Wednesday, November 14, 2007

The War Still Wages: Science vs. Religion

If there is a war, then its opposing parties still curse each other from their opposing sides. This battle could be seen as starting some 500 years ago but for the purposes of this blog, we could view these 'sides' as based on the idea that the underlying concept of Darwin's work, that we are all evolving possibly from one or few forms and that there is no 'First Cause' (see Darwin post), is irreconcilable to a literal translation of the Bible.
For an article dealing specifically with the ideas Darwin presented and the ongoing war between science and religion, please see this interesting article by David Van Biema in Time's online magazine that asks:

"Can Darwinian evolution withstand the criticisms of Christians who believe that it contradicts the creation account in the Book of Genesis? In recent years, creationism took on new currency as the spiritual progenitor of "intelligent design" (I.D.), a scientifically worded attempt to show that blanks in the evolutionary narrative are more meaningful than its very convincing totality. I.D. lost some of its journalistic heat last December when a federal judge dismissed it as pseudoscience unsuitable for teaching in Pennsylvania schools.
But in fact creationism and I.D. are intimately related to a larger unresolved question, in which the aggressor's role is reversed: Can religion stand up to the progress of science? This debate long predates Darwin, but the antireligion position is being promoted with increasing insistence by scientists angered by intelligent design and excited, perhaps intoxicated, by their disciplines' increasing ability to map, quantify and change the nature of human experience. Brain imaging illustrates--in color!--the physical seat of the will and the passions, challenging the religious concept of a soul independent of glands and gristle. Brain chemists track imbalances that could account for the ecstatic states of visionary saints or, some suggest, of Jesus. Like Freudianism before it, the field of evolutionary psychology generates theories of altruism and even of religion that do not include God. Something called the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology speculates that ours may be but one in a cascade of universes, suddenly bettering the odds that life could have cropped up here accidentally, without divine intervention. (If the probabilities were 1 in a billion, and you've got 300 billion universes, why not?)

For a more 'opinionated' representation of the side of science check out this link

"Even today religious fundamentalists still insist the Bible is the literal infallible Word of God, inerrant, without contradiction, correct in all matters of Faith and all matters of science. They force the Bible to fit in with today's knowledge of science, like forcing a square peg into a round hole, or they attack any science they can not yet force the Bible to conform to."

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