Perhaps I can add a few more notes to this topic. In the newspapers the last weeks was this item:

“Vatican official refutes intelligent design theory”
http://www.catholic.org/international/international_story.php?id=17691

so this topic was on my mind to ask those at the Vatican Observatory when I visited there this morning (*) if the words by the director George Coyne was representing the Pope’s view. According to Guy Consolmagno (who works for Coyne), the answer is the two are in accord; the Pope refutes intelligent design too. If you think that is confusing, then I suggest to read the above news article to see how it fits with the Vatican’s views.

(*) It was a get-acquainted visit to a colleague and my first visit to VO (I’m not Catholic). Since the Observatory is located nearby to where I live and excellent research is made by Guy Consolmagno and the Jesuit astronomers there, I felt compelled to make a visit. I don’t have words to describe the Vatican Observatory, every corner demonstrated a fantastic piece of history. Four-hundred year old books, research papers by Newton, Maxwell, scientific instruments for the most clever purpose, 19th century telescopes, original documents by the Apollo astronauts given as gifts to the Pope, a log book of visitor signatures that included Eddington, Hertzsprung, Russell, Oort… I was in another world for some hours.

I’m an agnostic with theist leanings. I find interesting your suggestion that a God of infinite powers would be unlikely to bother with humanity on the basis that we and our planet are physically small. Would a God capable of creating infinity be likely to value things on the basis of their size? Surely God would be no more likely to be impressed with something as big as a galaxy than with something as tiny as a microbe.

If we accept the omniscient, omnipotent God premise then all Cristian dogma is plausible on the grounds that God can make it so. “Personal” God would be supported, not contraindicated by God as omnipotent.

Incidentally, fundamentalists scare me.

Regards

I found this really interesting article, which gave some background on Eastern Philosophy & it’s attraction to.. by Einstein, Bohr, Oppenheimer:

http://online.sfsu.edu/~rone/Buddhism/VerhoevenBuddhismScience.htm

Buddhism and Science:
Probing the Boundaries of Faith and Reason

Dr. Martin J. Verhoeven
Religion East and West, Issue 1, June 2001, pp. 77-97

Western interest in Eastern religions, especially Buddhism, historically coincided with the rise of modern science and the corresponding perceived decline of religious orthodoxy in the West. Put simply: Modern science initiated a deep spiritual crisis that led to an unfortunate split between faith and reason—a split yet to be reconciled. Buddhism was seen as an “alternative altar,” a bridge that could reunite the estranged worlds of matter and spirit. Thus, to a large extent Buddhism’s flowering in the West during the last century came about to satisfy post-Darwinian needs to have religious beliefs grounded in new scientific truth.
…
By the 1890s America was caught in the throes of a spiritual crisis affecting Christendom worldwide. Modern scientific discoveries had so undermined a literal interpretation of sacred scripture, that for many educated and thoughtful people, it was no longer certain that God was in his heaven and that all was right with the world. These rapid changes and transformations in almost every aspect of traditional faith, had such irreversible corrosive effects on religious orthodoxy, that they were dubbed, “acids of modernity.” They ate away at received convictions, and ushered in an unprecedented erosion of belief. People like my grandparents, brought up with rock-solid belief in the infallible word of God, found their faith shaken to its very foundations. It was as if overnight they suddenly awoke to a new world governed not by theological authority but by scientists. New disclosures from the respected disciplines of geology, biology, and astronomy challenged and shattered Biblical accounts of the origins of the natural world and our place and purpose in it. Sigmund Freud captured the spirit of the age well when he said “the self-love of mankind has been three times wounded by science.” The Copernican Revolution, continued by Galileo, took our little planet out of the center position in the universe. The Earth, held to be the physical and metaphysical center of the Universe, was reduced to a tiny speck revolving around a sun. Then Darwin all but eliminated the divide between animal and man, and with it the “special creation” status enjoyed by humans. Darwin, moreover, diminished God. The impersonal forces of natural selection kept things going; no divine power was necessary. Nor, from what any competent scientist could demonstrate with any factual certainty, was any Divinity even evident—either at the elusive “creation,” or in the empirical present. Karl Marx people portrayed people as economic animals grouped into competing classes driven by material self-interest. Finally, Freud himself characterized religious faith as an evasion of truth, a comforting illusion sustained by impulses and desires beyond the reach of the rational intellect. Nietzsche’s famous declaration that “God is Dead” may have seemed extreme, but few would have denied that God was ailing. And certainly the childhood version of a personal, all-powerful God that created the world and ruled over it with justice and omniscience was for many a comforting vision lost forever.
…
This trend linking Buddhism to science continued, even accelerated, into the 20th century. Einstein’s work and further developments in the new cutting-edge physics seemed to provide even further evidence that science and Buddhism were merely different rivers leading to the same sea. Where the old theologies crumbled under the juggernaut of science, Buddhism seemed to hold its own, even thrive. The early (and even contemporary) exponents of Buddhism pushed this idea. It remains an area of great promise and interest; but it is not one without difficulties.
…
The second area of doubt regarding modern science arises from within the scientific community itself. The last decades of the 20th century have seen an internal reexamination take place within almost every scientific discipline, as each has been forced to question its own foundations and exclusive claims to truth. We are in the midst of a major paradigm shift, the outcome of which still remains unclear. It revolves around a loss of the positivistic certainty that science once enjoyed and now finds slipping away. Ironically, the scientific “establishment” finds itself confronting a challenge to its exclusive authority that in many ways mirrors the spiritual crisis that religious orthodoxy faced with the triumph of modern science.
…
With the ground-breaking work of Niels Bohr, Heisenberg, and Sir Arthur Eddington, the rock-solid presupposition central to that classical scientific thought began to crumble. With the “new science” that started to emerge in the post-World War II era, the observer and the observed could not be presumed separate and distinct. Gone too was the neat subject/object distinction that had come to define classical science. This shift away from the study of the “outside” objective world of nature to the “inner” subjective world of the observer is a hallmark of the new science. As Heisenberg observed, “Even in science, the object of research is no longer nature itself, but man’s investigation of nature.”

[ is this related to the “anthropic principle”? ]

For example, Heisenberg pointed out that the very act of measurement interfered with what one was attempting to measure. You cannot separate the subject from the object of the experiment. So, if the scientist changes the very nature of the “reality” he or she investigates, then what is truth? What is purely objective fact? Where does the boundary lie (indeed, if there is one) between the mind and the external world? Consequently, the quantum theory of the new physics no longer claims to be describing “reality.” It describes probable realities. The new physics looks for possible realities and finds them so elusive that no one model can exhaustively account for everything. The indeterminacy of models has replaced earlier certainties.

Some, like Thomas Kuhn, even questioned the notion of science as an objective progression towards truth. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Kuhn observed that science, like religion, becomes heavily encumbered with its own baggage of non-rational procedures. Science accumulates its peculiar set of presuppositions, doctrines, and even heresies.

[ even more so now, with String Theory ]

Kuhn essentially demolished the logical empiricist and purist view that science personified the impartial progression towards a universal truth. Instead, he saw it as a series of shifting “paradigms”—a global way of seeing things which is relatively immune from disconfirmation by experience. One paradigm would hold sway for awhile, only to be displaced in a “revolution” by another conceptual worldview. These paradigms, both self-contained and self-perpetuating, tended to conserve and perpetuate their own ideas, just as religion tends to conserve and perpetuate its own beliefs.

For example, Galileo declared in the early 1600s that Copernicus was correct: The earth moves, and the sun is the center of our galaxy. The Church denounced these views as heresies and dangerous to the Faith. They forced Galileo to recant during a trial under the Inquisition. Although he was publicly compelled to affirm the existing “scientific” paradigm, Galileo still defied the authorities. After getting up from his knees, he is said to have mumbled “E pur si muove” (nevertheless it still moves). Placed under house arrest, Galileo lived out the rest of his life in seclusion.

The world, of course, shifted paradigms to accept the Copernican worldview. The Church, however, lagged behind, and only in 1992 did the Vatican lift the 1616 ban on the Copernican teaching. Einstein, whose theory of relativity was at first met with skepticism and doubt, later became an icon of scientific genius. And yet, even Einstein found himself resisting the new theories of the quantum physicists towards the end of his life—once again adding credibility to Kuhn’s thesis.

Whether Kuhn is correct or not is beside the point. His critique illustrates a larger trend: the suspicion that science does not have absolute answers, nor even ultimate authority. Thus, modern science presents less of a unified front, less of a final bastion of truth. Certainly many people still see themselves as living in a black and white world. But, in general, many scientists are coming to define their discipline in a more humble and tentative way. Science, for people at the turn of the century, stood for absolute, fixed truths and principles that held good forever; it embraced and explained an unchanging reality, or at least a reality that was changing according to constant and predictable laws. Today we are more modest, less presumptuous. A better working definition of science now might be “a form of inquiry into natural phenomena; a consensus of information held at any one time and all of which may be modified by new discoveries and new interpretations at any moment.” In contemporary science, uncertainty seems to be the rule.
…
As early as the 1940’s, the pioneering physicist Niels Bohr sensed this congruence between modern science and what he called “Eastern mysticism.” As he investigated atomic physics and searched for a unified field of reality, he often used the Buddha and Lao Tzu in his discussions on physics in his classes. He made up his own coat of arms with the yin/yang symbol on it. The American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer also saw in Buddhism a scientific parallel to the puzzling riddles of modern physics; his cutting-edge discoveries seemed to echo the enigmatic wisdom of the ancient sage. Wrote Oppeheimer:

If we ask, for instance, whether the position of the electron remains the same, we must say ‘no;’ if we ask whether the electron’s position changes with time, we must say ‘no;’ if we ask whether the electron is at rest, we must say ‘no;’ if we ask whether it is in motion, we must say ‘no.’ The Buddha has given such answers when interrogated as to the conditions of man’s self after his death; but they are not familiar answers for the tradition of seventeenth and eighteenth-century science.

Thus, it grows increasingly difficult to believe in an external world governed by mechanisms that science discloses once and for all. Thoughtful people find themselves hesitant, unmoored, with an up-in-the-air kind of feeling regarding the most basic facts of life. It is said that “we live in an age when anything is possible and nothing is certain.” This post-modern dilemma highlights the felt need to reconcile facts and values, morals and machines, science with spirituality. And while traditional Judaeo-Christian theologies struggle to address this particularly contemporary malaise, Buddhism maneuvers this tricky terrain with apparent ease and finds itself sought after with renewed interest and popularity.
…
Such insights early on intrigued Western thinkers, as Buddhism hinted of a new avenues of travel through the mind/matter maze. It led scientists like Albert Einstein to declare:

The religion of the future will be cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual and a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. . . If there is any religion that would cope with modern scientific needs, it would be Buddhism.

“God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! ” - The Gay Science

But it must also be noted that while Nietzsche was certainly no fan of Christianity and the Church of his day, whether he was an athesist is open to debate.

Regarding athesists as the “arrogant” ones: Is it not the height of arrogance to presume that this God we speak of - omnipotent, omniscient - would care in the slightest about we mere mortals fighting out an existence on this rather irrelevant (except for us) corner of the universe? And further that He would send His son to us and be willing to engage with us on daily and invididual basis through prayer?

I can understand faith in the mystery of universe and something like a ‘life-force’ or spiritual energy which we can have no understanding in. (perhaps in the spirit of buddhism?) But a “personal” relationship with God I cannot understand.

And in the end we find that our spirituality, faith and religion is a personal matter - to embrace, engage with, be skeptical of or shun completely.
Religious freedom is a hallmark of many free societies - as it should be. Atheists would not (and rarely do) advocate that all religion should be banned because they believe it to be wrong. Nor should theists expect the state or society to give religion a primacy in the making of laws and deciding on values, or mores.

The problem for scientists (and athesists) with regards to ID and the rest, is when religion imposes or takes over from science in explaining *science*, and dogmatically judges those who don’t live according to their interpretation of the bible. (take your pick of social issues - gender, sexuality, abortion etc) Unfortunately, for many Christians their religion demands of them an evangelical and ’spreading of the message’ mode of faith, and thus we have conflict.

m

I think you just contradicted your first sentence with the rest of the paragraph. Besides I can’t listen to God’s counsel if I don’t believe in Her existence. That’s an arrogant posture in your opinion I am sure, but well, you are entitled to it and I respect that. Now, if you can respect my opinion and think a bit more before associating disbelief with arrogance.

Eugene, I don’t intend to offend those who differ from me in their beliefs, just because they differ. If someone honestly doesn’t know that God lives, or chooses not to believe it, they won’t take offense when aggressive atheists, seeking to argue their case, and destroy the case for faith, are taken to task for their stance, which is to insist that, as a matter of public policy, we must not be permitted to acknowledge that we depend upon God as individuals and as a nation in any official capacity.

However, I’m of no account among the men of affairs who are today seeking to establish their own atheistic view in this country. What I say is nothing more than a feeble reflection of what our noble and honorable forefathers have said: that it is arrogant and shameful for Americans not to acknowledge the hand of God in all things. For instance, in Abraham Lincoln’s words:

And whereas it is the duty of nations as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions, in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.
And, insomuch as we know that, by His divine law, nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war, which now desolates the land, may be but a punishment, inflicted upon us, for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole People? We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!
It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.

While these may seem like harsh words to those who are cut deeply by them, they are not offensive to the just, who receive them gladly. If the hearts of the nation are won over by those who continuously argue for disbelief, while the voice of those who know better is never raised in opposition to their deceit, then how shall the judgments of God be stayed from this nation?

We must never forget how heavily the sword of his justice fell upon the former inhabitants of this land, and yet there were great promises made unto their fathers that he would remember their descendants, who still live among us. How much more shall we stand in jeopardy, if we ignore what happened to them, and we too forget him, and deny the God of Heaven, as they did, after having displaced them so readily and rudely in this, the choicest of all lands, and received the great blessings we have received in their stead, as outlined above by President Lincoln, because of the faith of our forbearers?

But God has made it known in our day that when we are fully ripe in iniquity, we shall be swept off the face of this land as a people, because he has decreed a solemn decree that the inhabitants of this land shall serve the God of the land, which is Jesus Christ, or be swept off the face of the land in his own due time. If he did it to the former inhabitants, we shouldn’t suppose that he won’t do it to us.

There are great things to be understood regarding the work of the God of Israel, not only in this land, but on the whole face of the earth, but I must stop here. Suffice it to say, that the history of disbelief is much greater, more central, and deeply disturbing than Sean ever imagined. The pathos in the drama of the struggle between good and evil, between belief and disbelief, is not brewed in an evening cocktail; it echoes in the mountain valleys, in the canyon walls, and in the streets of desolate cities, as the thunder of the great deep, heaving itself beyond its bounds.

This generation of Americans has not known the sorrow of former generations, and they do not yet realize the enormity of the price former nations have paid for the forsaking of their God and his righteousness to turn to Godlessness and to walk after the lusts of their own hearts until they were fully ripe in iniquity, but read the lamentation of a believer who experienced it first hand in Jerusalem:

REMEMBER, O LORD, what is come upon us: consider, and behold our reproach.
Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our houses to aliens.
We are orphans and fatherless, our mothers are as widows.
We have drunken our water for money; our wood is sold unto us.
Our necks are under persecution: we labour, and have no rest.

We have given the hand to the Egyptians, and to the Assyrians, to be satisfied with bread.
Our fathers have sinned, and are not; and we have borne their iniquities.
Servants have ruled over us: there is none that doth deliver us out of their hand.
We gat our bread with the peril of our lives because of the sword of the wilderness.
Our skin was black like an oven because of the terrible famine.

They ravished the women in Zion, and the maids in the cities of Judah.
Princes are hanged up by their hand: the faces of elders were not honoured.
They took the young men to grind, and the children fell under the wood.
The elders have ceased from the gate, the young men from their musick.

The joy of our heart is ceased; our dance is turned into mourning.
The crown is fallen from our head: woe unto us, that we have sinned!
For this our heart is faint; for these things our eyes are dim.
Because of the mountain of Zion, which is desolate, the foxes walk upon it.
Thou, O LORD, remainest for ever; thy throne from generation to generation.

Wherefore dost thou forget us for ever, and forsake us so long time?
Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old.
But thou hast utterly rejected us; thou art very wroth against us.

So, as President Lincoln so wisely observed, “It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.” Here’s the point: We can be wise and do it now, or we can wait and see if it was really as bad as Jeremiah described it.

Doug

Here’s a group of people who do very well with reconciling the two: the Jesuit astronomers at the Vatican Observatory. I am convinced that these people are brilliant ‘bridges’ between religion and science, and who can show religious people the value of science.

Interview with Brother Guy Consolmagno
http://www.astrobio.net/news/article966.html

Here’s a piece of the interview that I think makes clear their position (sorry for the length) Notation: GC = Guy Consolmagno, AM = Astrobiology Magazine

GC: […]but also to reassure the religious people science is a good thing. Don’t listen to people who say you have to choose one or the other.

And there’s two things going on there. One is the sense that, if God made the universe, and he made it good, and he loved the universe so much that, as the Christians believe, he sent his only son, it’s up to us to honor and respect and get to know the universe. I think it was Francis Bacon who said that God sets up the universe as a marvelous puzzle for us to get to know him by getting to know how he did things. By seeing how God created, we get a little sense of God’s personality. And that means, among other things not going in with any preconceived notions. We can’t impose our idea of how God did things. It’s up to us to see how the universe actually does work.

AM: Isn’t the belief that God created the universe a preconceived notion?

GC: It is. And it’s a preconceived notion that in one form or another every scientist has to have. Because here’s the other side: to be a scientist you have to have two fundamental assumptions, so fundamental you don’t even think about it. You assume that the universe makes sense, that there really is an objective reality; there really is a logic to this; it’s not just chaos; there really are laws to be found. We’re so used to that assumption, you don’t realize it. A lot of cultures don’t have that.

And the other assumption you have to make is that it’s worth doing. If your idea, if your religion is to meditate and rise above the physical universe, this corrupting physical universe, you might say, you’re not going to be a scientist, you’re not going to be interested in Mars. So it’s a religious statement to say the physical universe is worth devoting my life to. Seeing how the universe works is worth spending a lifetime doing.

AM: Why is it a religious statement?

GC: By religious I mean that it is based on certain fundamental assumptions you have about how the universe works and what your place in the universe is. And ultimately, that’s a religious assumption. Whether it’s my religion or somebody else’s religion, lots of people with lots of religions are looking at science. I’m not saying it’s only one religion that has that assumption. But I’m saying that there are religions that don’t. There are brilliant cultures throughout history who have had fabulous mathematics and glorious ethical systems - and no science. It really is an important fundamental assumption that you have to have, especially day-to-day as a scientist. It’s what gets you up in the morning.

You know, one of the scary things as a scientist is that you’re not punching a clock. There’s probably nobody looking over your shoulder to see if you’re working today. It’s only after two years, when you haven’t produced anything, that you don’t get the next grant and then you’re out of a job. But day-by-day, what gets you up, what makes you do the work? Why are you excited about this stuff? And why do you think that it’s worth doing, when people are starving in the world?

AM: And what’s your answer?

GC: My answer is the answer I gave before. That it’s one of the things that makes us human and, for me, it’s one of the things that bring me into close personal touch with God.

(BTW, here are some definitions of apologetics.)

This may be a necessary supposition for the purpose of motivating scientists to engage in unrestrained exploration of the universe in the manner we call ’scientific’, but why should we assume that this tenet must prove true per se? Adopting this tenet is a practical matter and has nothing to do with any insight into an ultimate truth.

S.M.: “A believer can always put god just outside our current observational bounds..”

Or a believer can put God all the way outside our observational bounds by declaring God transcendent (as Christians and many others do) and therefore now and forever beyond the ken of science. Science must follow the rules; a transcendent God exists beyond the rules.

S.M.: “..science continues to reveal where god is not.”

Does science reveal where god is not? So some process or other (eg. evolution) explains someting that seems to contradict a particular brand of theism - even if we discredit that particular theism we’re still left with all the theisms that regard that process as just another of God’s creations.

Before I’m accused of repeating the tired argument that atheists are immoral or something, let me make it clear that I’m only pointing out that good and evil are not derived from science. Everybody, not just the religious, are living with ideas that are non-scientific.