A Priest And A Rabbi Walk Into A Science Lab

I guess today is religion versus faith day in Ottawa because the Ottawa Citizen online has a rabbi AND a priest talking about it.

Here’s the priest:

We have come to think science handles facts whereas religion deals with beliefs that are personal opinions. Science, however, is silent on some of the most important questions we have: Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? Some people think that because these questions cannot be satisfactorily answered by science, they have no answer.

That’s because they have no answer. The universe does not exist for our pleasure. The meaning of your life is whatever meaning you attach to it. He is very confused about the difference between beliefs and facts:

We fail to acknowledge that science and religion share one important thing in common: the need for all forms of knowledge to take some things “on faith” when we look for the truth. Very few people today, for example, know much about particle physics: when read an article about quarks, we take “on faith” that the scientist who wrote it has told us the truth. People sometimes consider, however, the first-hand accounts in the Gospels of the witnesses of Christ’s life, death and resurrection to be mere opinions (a.k.a. beliefs).

This is a profoundly ignorant statement. Maybe I don’t know much about quarks, but the scientists who have discovered them have written peer-reviewed papers based upon experimentation performed in particle accelerators. I don’t need faith to accept that.

As for this business about first-hand accounts in the Gospels, there is no such thing. Not a single one of the Gospel writers ever met Jesus. Mark is the earliest one and its author, who was not a person named Mark, wrote it decades after Jesus’ death. The others all came later. The books are riddled with contradictory versions of the story. No scholar of the New Testament denies this. No one who has read the books could miss this.

Also weighing in this morning is homo-obsessed Orthodox rabbi Reuven Bulka, author of One Man, One Woman, One Lifetime, member of the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, and converter to Judaism of Dr. Laura Schlessinger. He actually sounds somewhat more reasonable than his Catholic colleague:

…[T]he most crucial point of conflict between and science and religion is the mistaken presumption that religion and science are in conflict. Scientists err when they presume that religion contradicts science, and religionists err when they assume that science precludes religion.

He goes on to point out that evolution and science don’t conflict. Maybe not for him, but for millions of people they do. That’s why over half of Americans are young earth creationists.

Then he says something else that I can definitely agree with:

The bottom line is that science cannot prove the non-existence of God any more than any religion can prove the existence of God.

How am I able to say that religion cannot prove the existence of God? Simply because if the proof were truly irrefutable, everyone would be a believer. Or, to put it more accurately, no one would be a believer, because everyone would “know” that God exists by virtue of the proof, and true belief would disappear.

Belief is, after all, different from unassailable fact.

Very nice sounding indeed. Unfortunately, his lifelong assault on gays can’t derive from any kind of scientific approach since the scientific community has no problem with homosexuality. It can only be a result of his religious beliefs.

For Bulka the problem isn’t his approach to science. It’s his hypocrisy.