Try Religion - You'll Live Longer!
Moment of Death documentary
Is Your Brain Hard-wired for Religion?
Views on Science and Religion
After thinking about these resources and sharing ideas with your classmates, post your thoughts here on the topic. Respectfully reply to others' comments as well. Be as thorough as possible and cite information and ideas from the resources.
In my opinion, I do agree that a lot of the confrontation between religion and science is somewhat artificial. Of course I acknowledge that some areas do overlap, for example the issue of creationism vs evolution. However, that is certainly made into much more of an issue than it needs to be. One of the largest issues of this is it is perceived that be believing in evolution, a person stops themselves from having anything to do with religion, which certainly isn't true. The author of the articles responding to Jerry Coyne's overhype of the debate notes that "The writings of influential Church Father Thomas Aquinas hint that he would have accepted evolution." Thomas Aquinas was an incredibly well educated and influential philosopher, as well as an important religion figure. He is a great example of the fact that science and a thirst for learning can be molded together with religion.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you, and your last line is similar to a thought that I had about prior practices of using religion to explain natural phenomenon. I was thinking that religion can he helpful with furthering our understanding of science, if we ask ourselves "what did we used to believe?"
DeleteMost religions do not deny the proven aspects of evolution anyway; the question not answered by evolution is how did it all start?
DeleteI completely agree with Bryan Farha's article that differentiates Science and Religion. First of all as he said, they deal with different parts of the world: science deals with the natural world while religion focuses on the supernatural one. As Farha stated, religion cannot tell someone the number of "bacterial colonies on the head of a pin" but can give insight on the number of angels. On the other hand, I disagree Alex Berezow when he argues that religion has not held back science. In the past the church wanted power and money only and would do anything they could to maintain it. So in the case of Galileo, the church had no right to interfere with his studies since they didn't affect the supernatural world directly, while only diminishing their power. To conclude, I believe science and religion may have some similarities but should never be compared as two different sides on the same argument
ReplyDelete"the church wanted power and money only"? Not sure about that. I also encourage you to look into some of the theologians who were great scientists in themselves.
DeleteI believe that if religion focused on the spiritual and supernatural world and nothing else then science and religion would be able to live together in peace, and as the article by Victor Stenger states "science makes no such assumption on faith". So this tells me that religion is stepping over its boundaries by preaching how physical world works.
ReplyDeleteOK, but don't we have to explore what's natural before we investigate what's super-natural?
DeleteI think that there certainly exists a conflict between science and religion, since many scientific ideas do not correspond with religious beliefs. However, some people on either side of the argument are more vocal and disrespectful than others. In their article, Alex Berezow and James Hannam's disagree with Jerry Coyne's opinion that "the greatest opponent of biology's greatest theory-- evolution-- has always been Christianity." I agree with Berezow and Hannam because Coyne's quote makes it sound like all Christians deny evolution. I am probably stretching the meaning of Coyne's quote, but overall, I feel like people of many different religions might be assumed to oppose certain scientific ideas, when in reality many of these people believe them and/or are respectful of them.
ReplyDeleteYou are right about the tenor of the conversation about science and religion. A more reasoned discussion would help everyone's understanding.
DeleteI think that the conflicts between science and religion are kind of ridiculous but are kind of understandable. I think a lot of the reason people have so many arguments against science is because they are scared. If a person grows up their whole life believing a certain thing only to be proven wrong by some experiment, that can be pretty tough for them. Also knowledge is power. (as Dave mentioned) Galileo scared the Church by creating scientific studies that went against their practices which was like a challenge to their authority. People in general are scared of things they don't understand and lash out. Religious people struggle to understand the importance of science and scientist struggle to understand why religious people wouldn't want the 'truth' about things. Because of those things, people are angry and disrespectful to others which just aggravates the whole issue even more.
ReplyDeleteI think the conflict between religion and science is legitimate although it has been too overhyped and intense. The truth is that science does disprove basic tenets of religion and the two have fundamental differences. Often someone will point out that religion has not faltered with the strength of science and I think that this is because science first enlightened followers and turned them away from religion but recently (global warming, no afterlife) is scaring people and pushing them further into religion as a coping mechanism. In reality, the two are incongruent. The only thing left that science cannot or has not disproven is the question we are discussing now of morality and on that front, neither science nor religion is triumphant.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to challenge you on the Galileo affair to find some sources that explain it much differently. It was actually a very complex matter, involving a complicated number of relationships. A philosophy professor at the University of Nevada has studied in in depth. Here's an example:
ReplyDeletehttp://nybookreview.blogspot.com/2010/08/finocchiaro-maurice-2005-retrying.html
I strongly support the idea that if one believes strongly in a religion then it is difficult to say they have faith in science as well. Science is based on our logical findings from thousands of years of inquiry, whereas religion is the faith in higher beings that created us in illogical amounts of time such as seven days.
ReplyDelete