What Religion Gives Us (That Science Can’t)

From The New York Times-

It’s a tough time to defend religion. Respect for it has diminished in almost every corner of modern life — not just among atheists and intellectuals, but among the wider public, too. And the next generation of young people looks likely to be the most religiously unaffiliated demographic in recent memory.

There are good reasons for this discontent: continued revelations of abuse by priests and clerics, jihad campaigns against “infidels” and homegrown Christian hostility toward diversity and secular culture. This convergence of bad behavior and bad press has led many to echo the evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson’s claim that “for the sake of human progress, the best thing we could possibly do would be to diminish, to the point of eliminating, religious faiths.”

Despite the very real problems with religion — and my own historical skepticism toward it — I don’t subscribe to that view. I would like to argue here, in fact, that we still need religion. Perhaps a story is a good way to begin.

More here-

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/03/opinion/why-we-need-religion.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur

Can a scientist believe in the resurrection? Three hypotheses.

From Veritas-

I’m a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, and this weekend, I’m celebrating the resurrection of Jesus. So are dozens of my colleagues. How can this be?

Hypothesis one: We’re not talking about a literal resurrection. Perhaps it is just an inspiring myth that served to justify the propagation of Jesus’ exalted ethical teachings. A literal resurrection contradicts the known laws of nature. Maybe scientists can celebrate the idea of Jesus’s spirit living on, while his body remained in the grave.

But the first disciples attested to a physical resurrection. How could an untruth logically support high moral character? How could it have sustained the apostles through the extremes of persecution they experienced founding Christianity? And is celebrating a myth consistent with scientific integrity?

More here-

http://www.veritas.org/can-scientist-believe-resurrection-three-hypotheses/

Scientist Robin Dunbar to test new theory that religion is key to humans' social evolution

From The Washington Post (via Houston)-

In humans' mysterious journey to become intelligent, socializing creatures like no other in the animal world, one innovation played an essential role: religion.

That's the theory that a preeminent evolutionary scientist is setting out to prove.

"You need something quite literally to stop everybody from killing everybody else out of just crossness," Robin Dunbar said. "Somehow it's clear that religions, all these doctrinal religions, create the sense that we're all one family."

Dunbar, an evolutionary psychology professor at Oxford University, gained some measure of fame more than 20 years ago for his research on the size of animals' social networks. Each species of primate, he found, can manage to keep up a social bond with a certain number of other members of its own species. That number goes up as primates' brain size increases, from monkeys to apes.

Humans, Dunbar found, are capable of maintaining significantly more social ties than the size of our brains alone could explain. He proved that each human is surprisingly consistent in the number of social ties we can maintain: About five with intimate friends, 50 with good friends, 150 with friends and 1,500 with people we could recognize by name. That discovery came to be known as "Dunbar's
number."

More here-

http://www.houstonchronicle.com/life/houston-belief/article/Scientist-Robin-Dunbar-to-test-new-theory-that-10977335.php

Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God

From The Wall Street Journal-

In 1966 Time magazine ran a cover story asking: Is God Dead? Many have accepted the cultural narrative that he’s obsolete—that as science progresses, there is less need for a “God” to explain the universe. Yet it turns out that the rumors of God’s death were premature. More amazing is that the relatively recent case for his existence comes from a surprising place—science itself.

Here’s the story: The same year Time featured the now-famous headline, the astronomer Carl Sagan announced that there were two important criteria for a planet to support life: The right kind of star, and a planet the right distance from that star. Given the roughly octillion—1 followed by 24 zeros—planets in the universe, there should have been about septillion—1 followed by 21 zeros—planets capable of supporting life.

More here-

http://www.wsj.com/articles/eric-metaxas-science-increasingly-makes-the-case-for-god-1419544568

Are humans special?

From The Pittsburgh Post Gazette (via the LA Times)-

Humans have had quite a ride in the 500 years since Copernicus. We’ve built and tested a rational vision of the universe in which our circumstances, and those of the Earth, are unexceptional and insignificant in the grand scheme of things. We are fleeting specks on a crumb of cosmic dust, among countless other crumbs in the briefest sliver of a far bigger story.

This perspective has guided us to the innermost sanctums of matter and to the origins and nature of space and time itself — an expanding fabric that has no spatial center, in which all places are shining examples of unimportance.

More here-

http://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/Op-Ed/2014/11/30/Caleb-Scharf-Are-humans-special/stories/201411300053

R.I. Episcopal Bishop W. Nicholas Knisely bridges the religion-science divide

From Rhode Island-

 Well before he became Rhode Island’s Episcopal bishop, the Right Rev. W. Nicholas Knisely lived in two worlds. As a priest and rector of a church in Bethlehem, Pa., he looked after people’s spiritual needs. Then he’d hop in a car and travel across the river to nearby Lehigh University to teach physics and astronomy.

His double role came about in part because the school had learned that before he became a priest he had earned degrees in both astronomy and physics. In agreeing to the post, however, Knisely had one condition: that he’d be allowed to teach class wearing his clerical garb.

But as Bishop Knisely recounted to packed pews at a forum last week at St. Andrew’s-by-the-Sea, the priestly attire created quite a stir. Many were stunned to see a man of the cloth teaching science.
He says he understood their confusion. For so long, they had believed that religion and science were fundamentally at odds, the result of long-worn stories about the church’s treatment of Galileo centuries ago and more modern stories about fundamentalist believers trying to ban the teaching of evolution in school.

But the gulf between the two spheres is not nearly as wide as one might think, says the bishop, who points out that both disciplines are seeking truth but have different ways of ascertaining it. For the scientist, the ultimate test is whether it can be replicated or verified, usually in a laboratory. For the religionist, the ultimate determinant, beyond looking at revelation, is whether it’s an idea that endures, is widely accepted by the faithful, and bears fruit.

More here-

http://www.providencejournal.com/breaking-news/content/20130728-r.i.-episcopal-bishop-w.-nicholas-knisely-bridges-the-religion-science-divide.ece

Episcopalians on Science and Faith: gettin’ it done

From Patheos-

“The goal of human knowing is neither to exalt science over other forms of inquiry nor to use theology as a magic wand to make things we can’t otherwise explain vanish. The goal of human knowing is instead to seek to engage God, the world, and ourselves in one unified frame of meaning.”
~The Very Rev. Gary Hall (Dean, Washington National Cathedral), “Cathedral Age” (Autumn 2012)

Recently I stumbled onto a website of the Episcopal Church, The Network for Science, Technology, and Faith. This website is an attempt to foster community on the issue of science and faith stemming from the Episcopal Church’s recent (77th General Convention, July 2012) statement affirming the essential compatibility of science and faith.

One resource developed by this body is a Catechism of Creation made up of three parts: Theology of Creation, Science and Faith, and Caring for Creation. The presence of Parts 1 and 3 suggests a full-orbed approach that I feel is typically not part of the evangelical dialogue, and there is much to discuss here. But I want to focus on Part 2.

More here-

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2013/05/episcopalians-on-science-and-faith-gettin-it-done-evangelicals-could-learn-something/

Physicists say they've found evidence of 'God particle'

From The LA Times-

The head of the world's biggest atom smasher says they have discovered a new particle that is consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson known popularly as the “God particle,” which is believed to give all matter in the universe size and shape.


To cheers and standing ovations from scientists, the world's biggest atom smasher claimed the discovery of a new subatomic particle Wednesday, calling it "consistent" with the long-sought Higgs boson -- popularly known as the "God particle" -- that helps explain what gives all matter in the universe size and shape.

"We have now found the missing cornerstone of particle physics," Rolf Heuer, director of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), told scientists.

He said the newly discovered subatomic particle is a boson, but he stopped just shy of claiming outright that it is the Higgs boson itself -- an extremely fine distinction.

More here-

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sciw-god-particle-20120704,0,871581.story

Faith and the search for the God particle

From Scotland-

A LEADING theoretical physicist claims the God particle will be found within months.

Professor Peter Higgs, who has just been given the Edinburgh Award for services to the city, believes experiments being carried out at CERN will help explain the origins of the universe.

Scientists at CERN, the world’s largest participle physics laboratory, which is situated near Geneva on the Franco-Swiss border, have been conducting tests with the large hadron collider to verify an explanation for the origins of mass as a property of matter.

The so-called God particle, named after a theory Professor Higgs first propounded in 1964, will apparently solve the mystery of why objects around us have weight.

According to the Higgs boson theory, as it is also known, at the very beginnings of the universe – the big bang – the smallest building blocks in nature were weightless but became heavy a fraction of a second later when the fireball of the big bang cooled.

Mass, a term first coined by Isaac Newton in his 1687 tome Principia Mathematica, is a phenomenon few scientists ever queried until recent times.

More here-

http://www.johnogroat-journal.co.uk/Features/Dan-Mackay/Faith-and-the-search-for-the-God-particle-05032012.htm

Science Finally Demonstrates Four Specific Ways Prayer Transforms the Human Brain

From Newsmax-

Millions of Americans believe in the power of prayer. In fact, a recent poll found that 84% of U.S. adults claim they’d prayed in the past week.

And written evidence of prayer dates back at least 5,000 years.

However, many people believe prayer has no scientific basis.

The Newsmax Health team wanted to identify what is really known about prayer, scientifically speaking.

How does prayer affect the human brain?

And does praying offer people any real benefits — mentally, physically, or emotionally?

To this end, they went out to the scientific and medical community to determine the potential benefits of prayer.

The results were so surprising that they created a free video presentation on the science behind prayer to share what they found.

Read more on Newsmax.com: Science Finally Demonstrates Four Specific Ways Prayer Transforms the Human Brain

More here-

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Four-Specific-Ways-Prayer/2012/01/11/id/423861

An Effort, Years in the Making, to Capture the Mystery

From The New York Times (A really wonderful story)

The story of a faithful man, and of the unique offering he will be making on Sunday to his church, begins in a Southern California backyard in March 1974. That man, today a prominent Manhattan doctor named James Marion, is then a 10-year-old boy, and he is startled by the sound of screams from inside his family’s home.

When the boy enters, he sees his father vomiting blood, and hears his mother telling his older brother to drive to the hospital. As the car pulls away, Jim catches sight of his father in the back seat. It is the last glimpse he will have of his father alive, for Robert Marion will die a week later at age 40, having slowly bled to death from an ulcer.

Sitting in his Upper East Side office on a recent afternoon, Dr. Marion, 48, says with a physician’s mordant humor that “you don’t have to be Sigmund Freud” to figure out why he ultimately became a gastroenterologist. He became an expert in the kind of disease that killed his father.

The death of Robert Marion plunges his family into poverty. Without his salesman’s salary to support them, his widow and their four sons resort to selling T-shirts at weekend flea markets. There is no more money for parochial school tuition.

More here-

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/19/us/an-effort-years-in-the-making-to-capture-the-mystery.html?_r=2&scp=2&sq=episcopal&st=cse

A Christmas tree experiment gone chemically wrong

From Maryland-

Richard Israel, an Annapolis alderman, historian and storyteller, remembers the year he had two Christmas trees.

It had to do with the fact that Israel's father, Floyd Israel, was a professional chemist.

It had to do with an experiment gone bad.

"I grew up in Hutchinson, Kansas, and we had had a fire in our house," Israel said. "It damaged the house, so we had to vacate, but we had moved back in, in time for Christmas. But it left my parents very fire conscious."

Israel said his family, despite the name, had always been Christian. In fact, his mother's family had been Presbyterians until the local Episcopal church started paying one of Richard Israel's ancestors a dime each week to sing in the choir because of his excellent voice. The family switched denominations.

Israel was an only child, and his parents always put up the Christmas tree on his birthday, Dec. 18.

This particular Christmas season was 1948, when Israel was 5 years old.

"My father decided to fire-proof the Christmas tree. He mixed up some concoction in his laboratory," Israel said.

More here-

http://www.hometownannapolis.com/news/top/2010/12/26-50/A-Christmas-tree-experiment-gone-chemically-wrong.html?ne=1

Bishop bridges the chasm between faith and science

From Chicago-

As a trained oceanographer, pilot and high-profile prelate, Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori seems like the ideal ambassador to bridge the widening chasm between faith and science.

She will step up to that challenge Friday in Chicago when she champions collaboration between the religion and health care communities at two area hospitals.

During a public lecture at Rush University Medical Center, Jefferts Schori is expected to discuss healing ministries that Episcopal congregations have developed around the world. Later that day, she is expected to ordain Stroger Hospital's first paid trauma chaplain.

Elected in 2006 for a nine-year term, Jefferts Schori immediately set out to make the United Nations Millennium Development Goals — eight global priorities to help the world's poorest — the hallmark of her tenure.

"Religion is one of those institutions that crosses national boundaries, said the Rev. James Risk, the executive director of Bishop Anderson House, the Episcopal Church's ministry serving the Illinois Medical District, who invited her to Chicago soon after she was elected. "If we're going to meet human needs, we need to be working together. … Science and faith will do more together to meet the challenges as a species than we will apart."

More here-

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/religion/ct-met-episcopal-bishop-science-20101202,0,6205345.story

Do you think quantum physics lends itself to religious belief?

From Canada-

Rev. KEVIN FLYNN is an Anglican priest and director of the Anglican studies program at Saint Paul University.

I know very little about quantum physics and probably misunderstand a great deal even of that. The writer from whom I've learned most is Sir John Polkinghorne. Polkinghorne is an Anglican priest and theologian, a quantum physicist, fellow of the Royal Society and winner of the Templeton prize. Author of many books, his Quarks, Chaos and Christianity: Questions to Science and Religion, is a stimulating discussion of issues both scientific and theological. He is the very type of the believer who quests after truth wherever it may be found.

Thus he writes, "Many people seem to think that faith involves shutting one's eyes, gritting one's teeth, and believing X impossible things before breakfast ... Not at all! Faith may involve a leap, but it's a leap into the light, not the dark. The aim of the religious quest, like that of the scientific quest, is to seek motivated belief about what is the case ..." He contends that theologians and scientists have much in common in the intellectual rigour both require for their inquiry.

Many people will likely appreciate Polkinghorne's ability to bridge the gaps between science and faith. Even more, perhaps, will share with him the great sense of wonder and awe that a study of this amazing universe gives rise to. Quantum physics pushes us to see ourselves, not as discreet individuals, but as members of a complex lattice-work of relationships. Indeed, relatedness goes beyond human beings and connects everything. At times, it's difficult to know whether one is reading theology or religion; it can seem more like poetry. Perhaps that's the most helpful dimension of quantum physics: that it break us out of world views, either scientific or religious, which limit vision and thus proscribe hope.



Read more:

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/life/think+quantum+physics+lends+itself+religious+belief/3895857/story.html#ixzz16ZtKx7v0

Anglican cleric tries to reconcile religion and science

From San Diego-

His scientific credentials are unassailable. His theological education and ordination as an Anglican cleric likewise cannot be questioned.

So why are the efforts of the Rev. John Polkinghorne to reconcile science and religion denigrated by some scientists and some believers?

“There are fundamentalists on both sides,” Polkinghorne said in an interview Tuesday at Point Loma Nazarene University. “I think both of them are wrong. I am in the middle. I want to take both science and religion appropriately seriously.”

San Diego County residents can hear Polkinghorne speak on “The Search for Truth in Science & Theology” at an 11 a.m. free public lecture Wednesday at the university, the last in a series of four talks.

Though perhaps not widely known here, the 80-year-old Polkinghorne is a leading figure in his home country of England in the discussion over the intersection of religion and science and beyond. He helped write the country’s guidelines on stem cell research and medical ethics.

More here-

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/nov/16/anglican-cleric-tries-reconcile-religion-and-scien/

Rescuing Galileo from Scientism

From The Living Church-

“Eppur si muove (and yet it does move).” So Galileo most certainly did not say at the end of his infamous trial in 1633. He was, of course, eventually proven right, more or less. But by then he had been in his expensive and ornate grave the better part of a century, having spent the last 11 of his 78 years under house arrest in his palatial estate, following his second trial. The first had been in 1616 and its outcome was then, and has been since, much disputed.

What is not in dispute is that this trial of Galileo is one of the most carefully studied events in the history of science and the Church, one about which endless books and plays have been written, debating points scored, and cultural battles fought. It is to the political (and too often propagandistic) uses to which the affair has been put that Galileo Observed is addressed. The authors begin with William Draper and Andrew White’s Victorian Era mythologizing about the trial as a major battlefield in their supposed “war of science and religion,” demonstrating that neither trial had much to do with any obscurantist opposition of the Roman Catholic Church to the scientific enterprise or excessive devotion to literalist hermeneutics. Though, to be sure, there were elements of these things in play, as the Church of the time was cautious with regard to developments in cosmology that were sweeping the scientific world.

Nor was it simply a matter of a feckless and arrogant Galileo bringing condemnation on himself, as the authors note when they evaluate Arthur Koestler’s 1959 novel The Sleepwalkers. Though again, it cannot be ignored that Galileo was possessed of an often prickly and difficult persona, refusing to accept Tycho Brahe’s observations of comets and at times belittling Kepler, whose most important scientific achievements Galileo mostly rejected (like most natural philosophers from ancient times, Galileo considered long-distance interactions an impossibility and so discounted Kepler’s claims of lunar gravitational pull as the cause of the tides, preferring his own claim that they resulted from the motion of Earth; he also rejected Kepler’s theory of elliptical planetary motion, preferring the more traditional — and incorrect — assumption of circular orbits).

More here-

http://www.livingchurch.org/news/news-updates/2010/7/23/review-essay-rescuing-galileo-from-scientism

Brain unable to understand existence of God: expert

From Canada-

One of the world’s foremost neuroscientists is about to tell some of the world’s foremost theologians the bad news: God may exist, but the human brain is simply not capable of knowing that for sure.

Georg Northoff, research director of Mind, Brain Imaging, and Neuroethics at the University of Ottawa’s Institute of Mental Health Research, will speak March 23 to several hundred theologians at the University of Marburg, in Germany. The 500-year-old school has produced such towering intellects as theologian Paul Tillich and philosopher Martin Heidegger.

Northoff, internationally recognized for his research into brain function, will be the only scientist to speak to the group.

“We will never be able to answer the existence of God,” he said this week from his office at the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre. “There is a limit because of the way the brain functions. (That) limit . . . is the price we to pay for consciousness.

“We can research the neuro-mechanism into belief, but we cannot say anything about God. That’s where we have to go to philosophy.”

To any theologian, or simple man of faith, the fact that science doesn’t have all the answers seems laughably self-evident.

More here-

http://www.vancouversun.com/life/Brain+unable+understand+existence+expert/2682486/story.html

At 150, Darwin's 'Origin' Stirs Even More Debate

From NPR-

One hundred fifty years ago, a book appeared in England that changed the world.

Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species has been called the most important book ever written. Introducing the theory of evolution by natural selection, Darwin's book fundamentally altered how scientists look at the natural world, and continues to frame biological research today.

Since the day it appeared, the book has been controversial. But surprisingly, it may be more controversial today than when it first appeared. That's because by 1859, there had been several books on evolution published in Britain.

"The most famous example being a book that came out in Victorian Britain in 1844 — an anonymous best-seller," says Jim Endersby. "It was called The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation."

Endersby is a professor of the history of science at the University of Sussex and the author of an introduction to a commemorative edition of On the Origins of Species published by Cambridge University.

He says The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation may have captured the popular imagination, but it was lambasted by scientists for its multiple factual errors, and by the clergy for its affront to religious dogma. Darwin's book got a much more positive reception.

"What really impressed people with Darwin's work was not so much the idea itself, but the book," says Endersby. "It was the fact that there was so much detail, so much evidence."

More here-


http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120692695

Quarks, Chaos & Christianity

SMcK foreword: RJS's question below stunned me this morning. Did God create in such a way that the laws of nature were how he created, so that expecting something outside the laws of nature is looking for the wrong thing? And I wonder how you define miracle: Is it an "interpretive" word or the event itself? Anyway, here's the post by RJS:

John Polkinghorne has written an excellent little book Quarks, Chaos & Christianity ruminating on questions related to science and religion. Polkinghorne is a theoretical physicist and an Anglican priest - and his thoughts are always worth considering. Today I would like to look at the chapter in this book on miracles. This discussion, I think, has bearing on the issues related to evolution, creation, and Intelligent Design.

Should we expect the effects of God's intelligent design of creation to be empirically discernible? Did God use natural or miraculous means?

First we must consider what is meant by "miracle." Polkinghorne considers three kinds of miracles in scripture. Miracles arising from normal human abilities possessed to an extraordinary degree, miracles involving the timing or occurrence of natural events, and miracles involving events contrary to nature.

More here-

http://blog.beliefnet.com/jesuscreed/2009/06/what-about-miracles-rjs.html

Non-Debate Between Godless Humanists and Religious Kooks

From an Episcopal Priest in Kansas-

This week, National Public Radio has been doing a series of stories about “the Science of Spirituality.” The stories focus on the ways that our brains work in regard to such things as spiritual visions, near-death experiences and the impact of prayer on health and well-being. Emphasis is put on the fact that our brains are electro-chemical organs that are the very basis of human experience. But the stories have been intentional about not dismissing the real possibility of God. Instead, the journalists present the idea that perhaps the electro-chemical processes are what make it possible for us to comprehend and connect to something more than ourselves.

As an Episcopal priest, I find such stories interesting because they address issues that I deal with directly within my vocation. They also appeal to me because as an Episcopalian, I come from the Anglican branch of Christianity that buried Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton front and center within the confines of one of our most sacred shrines, Westminster Abbey. I appreciate such an approach because my religious belief is based upon the notion of balancing Scripture, Tradition and Reason, especially when it may force me from my own comfort zones and into a deeper encounter with God.

But recently I have come to appreciate such an approach to science and religion because of the mostly non-fruitful and downright derogatory ways that a few scientists and religious apologists have carried on in the public forum. Unfortunately, where science and religion are concerned, real dialogue is usually bypassed in favor of posted agendas.

All too often scientific method is used to justify an academic skepticism that degrades into a belittlement of all things having to do with faith and spirituality. While in the other camp, religion is often used in both silly and tragic ways to justify forms of ignorance about, and prejudice towards, the reality of the human condition and the cosmos as a whole.

More here-

http://www.emporiagazette.com/news/2009/may/22/nondebate_between_godless_humanists_and_religious_/