Religion

From Robert H. Nelson at the Conversation: The question of whether a god exists is heating up in the 21st century. According to a Pew survey, the percent of Americans having no religious affiliation reached 23 percent in 2014. Among such “nones,” 33 percent said that they do not believe in God – an 11 percent increase since only 2007. Such trends have ironically been taking place even as, I would argue, the probability for the existence of a supernatural god have been rising. He offers five reasons God probably exists, but that’s not new. This is: As I say in my book, I should emphasize that I am not questioning the reality of natural biological evolution. What is interesting Read More ›

From an interview by Suzan Mazur, author of Paradigm Shifters, with archaeologist Ian Hodder, at HuffPost: Suzan Mazur: Templeton is known for its pairing of religion and science, inserting the divine in science. … I’m asking this because Templeton has come under fire for putting its fingers all over science from the investigation of the origin and evolution of life to space science. It’s perceived that the foundation is compromising the work of scientists and retarding science. Maurice Bloch, one of your own Çatal book authors has said pursuing a religion angle at Çatal is “a misleading wild goose chase” because humans only thought up religion 5,000 years ago at the earliest. Bloch says humans largely live in their reflective Read More ›

From Jeff Miller at Apologetics Press: As with inflation theory, the multiverse is untestable and unobservable, making it unscientific. Astrophysicist and Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University Adam Riess and astrophysicist Mario Livio, previously at the Space Telescope Science Institute, stated: “Even just mentioning the multiverse idea…raises the blood pressure of some physicists. The notion seems hard to swallow and harder to test—perhaps signifying the end of the classical scientific method as we know it. Historically this method has required that hypotheses should be directly testable by new experiments or observations.”1 But observation, direct testing, and experimentation are not possible with the multiverse. More. But then, objectivity is so sexist now. The multiverse is an alternative to science! See also: Read More ›

Yesterday, we heard from the people who think they know why we might never hear from alien civilizations. Today’s turn goes to Santhosh Mathew at the Guardian, who wonders if religion will survive if we do hear from them: The interaction with alien life is not just being discussed in the domain of philosophy any more, it has entered into the traditional scientific realm. Realising this possibility, Nasa, in 2014, gave $1.1m to the Center of Theological Inquiry, an independent institution, to support an initiative to study “the societal implications of astrobiology”. Nasa was criticised by some for providing money to an organisation rooted in Christian theology. Yes. That’s because it sounds to many of us like a solution in Read More ›

From Meghan O’Gieblyn at the Guardian: After losing her faith, a former evangelical Christian felt adrift in the world. She then found solace in a radical technological philosophy – but its promises of immortality and spiritual transcendence soon seemed unsettlingly familiar … Transhumanism offered a vision of redemption without the thorny problems of divine justice. It was an evolutionary approach to eschatology, one in which humanity took it upon itself to bring about the final glorification of the body and could not be blamed if the path to redemption was messy or inefficient. Tip: As soon as they mention “evolutionary,” find your keys. Encounters with God are not “evolutionary.” Within months of encountering Kurzweil, I became totally immersed in transhumanist Read More ›

From Jack Kerwick at Townhall: Though it will doubtless come as an enormous shock to such Christophobic atheists as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and their ilk, it is nonetheless true that one especially significant contribution that Christianity made to the world is that of science. No one has better established this than Rodney Stark, a sociologist of religion who makes his home at Baylor University, the school from which I received a master’s degree in philosophy. Stark’s The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, though published 12 years ago, is worth revisiting, particularly at this time when, not unlike at Christmas, journalists and others in the media presume to address the topic of Jesus. Read More ›

From Jerry himself at Why Evolution Is True: Reader Mark called my attention to the fact that John Templeton Foundation (JTF) has bestowed its annual Templeton Prize on someone who’s not only a deeply misguided religious philosopher, but also has promoted intelligent design and criticized naturalism. Thanks to Jerry for spelling that out… Having made clear that he does not attend the same Bible Study as Plantinga, Coyne then says, All of this casts doubts on Templeton’s claim to be increasingly down with science, for, after all, Plantinga is pretty much an intelligent design creationist. Although he’s waffled on this a bit in the past, he seems to have settled on ID creationism. I’ll quote Michael Ruse from The Chronicle Read More ›

Surely no one bet against that. From Ryan Cross at Science: More widespread support comes from the Clergy Letter Project in Olympia, a group of some 14,400 ordained clergy members that supports teaching evolution and climate change. Founder and executive director Michael Zimmerman says a survey of the group’s members showed strong support for the march. Negative responses mostly came from people who said they believed the event wouldn’t change anything, and might even further polarize science, Zimmerman says. “The new slightly more political focus of the march might have turned some members off,” he says. (In contrast, he notes, responses in favor of supporting the People’s Climate March were unanimous.) The Clergy Letter Project is best known for supporting Read More ›

Read and decide. Recently, Paul Ratner asked at BigThink if Albert Einstein was a pantheist or deist? A friend kindly forwards information from a 2009 web page that no longer exists, apparently originally composed in German, dated in 2009, http://nobelist.tripod.com/id1.html The author appears to have done homework. If anyone finds out whose vanished page this is, please let us know in the combox. 1. ALBERT EINSTEIN – NOBEL LAUREATE IN PHYSICS Nobel Prize: Albert Einstein (1879–1955) was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to Quantum Theory and for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect. Einstein is one of the founders of modern physics; he is the author of the Theory of Relativity. According Read More ›

A literary essay from David Randall at First Things: Yet three notable works of science fiction do address themselves to the power of that old promise against the secular infinitudes of time and space: Cordwainer Smith’s “The Dead Lady of Clown Town” (1964), John Morressy’s The Mansions of Space (1983), and R. A. Lafferty’s Past Master (1968). These novels share a Christian preoccupation—a theological preoccupation—with the survival of faith threatened sometimes by oblivion, sometimes by annihilation, and sometimes indeed by the gates of hell. The three fables vary on an important particular. The survival of faith may or may not be identical with the survival of the Church—and the difference between broadly Christian and specifically Catholic science fiction may be Read More ›

From writer and filmmaker Paul Ratner at BigThink: Some (including the scientist himself) have called Einstein’s spiritual views as pantheism, largely influenced by the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. Pantheists see God as existing but abstract, equating all of reality with divinity. They also reject a specific personal God or a god that is somehow endowed with human attributes. Himself a famous atheist, Richard Dawkins calls Einstein’s pantheism a “sexed-up atheism,” but other scholars point to the fact that Einstein did seem to believe in a supernatural intelligence that’s beyond the physical world. He referred to it in his writings as “a superior spirit,” “a superior mind” and a “spirit vastly superior to men”. Einstein was possibly a deist, although he Read More ›

In a survey article of centuries of views, Jon Garvey offers at Hump of the Camel: God might indeed decide to make life on earth a unique case, and the vastness of a cosmos uninhabited by other physical beings a matter for himself alone. Indeed, one of the intriguing aspects of cosmic fine tuning is the realisation that a vast universe is necessary to enable the conditions a tiny inhabited world like ours requires. God’s prodigality in doing so much for us would make as plausible, and inconclusive, a case. Yet Chalmers once more shows that extraterrestrial life poses no inherent problem whatsoever for Christianity. Neither, though, does a universe in which life is unique to the earth – a Read More ›

I would hardly trust anyone but Suzan Mazur, author of Public Evolution Summit, to get to the bottom of this one, at Huffington Post: A Chat w/ NASA-funded Italian Jesuit Andrea Vicini Andrea Vicini was one of two dozen religious scholars who between 2015 and 2017 shared nearly $3M awarded jointly by NASA and the John Templeton Foundation (administered by the Center of Theological Inquiry, Princeton) to investigate how the religious community would respond to the discovery of life in outer space. As I’ve already reported, informants at NASA tell me we will not find life anywhere else in the solar system. So why blow 5% of the NASA Astrobiology Institute budget on such a project? I spoke recently by Read More ›

Here’s my new article at Design Disquisitions. Enjoy: In the next two (potentially three) articles I’ll be taking an in-depth look at an excellent paper written by Jeffrey Koperski, a philosopher of science at Saginaw Valley State University. Koperski has written about ID in several publications (1), which I highly recommend, and he takes a balanced and sensible approach to this topic. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t accept ID, but takes a constructively critical stance, so his work is well worth engaging with. As one can tell from the title of the paper, Two Bad Ways to Attack Intelligent Design and Two Goods Ones(2), Koperski critically analyses two common criticisms of ID, suggesting that they are highly dubious lines of argument. He then Read More ›

Peter Woit comments at Not Even Wrong on his review (paywall; no paywall) at Wall Street Journal of A Big Bang in a Little Room: The Quest to Create New Universes by Zeeya Merali: My concern about the topic of the book is that it’s Fake Physics, not that religion is motivating the author (and likely motivating the Templeton Foundation to fund this project). A book about the religious views of physicists would be an interesting one that I’d certainly read, and the material in this book on that topic is quite interesting. One of the odder twists here is that the two blurbs from physicists promoting the book are from Sean Carroll and Martin Rees, with Carroll writing So you Read More ›