science and religion

Numerous studies showing that decision-making appears to occur well before we believe we’ve made the decision, but that doesn’t mean it’s time to give up on free will just yet.

Artist Jonathon Keats feels there is a complete lack of curiosity on the part of the average person to ask the playful and profound questions at the heart of human existence. The hoi polloi wait, Keats laments, for the artist to tell us the meaning of their art, the scientist to tell us how the world works, and the religious leader to tell us right from wrong. We have become passive creatures. To help combat this lethargy, Keats has turned to pornography. It began a couple of years ago with plants—showing zinnias uncensored footage of explicit pollination acts—but now it has escalated to porn for God.

Humanity may be a mystery, but what about the human who virtually enters a spec of dust and is able to learn the mysteries of dustness? Doesn’t this kind of leap require us to adopt a kind of awe and reverence for the mysteries outside the human as well?

“The earth will end only when God says time to be over”

The Dalai Lama was just in Atlanta, visiting Emory University’s “Emory-Tibet Science Initiative.” There he spoke about the easy relationship between Buddhism and science. When you whittle it down to its essence, Buddhism is very simple and amenable to Enlightenment types.

Sam Harris latest, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, is undermined by poor scholarship, ad hominem attacks and an obsession with religion.

The humanist community assembled many of its leading lights recently to award Richard Dawkins a prize for furthering rational thought. A secular humanist convention is not the witches’ coven that some sheltered theists might expect. I did not see anyone smoking and never heard a profane word. Drinking at the reception was modest by anyone but a teetotaler’s standards, and far less than at the Episcopal fundraiser I’d attended the previous week. Also unlike the Episcopal affair, I did not spot a single same-sex couple. I began to wonder how much fun these people, freed from religion’s rules, were having with their liberty.

It didn’t help that Galileo would satirize and mock the Church hierarchy.

One wonders how religious leaders might have exercised a more meaningful presence in the event as it unfolded and was engaged across a global digital landscape. As I scanned the emerging Facebook communities throughout the day and monitored Twitter feeds and news site comments, it was clear that few religious leaders were participating in what has to have been the most significant global spiritual conversation that has ever taken place on Earth.

Skepticism means having the courage to suspend one’s set of beliefs long enough to take another set of beliefs really seriously. That is, real skepticism means disbelieving. So be as skeptical as possible but as open as possible, and remember that if one refuses to investigate religion in this way, then that is known as contempt prior to investigation—and is the death of the life of the mind.