{"id":45014,"date":"2017-11-24T12:02:46","date_gmt":"2017-11-24T19:02:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=45014"},"modified":"2017-11-24T16:46:36","modified_gmt":"2017-11-24T23:46:36","slug":"science-progresses-religion-doesnt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2017\/11\/science-progresses-religion-doesnt.html","title":{"rendered":"Science progresses! Religion doesn’t!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"President<\/a>
A view of BYU\u2019s Life Sciences Building from the north. (It\u2019s much taller-looking from the south.)
Wikimedia Commons<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I find the continual contrasts of science to religion made by certain atheists \u2014 including at least two who like to comment on my blog \u2014\u00a0exceedingly odd. \u00a0They incessantly\u00a0point out that science has given us new technologies and cures for polio and other diseases, while theology hasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

My response, on the whole, is \u201cSo what?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

To\u00a0me, this is\u00a0rather like criticizing the Houston Astros for their failure to score a single touchdown during the entire 2017 baseball season. \u00a0Or faulting Homer because his English was so bad. \u00a0Or lamenting Chaucer\u2019s uselessness in stamping out the bubonic plague or the irrelevance of an accurate knowledge of the Renaissance for building a highway bridge.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s like declaring that Thucydides, Tacitus, and Josephus are\u00a0no longer worth reading since we now have electric toasters. \u00a0Or that, in these days of jet air travel, there\u2019s no point in reflecting on\u00a0ethics or on moral issues. \u00a0Or that, now that we\u2019ve identified muons and positrons and covalent bonds, philosophy is obsolete. \u00a0Or that, for a society that has essentially eliminated small pox, Shakespeare, Bach, Monet, Dickens, Goethe, Dante, and Dostoevsky\u00a0are no longer relevant.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

(I understand that the people making these unfavorable contrasts of science to religion are likely to go on doing so, despite the fact that, from my point of view, they\u2019re committing something analogous to what Gilbert Ryle called a \u201ccategory mistake\u201d<\/a> \u2014 and, yes, I\u2019m well aware that Ryle was arguing against mind-brain dualism when he invented the term \u2014 but I retain the wan hope that, just perhaps, one of them will, in the manner of a Buddhist<\/a> monk reflecting on a Zen koan<\/em>, someday experience enlightenment.)<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve devoted at least two overlapping\u00a0columns to this topic \u2014 but, since the argument continues to be made, I think it advisable to call attention to them yet again:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIs the Bible more like Plato\u2019s or Copernicus\u2019 books?\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cScience, progress and religion\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Moreover, when these atheists observe that religion didn\u2019t give us modern cosmology or a flu vaccine, they seem, implicitly, to be claiming science and its achievements for atheism, which is an entirely unjustifiable bit of ideological imperialism. \u00a0It completely overlooks and ignores such figures (and their number could be multiplied many times over) as the cathedral canon Nicolaus Copernicus (father of the modern heliocentric concept of the solar system), the devoutly Christian Francis Collins (who oversaw the sequencing of the human genome), the deeply Lutheran Johannes Kepler (who made Copernicus\u2019s system accurate by positing elliptical rather than circular orbits for the planets), Father\u00a0Georges\u00a0Lema\u00eetre (the mathematical physicist who first formulated the concept of an expanding universe and the \u201cBig Bang\u201d), the great Isaac Newton (who devoted roughly as much time to commenting on the Bible as to inventing modern physics), the devoutly Jewish Arno Penzias (co-discoverer of the first empirical confirmation of the Big Bang, 1978 Nobel laureate, and father of a rabbi), Father Gregor Mendel (the founder\u00a0of modern genetics), the pious Muslim theoretical physicist Abdus Salam (winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize), the very Christian Allan Sandage (among the most prominent astronomers of the twentieth century), the great American Mormon chemist Henry Eyring (whose son currently serves as first counselor in the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), and\u00a0Theodosius Dobzhansky (the devoutly Russian Orthodox evolutionary biologist who was a principal figure in the synthesis of Darwinian evolutionary theory with genetics).<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a big, fat myth that all scientists are religion-hating atheists\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI was merely thinking God\u2019s thoughts after him,\u201d Johannes Kepler once wrote. \u00a0\u201cSince we astronomers are priests of the highest God in regard to the book of nature, it benefits us to be thoughtful, not of the glory of our minds, but rather, above all else, of the glory of God.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a recent column that I wrote for the Deseret News<\/em> that is also relevant to this issue:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cInheriting wind \u2014 false accounts of the supposed war between science, religion\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 I find the continual contrasts of science to religion made by certain atheists \u2014 including at least two who like to comment on my blog \u2014\u00a0exceedingly odd. \u00a0They incessantly\u00a0point out that science has given us new technologies and cures for polio and other diseases, while theology hasn\u2019t. \u00a0 My response, on the whole, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nScience progresses! 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