skip to main |
skip to sidebar
My friend Tim at A Blog with No Name has written a post on the subject of Science and Religion.
Here is a teaser: There is only one reality, whether you're looking at it through religious or scientific eyes. Science and religion both try to discover some truths about it. Truth can't contradict itself; so if they do discover truth, it must be consistent. It's no good to believe during the week that we evolved by natural selection, only to believe on Sundays that we were specially created out of the blue 6,000 years ago. Science and religion must both live in the same real world. Theology and science must both adapt in response to known evidence, as we make more sense of the world we are in. Otherwise we're disconnecting ourselves from the world and our beliefs are simply attractive ideas which have nothing to do with reality.
Do we want reality, or fantasy? I think that if we're basing our lives on it, we should go for reality. Or at least, the closest we can get to reality.
The issues raised in this post along with a few other remarks I've seen in the media this week have got me thinking.
In the Anita Roddick interview, she talked about being surprised at a Greenbelt festival to find out that this Christian festival is'big...organised....joyful...free'. She said I have fallen for the zeitgeist that says anybody who has a religious inclination has no sense of rationale or intellectual understanding and therefore should be dismissed. She talked of her surprise in finding that Christians were involved in trade justice.
Separately, I was struck by a comment on this post on the New Statesman blog (HT to Methodist Preacher) that: Many people find that a pre-scientific, Biblical world-view is incompatible with an acceptance of a scientific account of human origins and the history of planet Earth.. This suggested to me a wholesale writing-off of Christianity on the basis that it demands the acceptance of an ancient cosmology. Maybe in this culture, the first Good News we have to proclaim as Christians is that we are passionate supporters of trade and ecnomic justice and that Christian faith is compatible with modern science? Just thinking out loud.
