This seems immensely unlikely to me. He may have not spoken much about his religious views to please his wife but it can’t have had anything to do with “what other believers might do”. Being an aethiest scientist at Cambridge in the 70s and 80s would have attracted no comment at all. Being outwardly religious would have attracted more comment in England at that time (or now).
I didn’t watch the video, but I was struck by the following comment in the response:
[QUOTE=PZ Myers]
Where Tsiaras sees ineffable unapproachable mystery, I see interesting problems to be solved.
[/QUOTE]
The way I see it, this whole thing isn’t about the religious mindset vs. the scientific mindset; it’s about the analytical mindset vs. the wondering mindset. It’s the people who want to pick things apart and see how they work, who want to explain things (and certainly some religious people fall into this category), vs. on the other hand the people who wax poetic, the way Walt Whitman does in When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer.
So do lions and gazelles. You’re right: religion and science can be the best of friends, provided religion is willing to admit it got its origin stories wrong, much of its history wrong, most of its assumptions about human biology and the natural world wrong— in fact a rather shocking percentage of everything it claims to be true (and dictated to us by God Himself or his prophets) pretty much straight-up, no question, couldn’t-be-wronger capital “R” Rong.
I haven’t checked lately— how’s that coming along?
No, I’m not using any double standard. I’ll also freely say that science cannot prove that unicorns don’t exist (unless they prove a horse with a horn on its head is biologically impossible), it can’t prove dualism is incorrect, and it can’t prove that invisible, ethereal, meowing cats do/do not cause electromagnetism.
It’s silly to believe all of those things (with maybe the exception of dualism, not that I like it), but science cannot disprove them. People shouldn’t believe them, Occam’s Razor is a very powerful, useful, and usually correct tool of logic, but there are many things, religion included, that are logically impossible for science to literally prove false.
Nothing about that sentence is strange to you? :dubious:
Well, it scans better if you leave his sciencey words in there; he actually said ‘the *guiding principle *of the universe is love’.
“Er… how so, Professor kanicbird?”
It’s coming along well.
Mainstream Christianity doesn’t bother to deal with things like natural history anymore and hasn’t for quite a while. What it does do is try to answer questions like “what should the goals of my life be?”, “how should I treat other people?”. Science can’t answer those questions–it can only address how things are, not how they ought to be.
It’s only a vocal fringe of Christians who insist on a literal interpretation of the bible who get worked up against science.
I always hear this. I hear it from the Christians I know too. But, they all pray. Explain that. I mean, explain why Christians who are only vaguely believing that love rules the universe or some such takes the time to pray to a god that they feel will answer prayers.
Praying is not much different than meditating, or writing in your diary, or chatting with your best old friend. It’s a way to help understand your emotions, wants, hopes, etc.
As a Christian, I don’t deny that, but I also believe in a God who does hear, and may answer, my prayers. It’s not just a one-sided conversation the way writing in a diary is.
This is what I hear from most Christians I know.
My mistake. Now a scientist has to prove the universe is intelligent to have principles. I can picture large numbers of horn like contraptions pointing towards space like in ‘Horton hears a Who’.
Working out very nicely, thank you for asking. Remember what you hear on your telly etc is NOT a reflection of mainstream Christianity.
FFS people think that religion is stuck in some historical loop.
In a lot of places, it is. Enough so that calling it mainstream is reasonable accurate in those areas.
Almost right:
Chemistry>Engineering>Physics>Math>Philosophy
I believe religion is somewhat to the right of those. Or maybe it just kind of hovers above it all, looking misty and blurry.
Everyone has their failings…it’s just some are better accepting and tolerating their own as well as others.
But that is not what is being said, the mainstream modern christian is being compared to people caught in a historical dead end. You may as well compare us to flat earthers.
And why not?
I freely admit that I am the posterboy of small reference pools and the finger I keep on the societal pulse may have accidentally been placed on its knee. However my impression of the “average” christain in america is that they are distrustful of evolution, especially if it’s not “intelligent design”, and that they think that God is intervening left and right in human affairs. And we definitely need to have mideval social standards regarding marriage, sex, and sexuality.
To be fair, my spider-sense tells me that flat or young earthers are indeed in the minority.