Religion Dispatches
Although medicine should stay in the business of being evidence-based, says Harvard historian of science Anne Harrington, other healing communities don’t necessarily need to follow that model. There’s a place for data, but you need to know what data can’t tell you.
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Numerous studies showing that decision-making appears to occur well before we believe we’ve made the decision, but that doesn’t mean it’s time to give up on free will just yet.
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Humanity may be a mystery, but what about the human who virtually enters a spec of dust and is able to learn the mysteries of dustness? Doesn’t this kind of leap require us to adopt a kind of awe and reverence for the mysteries outside the human as well?
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The Dalai Lama was just in Atlanta, visiting Emory University’s “Emory-Tibet Science Initiative.” There he spoke about the easy relationship between Buddhism and science. When you whittle it down to its essence, Buddhism is very simple and amenable to Enlightenment types.
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Sam Harris latest, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, is undermined by poor scholarship, ad hominem attacks and an obsession with religion.
The humanist community assembled many of its leading lights recently to award Richard Dawkins a prize for furthering rational thought. A secular humanist convention is not the witches’ coven that some sheltered theists might expect. I did not see anyone smoking and never heard a profane word. Drinking at the reception was modest by anyone but a teetotaler’s standards, and far less than at the Episcopal fundraiser I’d attended the previous week. Also unlike the Episcopal affair, I did not spot a single same-sex couple. I began to wonder how much fun these people, freed from religion’s rules, were having with their liberty.
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It didn’t help that Galileo would satirize and mock the Church hierarchy.
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Skepticism means having the courage to suspend one’s set of beliefs long enough to take another set of beliefs really seriously. That is, real skepticism means disbelieving. So be as skeptical as possible but as open as possible, and remember that if one refuses to investigate religion in this way, then that is known as contempt prior to investigation—and is the death of the life of the mind.
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As you probably know, a couple of weeks ago the pope was in England smack-talking the atheists. What is generally less known is that, at the same moment that pope was having his say with the UK’s radical non-believers, Vatican astronomer Brother Guy Consolmagno, also in England, was busy talking…
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Despite these publicly marked divides, the field of religion and science cannot easily be described by sticking a “vs.” between the two words. Rather than an ideological battle in which, as Hawking states, one side of the ring will “win” over the other, for some, the question is about how the two sides might work together.
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