite love. The cosmos is called continually into being by a Creator who wills, but does not force, truly interesting outcomes to emerge in surprising new ways. God, as scripture suggests, is the one who "makes all things new." The drama of life and its evolution is a response to this invitation.

24 Nov 09

3 Clergymen Tell How Differences of Faith Led to Friendship - NYTimes.com

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religion dialogue

17 Nov 09

23 Sep 09

Sympathy for Creationists « Neuroanthropology

the difficulty of really seeing the world through an evolutionary lens
Creationism adheres to patterns of error in thought: belief that our intellectual categories are reflected in reality; attribution of purpose and direction to the unfolding of events; and a firm conviction that we are both distinctive and fundamentally important to reality.

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evolution science religion anthropology

a basic disagreement about the concept of ‘belief’ or ‘faith.’
simply assumptions about how things work that are, mostly, consistent with the evidence, my own observations, what reasonable people tend to say, and the like. I don’t subject the existence of atoms or the location of my car to constant scrutiny; to do so would probably be the slippery slope to a kind of existential obsessive-compulsive disorder
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- When people of faith say that they ‘believe’ something, I suspect that they are describing a very different sort of feeling
- faith makes the faithful feel happy; they prize having belief; and some seem to be worried about losing it
- if I could come up with a convincing mathematical proof of God, I’d negate the whole need for faith, thus debasing the very attainment and maintenance of faith, the key to salvation, in a manner of speaking
- In contrast, most scientists don’t lose their faith in atoms, nor do they fear losing their belief that atoms exist.
- religious faith seems to be simultaneously more anxious and more precious than other sorts of mundane beliefs, such as confidence in the predictability of the material world
- If we look across the human species, believing in the supernatural is the statistically dominant human condition, even if belief in a particular act of ‘creation’ is less dominant.
- I suggested that some evolutionary theorists don’t really do the cause a favour when dealing with this hardened core of resistance to accepting evolution as the basic mechanism of species development and change. That is, some of the arguments that extrapolate from evolutionary theory undermine the credibility of evolution in the eyes of a wider public.
- those who put forward ‘evolutionary’ accounts to justify present patterns of human behaviour, which often turn out to be intentionally scandalizing or factually challenged on various levels
- One of the key issues for me is the whole notion of ‘human nature,’ and the degree to which behaviour is determined by selective mechanisms. Ironically, I think that the notion of ‘human nature’ sometimes employed in evolutionary psychology is a kind of essentializing error that also comes up in Creationist thought.
- Teleologic error: Evolution ‘designs’
- One reason that Darwin himself did not like the word ‘evolution’ (he preferred ‘transformation’ and didn’t use ‘evolution’ until the sixth edition of The Origin of Species) was that he thought it suggested improvement or progress or some sort of directionality to changes in species.
- I think both Creationists and many evolution proponents resist the implications of the utter directionless-ness of evolutionary development, either recoiling from the recognition that this is a completely rudderless existence or simply not being able to comprehend what non-intended, design-less development might look like.
- Some accounts of evolutionary change or trait emergence seem to me to exacerbate this tendency toward teleology by carelessly arguing that physiological changes are ‘for’ a particular function or fitness-related purpose.
- Essentializing error: species as ‘type’
- the essentializing error, the assumption that all individuals in a species are members of a type or category. To me, one of the implications of The Origin of Species is that species are unstable, constantly changing, and precariously balanced populations of individuals that might, at almost any time, split into multiple species or change into other sorts of individuals, were there not very active processes stabilizing them.
- the human brain, especially with the use of language, seems to function much better with types than with pools of variation
- we shouldn’t then let the assumption be that there is a ‘type-ness,’ a shared essence in a species which is really a population with inherent variation.
- For this reason, even though I may use the term ‘human nature’ myself at times, I think it’s an erroneous concept, even before we start talking about specific behaviours that allegedly make up that ‘nature’ because ‘nature’ gives too much credence to the existence of the type.
- One of the consequences of the essentializing error, in my opinion, is that we may be led to ignore both variation and future change
- Darwin wrote himself a marginal note to himself, ‘Never say higher or lower in referring to organisms.’ Most of us, even biologists, have a hard time sticking to this scrupulousness, and we tend to project value judgments onto even more neutral-sounding language (like my use of the terms ‘complex’ and ‘simple’ or ‘multi-cellular’ and ‘single-celled’).
- Biologists and Creationists alike tend to share a bias towards the multicellular freak show, if I might be so rude.
- we, as a species, are pretty self-centred, believing that, even if the universe does not revolve around us, at least we’re typical of life.
- We are exceptional, but not in the sense that we are fundamentally different from other animals; we, like our large-bodied evolutionary close relations, are odd and unusual in the grand circus of life. I think that Creationism turns this oddity into a kind of Divine License, a Adamic Stewardship, an assumption that humans are God’s special favourite creatures and Creation was given to us. Even many biologists and environmentalists focus on humans and large multicellular organisms disproportionately. An evolutionary framework, in contrast, is a more sobering assessment of our peculiarity, a sense for our fragility and dependence on all these other ‘simpler’ organisms.
- This piece is more about the difficulty of really seeing the world through an evolutionary lens.
- although natural selection may be simple in axiomatic terms, it is a real challenge to integrate it into everyday thought. Even our ways of speaking tend to reintroduce errors of teleology, essentialism and complexity bias, leading us to use terms like ‘design,’ a species’ ‘nature,’ and ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ organisms without considering much their implications.
- Global statistics tell us that Creationism must have some sort of consistency with observable facts
- Creationism adheres to patterns of error in thought: belief that our intellectual categories are reflected in reality; attribution of purpose and direction to the unfolding of events; and a firm conviction that we are both distinctive and fundamentally important to reality.
- I still don’t think Creationists are right, but I do feel like I know where they’re coming from.

12 Sep 09

Science Musings Blog - Moments of Being

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science religion nature phenomenology teilhard philosophy

07 Sep 09

Dinosaur Comics - November 13th, 2006 - awesome fun times!

I am on the lookout for science, personified!

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science religion philosophy humor comic

24 Aug 09

Op-Ed Contributor - A Grand Bargain Over Evolution - NYTimes.com

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science religion evolution opinion conflct

an underestimation of natural selection’s creative power clouds the vision not just of the intensely religious but also of the militantly atheistic
human moral sense — the sense that there is such a thing as right and wrong
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- evolutionary psychologists have developed a plausible account of the moral sense. They say it is in large part natural selection’s way of equipping people to play non-zero-sum games — games that can be win-win if the players cooperate or lose-lose if they don’t.
- But they may not have to stray quite as far from that scenario as they fear. Maybe they can accept this evolutionary account, and be strict Darwinians, yet hang on to notions of divinely imparted moral purpose.
- The first step toward this more modern theology is for them to bite the bullet and accept that God did his work remotely — that his role in the creative process ended when he unleashed the algorithm of natural selection
- Mr. Pinker has noted how the interplay of evolved intuition and the dynamics of discourse tends to forge agreement on something like the golden rule — that you should treat people as you expect to be treated.
- these speculations are compatible with the standard scientific theory of human creation
- If believers accepted them, that would, among other things, end any conflict between religion and the teaching of evolutionary biology. And theology would have done what it’s done before: evolve — adapt its conception of God to advancing knowledge and to sheer logic.
- If there is to be peace between religion and science, some of the more strident atheists will need to make their own concessions to logic.
- They could acknowledge, first of all, that any god whose creative role ends with the beginning of natural selection is, strictly speaking, logically compatible with Darwinism.
- natural selection’s intrinsic creative power — something they’ve been known to stress in other contexts — adds at least an iota of plausibility to this remotely creative god
- these atheist biologists could try to appreciate something they still seem not to get: talk of “higher purpose” is not just compatible with science, but engrained in it
- The complex functionality of an organism does demand a special kind of explanation.
- even once you accept that natural selection, not God, is the “designer” — the blind watchmaker, as Mr. Dawkins put it — there is a sense in which these organs do have purposes, purposes that serve the organism’s larger purpose of surviving and spreading its genes
- There are two morals to the story. One is that it is indeed legitimate, and not at all unscientific, to do what Paley did: inspect a physical system for evidence that it was given some purpose by some higher-order creative process. If scientifically minded theologians want to apply that inspection to the entire system of evolution, they’re free to do so.
  The second moral of the story is that, even if evolution does have a “purpose,” imparted by some higher-order creative process, that doesn’t mean there’s anything mystical or immaterial going on. And it doesn’t mean there’s a god. For all we know, there’s some “meta-natural-selection” process — playing out over eons and perhaps over multiple universes — that spawned the algorithm of natural selection, somewhat as natural selection spawned the algorithm contained in genomes.

23 Aug 09

Thoughts in a Haystack: Checking Reality

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evolution science religion dialogue

Eugenie Scott (of the NCSC) says to Ben Stein: "The most important group we work with is members of the faith community because the best kept secret in this controversy is that Catholics and mainstream Protestants are okay on evolution."

20 Jul 09

Raven and The First Men

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trickster myth history culture religion

17 Jul 09

The New Ambassadors of Science § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM

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science religion politics dialogue communication

Scientists should support dialog on the intersection of science and religion, if only out of respect for the plurality of beliefs out there. But when BioLogos Foundation’s language and staff bios represent nothing but evangelical Christianity, it’s hard to muster an ecumenical spirit.

12 Jul 09