Religion

Here’s Jerry Coyne (who is beginning to “get it” about a bunch of stuff), bashing Templeton Foundation again: Nautilus Magazine is an online site that bills itself as “a different kind of science magazine.” And indeed it is—for it’s partly supported by the John Templeton Foundation (JTF). The Foundation is largely dedicated to showing that religion and science are compatible,—even in harmony—for Sir John left his dosh to the JTF to fund projects showing how science would reveal the divine. Thus the magazine publishes accommodationist articles, like this one from last July, and now we have a new one by Brian Gallagher, editor of the Nautilus blog Facts So Romantic and a “Sinai and Synapses” (oy!) fellow. As we see Read More ›

What do Americans think matters in life? Americans with high levels of household income and educational attainment are more likely to mention friendship, good health, stability and travel. A quarter of Americans who earn at least $75,000 a year mention their friends when asked to describe, in their own words, what makes life meaningful, compared with 14% of Americans who earn less than $30,000 each year. Similarly, 23% of higher-income U.S. adults mention being in good health, compared with 10% of lower-income Americans. And among those with a college degree, 11% mention travel and a sense of security as things that make their lives fulfilling, compared with 3% and 2%, respectively, who name these sources of meaning among those with Read More ›

The crackdown on religion is said to stem from Xi Jinping, who became President in 2012. After he got term limits removed in March 2018, some have begun to privately call him “Emperor Xi”: Pastor Bob Fu, a Chinese civil rights activist since Tiananmen Square in 1989 and founder of ChinaAid, reports that facial recognition technology is being used to discourage churchgoing in China: “The government-sanctioned churches that are allowed to exist right now have unique restrictions. Each church has to install a facial-recognition camera in front of the pulpit. The purpose is to identify certain people in the congregation.” … Christians are treated with special wariness because they are associated with Western political values but, as Shepherd points out, Read More ›

It’s usually just fake news*, as some thoughtful academics point out: There are many sciences, many religions. A scientific innovation problematic for one religious tradition may be irrelevant to another. One science may pose a threat to religious beliefs when other sciences do not. Arguing for an essential conflict between science and religion fails because, as the philosopher John Gray has written, terms such as “religion” and “atheism” have no essence. The sciences may sometimes provide answers to questions once asked within the faith traditions – but they also leave space for religious enquiry and commitment. How do we prioritise competing scientific research projects? With limited resources we must ask what is more important for humankind. But these are not Read More ›

This one missed the religion news stream yesterday; just saw it today: Partly it is aesthetic. They are so vulgar. Dawkins in The God Delusion would fail any introductory philosophy or religion course. To take one example, the Ontological Argument for God was first devised by Anselm and refurbished by Descartes. Roughly, it runs thus: God is by definition that than which none greater can be thought. Does He exist? Suppose He doesn’t. Then there is a greater who does exist. Contradiction! Hence, God exists. In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins dismisses this longstanding and much debated philosophical argument with a few sneering paragraphs. His critique is on a par with someone arguing against Dawkins’ own body of work by saying Read More ›

A historian draws our attention this post from late 2016, a reflection on the survival of classical learning during the Christian era, in response to “Skep,” an energetic atheist blogger: But the usual way that those who are forced to admit that there were, in fact, many medieval natural philosophers studying all kinds of proto-scientific ideas, and doing so in the tradition of the Greeks and Romans and their Islamic successors, deal with this awkward fact is to claim that these poor scholars were cowed by the terrible restrictions of the Church and tightly constrained in what they could explore. Which, right on cue, “Skep” proceeds to do: “The fact is there weren’t a lot of scientists around for the Read More ›

Researchers tried modeling intergroup anxiety but look what the public heard about the results, instead of the facts: In fact, nearly every claim about the paper seems to misunderstand how computer models work generally and how they worked in this paper in particular. First, there is nothing particularly “religious” about the criteria used in the model. In computer models, you can name the pieces of the model however you wish. The authors of the software simply happened to assign religious names to the components of the model. There was hardly anything religious about it apart from that. According to the BBC article, the study shows that “The most risky situations are when the difference in the size of two different Read More ›

Not Paul Nelson, if you go by his account of the discussion between Weinstein, the biology prof driven by “woke” students from Evergreen State University and iconic Darwinist Richard Dawkins: I witnessed something last week that I never thought I’d see. Richard Dawkins, pressed to affirm the explanatory power of Darwinian reasoning for human life, backed off, expressing great caution. In fact, he said that talking about human behavior in Darwinian terms was “not helpful” and “not Darwinian.” Pressing Dawkins was evolutionary biologist (and atheist) Bret Weinstein, who, as the evening progressed, out-Darwined Dawkins — if I may coin a neologism — on several fronts. Dawkins, come to discover, turns out to be a rather reluctant Darwinian, at least where Read More ›

It’s not a new story. We’ve covered it here, here, and here within the last year or so. People don’t seem to be ditching traditional religion for science as much as for witchcraft: Interest in spirituality has been booming in recent years while interest in religion plummets, especially among millennials. The majority of Americans now believe it is not necessary to believe in God to have good morals, a study from Pew Research Center found. The percentage of people between the ages of 18 and 29 who “never doubt existence of God” fell from 81% in 2007 to 67% in 2012. Meanwhile, more than half of young adults in the U.S. believe astrology is a science. compared to less than Read More ›

British political philosopher John Gray, author of Seven Types of Atheism (2018) and also of Straw Dogs, comments in an interview: Indeed. I’m a skeptic by nature, so I’m resistant to claims by anyone to have complete answers to intractable human problems. I’m particularly annoyed by what’s now called “New Atheism,” and I react strongly against those who debunk the beliefs of others in a way I find bullying and shallow. The New Atheists — Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and others — attack religions in the sublime confidence that these religions are myths and that they themselves harbor no myths, but that’s not true. In many cases, the New Atheists are animated by 19th-century myths of various kinds: myths of Read More ›

A historian asks: Science Fiction Lacks Religiosity, But Why? Consider science fiction which, like all genres, has its own share of standard tropes and themes. One of the main themes in science fiction is the status of technology, and you’ll notice a frequent assumption that technology will constantly grow more and more sophisticated over time; more precisely, the assumption is about a certain idea of progression… When people encounter alien cultures in science fiction, they’re usually on some sort of a spectrum of more or less technologically––and, therefore, intellectually––sophisticated. It’s very common, in these situations, that more primitive cultures have “religion” while more advanced cultures have dispensed with it. There’s no inherent reason that intellectual sophistication and religion should be Read More ›

Our philosopher-photographer friend Laszlo Bencze sends us some thoughts on J. P. Moreland’s recent book, Scientism and Secularism: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology: – (O’Leary for News) I just finished my reading of this book and I think it’s an excellent analysis of the issues which undergird evolution, namely that science and only science can provide knowledge about the world. This view, known as “scientism” relegates both philosophy and theology to the realm of personal opinion where both may be safely ignored. Of course, as Moreland points out, this position is self-refuting because all statements about the power and purpose of science are necessarily philosophical statements: The irony is that strong scientism is a philosophical statement, expressing an Read More ›

Tim O’Neill, blogger at History for Atheists, offers a compendium of the Great Myths, including the warfare thesis myths on science and religion, a sure seller among the half-educated. Consider, for example, The Great Myths 6: Copernicus’ Deathbed Publication [on Earth as orbiting the Sun]: In a 2014 blog post full of typical historical howlers, new atheist grumpy uncle PZ Myers sneered at a mention of Copernicus as a “Catholic astronomer”, snarling “[Copernicus] delayed publication out of fear; only saw his ideas in print on his deathbed [and his] book was prohibited by the Catholic Church in 1616”. And just a few weeks ago in an error-filled article rehearsing the hoary myth of Giordano Bruno as a martyr for reason, the atheist Read More ›

Presumably, a fix of Darwinism goes down well in a complex world: Discover magazine tells readers why people believe in God. It’s simple: Evolution fooled us! But in fact the article is a perfect case study in how a sweeping story of “evolution” gets credit for just about anything. … That’s the story, says Alex. Evolution wired all that into us; but it messed up, too. It didn’t include a “stop” switch to tell us where not to use those tendencies. We see patterns that aren’t real, and we conclude falsely that someone must have put them there on purpose. Some things we learn by imitation aren’t so good after all. So for example we see patterns in weather, and Read More ›

From an interview with J. P. Moreland, author of Scientism and Secularism: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology (2018): RC: How does science differ from scientism and why does it matter? JPM: Claims of science—water is H20, electro-magnetic fields behave in such and such a manner—what science is limited to. But scientism is a philosophical claim about science, not a claim of science. Scientism is a theory of the nature of knowledge (it can only be obtained through physics, chemistry and the other hard sciences) and limits of knowledge (based on the nature of knowledge, it is limited to the the hard sciences and absent from all other fields, e.g. religious claims or ethical assertions). These types of claims Read More ›