Science Versus Religion?

A few more notes from my files:

Modern science, it has been said, has dissolved Christianity just as if, metaphorically speaking, it had been dropped into a vat of nitric acid.  “His doctrine of evolution,” wrote the American atheist Robert Ingersoll (d. 1899) of Charles Darwin, “his doctrine of the survival of the fittest, his doctrine of the origin of species, has removed in every thinking mind the last vestige of orthodox Christianity.”[1]

D’Holbach, Système de la Nature (1770):

An atheist is someone who destroys human chimeras in order to call people back to nature, experience and reason.  He is a thinker who, having meditated on matter, its properties and ways of behaving, has no reason to imagine ideal forces, imaginary intelligences or rational beings in order to explain the phenomena of the universe or the operations of nature—which, far from making us know nature better, merely make it capricious, inexplicable and unknowable, useless for human happiness.[2]

According to many advocates of atheism, it was ignorance of the laws of nature that gave birth to the idea of God, and a deeper knowledge of what makes nature tick will ultimately liberate humanity from false notions about supernatural beings and divine powers.

The notion that science and religion are, have always been, and must everlastingly be at war with one another rests a very dubious reading of history.[3]

[1] Cited by McGrath, Twilight, 99.  

[2] Cited by Alister McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World (New York and London: Doubleday, 2004), 30.

[3] See, for example, Alister McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World (New York and London: Doubleday, 2004), 79-83; also Summer of the Gods.  McGrath is a historian of theology at Oxford University who holds a doctorate in biochemistry.

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And now for some things that have caught my interest in recent science-related news:

“Could Brain Scans Determine Guilt or Innocence in Court?”

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“Rosetta’s Lost Picture From Moments Before It Struck a Comet”

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Here’s a curious item:

“Archaeologists are mystified by ancient ‘gates’ in Saudi lava fields: Google Earth reveals hundreds of geoglyphs in the desert, possibly 9,000 years old.”

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Flying, earlier today, from Richmond, Virginia, to New York City, I found myself looking with fascination at the coastline of Virginia and Maryland, with all its complicated bays and inlets, and reflecting on “fractals” and the “coastline paradox.”  It turns out that the length of such a coastline is, in a sense, almost unknowable.  Virtually infinite.

The limits of human knowledge are fascinating and, sometimes, surprising.

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I’m not sure how much stock should be placed in such surveys.  I certainly don’t consider them “hard science.”  But this one certainly seems to suggest that Provo-Orem, the largely “Morgbot” or “Mor(m)on” community in “Utard” that my wife and I have adopted as our home may perhaps not be the horrible hell on Earth that some particularly zealous critics of Mormonism occasionally seek to portray it as:

“These Are the Happiest Cities in the United States”

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And this isn’t exactly science news, either.  But it comes from the eminent journal Nature.  And, more importantly, it should be widely known.  Iran continues to act, at least on such occasions, as a lawless nation.  This case is an outrage:

“Iranian scholar sentenced to death: Ahmadreza Djalali, a researcher in disaster medicine, has 20 days to appeal against his death sentence.”

Posted from New York City, New York