science and religion - general Flashcards
fundamental questions
o Are creationism and evolution in opposition?
o Some development from our previous lecture
o How might we reconcile our understanding of the physical world with the idea of God intervening? In other words, what is God’s relationship to the physical realm?
new atheists
o This group strongly associate religious practice of any kind with irrationality
o One approach is what conservatives often term ‘liberal religion’ which in the West (influenced by the Enlightenment) has accommodated rationality:
♣ They dismiss the miraculous and extraordinary side of religion
♣ They critique sacred texts in a manner that explains away accounts that are ‘irrational’ – Jesus didn’t actually walk on water, there must be some unusual physical phenomenon that explains this – or perhaps it was just made up
o ‘New Atheists’ seek to develop a comprehensive approach, but we should ask the question how else might we deal with this? Are the New Atheists correct in their assumptions? Do they reflect a significant movement of people?
o We may develop the question about whether they are ‘right’ probably in another course, but here we want to understand what people actually think and believe about creation and evolution
was the enlightenment anti-Xian?
• The French Revolution with its anti-religious agenda is held as the example
o In reality, scholarship shows that there were many ‘enlightenments’ with the French version being atypical
• In Germany, for instance, the Enlightenment was a Protestant Christian initiative, which largely took place within the church
• It is also clear that many Catholics also engaged in the process
• An ‘enlightened’ view developed somewhere between fanaticism and superstition at one extreme, and irreligion and atheism at the other
• This also challenges the idea that religious involvement in social and political matters is necessarily retrograde – Christian, Islamic, Hindu and other ideas have for millennia challenged political, social and philosophical ideas
reformation/enlightenment views
- It would be wrong to say that 17th and early 18th century English Protestants were ‘victims’ of secular rationalism
- They were deeply concerned about both religious fanaticism and secularism
- They sought ‘reason’ as the best protection against fanaticism
- This English led phenomenon because influential all over Europe
- ‘Revelation’ and ‘reason’ work together by focussing on the moral fundamentals of Christian faith
- Fundamental aspects of Christian faith could be verified by natural science
- Newton was among these thinkers – although beware, as Newton was an avowed Arian! (but note Einstein wasn’t – see Space, Time and the Incarnation by T F Torrance!)
levi strauss
• The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) – seminal study, seeking to mine basic universal principles of marriage from a huge amount of data
o His interpretation is universalist, and he assumes a structuralist approach, in other words he assumes that fundamental structural principles underlie the data
o But his interpretation depends on fundamental philosophical assumptions about the world, which may be difficult to prove scientifically!
contrast relativists
• Contrast relativists, who perceive the world as being composed of diverse rationality
o This group of thinkers focus strongly on local data, which they see as a way of avoiding insensitive analytic errors
o They seek to avoid generalisations, or perhaps rather they are very cautious about drawing them
• What you need to see here is that how data is interpreted significantly depends on some assumptions that are made – rather than the data forming those assumptions
the role of belief
- also questions on belief and doubt in religion
The role of belief, which also allows for doubt, is not always an obvious component of religious practice. Some outsiders think of religious belief as purely fundamentalist and refusing to change even in the face of substantial evidence against its position. This is the view adopted by many with a scientific worldview. The New Atheist movement attacks religious fundamentalism at its core for apparently refusing to doubt their own position.
