Religion and Science: Thoughts and Responses to Midterm Questions October 25, 2007
1. Name: Sonia Maria Sotelo
2. Username: SoniaMX2004
3. http://sweetthoughtsfromthesoul.blogspot.com/
4. I’ve missed 1 class; late to none
5. Yahoo posts can be found on website above (#3)
6. Oh no, I definitely haven’t been able to watch all the videos. Some are very interesting, but total there is too much for me. I haven’t watched all of the Beyond Belief conferences and have skimmed through some of the interviews w/ scientists.
7. I’ve read most, but had to skim through the super long (and dry) readings like “What is Life?” I didn’t get to finish Collins, but went through enough of it to get a general feel for his argument. I’ll definitely finish it when tests and midterms settle down because I’m interested about his views and interpretations.
8. Dawkins would argue that morality (something which Collins says point to God and makes humans unique) can be explained scientifically. He would claim that evolution is evidence enough to dismiss God. He’d think it was silly of God to wait around so long before humans came along if His original intent was to create humans. (However, evolution shows that there was anything but a wait time for humans came. How does Dawkins know that God wasn’t perfectly content “painting” in every little detail of the universe, and this planet, and life; who’s to say God “waits?” If He’s outside of time, it wouldn’t really seem that long at all.) Dawkins thinks that there’s no reason the universe needs God. It could be like this universe won the lottery and came into being. There’s no miracle or divine purpose; it’s just that we’re the winners despite the enormous odds against us. Dawkins would disagree w/ Collins’ view that science and religion can coexist and even help each other. He would think that if Collins really accepts evolution in biology, then he must also accept atheism in theology. He’d criticize Collins’ basis of faith as totally unscientific (which, yes, of course it is) and think that his own opinions and philosophies are completely scientific (which, no of course they’re not; humans are subjective. It’s only as a whole and in community that we can be objective).
9. Collins points out that the “god” most atheistic scientists think of is a god that is limited to the laws of nature and therefore science. The existence of this god can either be supported scientifically or tossed out. Dawkins easily tosses the idea out. However, Collins believes that God is waaaay more complex than anything we could even try to study scientifically. There was an interesting debate b/w the two in Time Magazine about a year ago regarding this very topic (God vs. Science). It’s found at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1555132-1,00.html “From my perspective, God cannot be completely contained within nature, and therefore God's existence is outside of science's ability to really weigh in” (Collins, Time interview). I think Collins could go further and suggest that a God that’s bigger than nature (because He created it) and bigger than science (because He created the humans that do science) can provide “evidence” for His existence in a variety of ways, many of which (sadly) people like Dawkins will probably never grasp because they are too wrapped up in the “faith” in their own limited minds (isn’t that scary?? I would think that scientists of all people are most aware of how little we are in comparison to the universe. How can they be so confident in themselves and their beliefs in regards to non-scientific, spiritual things?). In his book, Collins went into more detail about why specific parts of the Moral Law cannot be explained by evolution. He mentioned agape love, love which we get directly from God and can give to others; love which is unselfish and Christ centered versus self-centered.
10. Littlewood’s theory of large numbers says that since there are millions of events going on in our everyday lives, then it’s almost entirely expected that for every thousand events or so two (or maybe more) of those events could “intersect.” If we are able to pay attention to this intersection, then we could think of it as a meaningful coincidence. As Freeman Dyson put in when talking about miracles, “Littlewood’s law of miracles states that in the course of any normal person’s life, miracles happen at a rate of roughly one per month. The proof of the law is simple. During the time that we are awake and actively engaged in living our lives (roughly for 8 hours each day) we see and hear things happening at a rate of about one per second. So the total number of events that happen to us is about thirsty thousand per day, or about a million per month. With few exceptions, these events are not miracles because they are insignificant. The chance of a miracle is about one per million events. Therefore we should expect about one miracle to happen, on the average, every month. Broch tells stories of some amazing coincidences that happened to him and his friends, all of them easily explained as consequences of Littlewood's Law.” I still don’t understand how they came up with the “one per million” ratio. These aren’t scientific numbers in that I don’t think they sampled a large population and calculated how many events they experienced per day or month and how many were out of the ordinary, then took the mean of the population. But anyway, if a miracle can happen “once every month” then 1) how come I don’t get to experience more miracles?? 2) does that mean horrible, freak of nature, terrifyingly scary events should happen to me once per month too?? Things that are just “chance?” Because yeah I notice when it seems as if God has answered a prayer, but the “miracles” seem to correlate w/ prayer. I think I would be more aware of a frightening intersection/coincidence, though, and yet I’ve yet to experience one.
11. People turn to pseudoscience due to their desire for excitement, something more to this place we live in, a sense of control and additional knowledge that they wouldn’t have if they didn’t have their belief. In the long run, reproducible evidence cannot really be attained and these systems are not scientific. For example, I learned in my Nature of Science (SCED 404) class that astrology is an ancient system invented by the Babylonians, but their 12 part system is flawed because they left out the 13th constellation called Ophiuchus. Plus, as the Earth orbits the sun, the zodiac constellations that the sun passes in front of are different sizes and shapes and therefore the sun spends different lengths of time lined up with each (the Babylonians assigned equal amounts to time to each, though). Also, in my astronomy class I learned about Earth’s wobble effect and how our axis if a little off and so the North Pole doesn’t point in the same direction as before. So when we look at our horoscopes, they are way off. Despite this, people believe that their zodiac sign affects their everyday lives and they cling to anything positive and exciting they hear and get amazed when they experience a “self fulfilling prophecy.” However, why is it that some days your horoscope seems soooo “accurate” and others you have to just brush off because they are totally wrong? I guess we can attribute Littlewood for those rare instances, but for the most part, all attempts to demonstrate the association b/w birthdates and a particular set of “zodiac sign” traits have failed when using scientific procedures. Another pseudoscience is the belief in the existence of Big Foot. If we take the Big Foot sightings and apply Ockham’s Razor to it, then we would try to find a simple explanation to explain the given phenomena. It could be a combination of overactive imagination and blind expectation that drives people to see Big Foot after all the stories they’ve heard and fake video footage they’ve seen. However, last semester I watched a video in my Nature of Science class that was on pseudoscience and after dismissing the Lochness monster (which we could test and have tested by draining and exploring the water) and other such pseudosciences, they said they couldn’t really define Big Foot as pseudoscience because there were soooo many “eyewitness” encounters involving people who really believed what they saw. I can’t remember their explanation as to why it was different… darn. But yeah, I thought that was interesting and it surprised me that they couldn’t “officially” classify it as pseudoscience.
12. To some, Darwinian evolution finally provides an explanation of how life, including human life, came to be how it looks today without having to throw a god into the mix. Evolution by natural selection totally changed biology and has greatly improved upon what we know about the natural world. It explains a lot and is becoming more and more accepted in the
13. Dawkins views religion as a mind virus that we can’t get rid of and says that a “meme” is a unit of cultural transmission; an idea that is passed on. This meme seems to fight for an area of our brain. According to Dawkins, religion competes w/ logic, sense, science, etc (the “truth”) and bores holes into our brain. I imagine it as religion wiggling its way into our mind and holding fast, never fully letting go even if we want it to. You can’t really get it out of your brain, and when new ideas of science and truth enter the mind, religion will develop a whole bunch of antibodies that will attack it, saying “You’re wrong, you’re wrong. Get out!” I don’t really like how he says religion isn’t really a choice. If you’re born a certain religion, you die in that religion. It gets on my nerves when people say they were Christian since birth. I mean, I guess yeah they were brought up in that religion, but my definition of “Christian” is different. I think it’s really hard to love, revere, desire to obey and submit to God when you are just born, but hey, maybe they’re able to do it.
14. If by a mind parasite, Dawkins means that it is completely harmful and nothing good comes out for it, it just latches on for selfish reasons and slowly destroys you, then yes I think a believer would totally be appalled by that statement. I think there are plenty of great things religion brings that a pure science only, nothing else out there point of view could never bring. Scientists like Gingerich and Dyson would say that religion gives life meaning and humans a purpose. Technology is a byproduct of science; it is not science’s main intention. Who knows? Maybe science is a byproduct of religion, though not its main intention. Religion has unexpected products. It can create a passion and dedication that a nonreligious person could never fully experience. It makes people do heroic things (think of martyrs and full time missionaries). It’s like being in love: I know from experience that you do crazy things that to others would seem absurd and even foolish, but to show the other person love, you’d do anything. Some of science’s byproducts aren’t all that great either. Just take the atomic bomb we discussed in class. Science is capable of a lot of terrible things, too, not just medicine and cell phones.
15. According to science, the Big Bang theory is how the universe came into being. From a singularity, there was an explosion that made the universe expand out. It is widely accepted and is the dominant scientific theory of the origin of the universe. There are various types of evidence that support this, such as galaxies moving away and the discovery of cosmic background radiation. Our galaxy and solar system are just one of many in the universe. Left over star debris formed planets around the dense, hot, star the sun. Some scientists suggest that the creation of this world and the life on this planet can be explained by the probability “theory”, that with an infinite number of universes and galaxies, the odds are that at least one universe would have at least one planet that holds life. However, by scientific definition, this is not a theory (well supported explanation), rather it is a possible explanation (=hypothesis). Stephen Wolfram, the creator of Mathematica, uses programs that shows that complexity can be computationally reduced and can be replaced by an algorithmic program of simply 0’s and 1’s. So things that look “designed” have come from a simple, disordered initial state. Those who believe in a God that created the universe have varying views of how He did it, yet all agree that He was the first cause. God’s hand is behind all natural processes to some extent. Believers vary from fundamental, young earth creationists to such scientists as Francis Collins. I think that now-a-days, most believers would accept the Big Bang theory, so in my opinion the Big Bang theory (apart from the probability hypothesis) has the most persuasive scientific argument. Believers have their own apologetics and reasons to believe in God, but not everyone is so easy to persuade when it comes to spiritual things.
16. Stephen Jay Gould, a Harvard paleontologist, argued that religion and science can coexist, because they occupy separate, “airtight” boxes. They stick to their own domain and argue at different levels. Dawkins said, “I think that Gould's separate compartments was a purely political ploy to win middle-of-the-road religious people to the science camp. But it's a very empty idea. There are plenty of places where religion does not keep off the scientific turf. Any belief in miracles is flat contradictory not just to the facts of science but to the spirit of science” (Time Interview). There’s no wall that separates the two. In the God Delusion, Dawkins talked about Gould’s term NOMA (non-overlapping magisterial) and shares his dislike for the view. According to Gould, religion deals w/ the realm of morals while science deals with the realm of fact. They are two separate things, but Dawkins would say that’s crap because he views evolution as the way we received our morality. I think it’s safe to that Gould wouldn’t win the argument because even Collins thinks that religion and science do come in contact.
17. Neurology deals with the nervous system of people, and their perception of the world and their state of conscious being which is produced by their senses. It is a person’s present state. Ontology, on the other hand, is the ultimate overall being; actual reality. So when we confuse the two it is confusing that reality with our own limited understanding and view of the world. We assume we know it all. I’d say this is something we have to be careful about when it comes to trust in science to answer and explain every question we have. I don’t believe that science claims to be the ultimate way of knowing, but when people act as if it is, they are confusing their neurology with ontology.
18. First, we’d have to recognize that “randomness” in science doesn’t mean “no purpose” or whatever other conclusion we tend to jump to. It means that the pattern has yet to be figured out by science. Furthermore, “chance” as we see it may be an explanation for why there is free will in the world. Overall, God is in control, but He gives us enough of our space in order to make our own choices and not be His little boring robots. By giving the world its space could make it look as if things just happen randomly and without purpose, though in the long run (and it is a very loooooong one) God will be glorified.
19. “All manifestations, visions, and forms that are seen within are mental (illusory) creations” ~Faqir Chand, guru. Not everyone is able to have religious experiences and visions due to various reasons: bad karma, sin, or simply their minds are just incapable of an experience. It is suggested that those who don’t dream as much are less likely to have religious experiences than those who dream a lot, though personally I have trouble accepting this because just the opposite is true with my fiancé and myself. Religion from a sociological perspective is very important and useful during hard and distressing times. Those experiencing these difficulties are led back to their families and relying on them for support and encouragement.
20. Neitzsche’s notion pretty much says, “Hey, if you had to relive your life over and over again, wouldn’t you want to make it count?” So you’d want to start living a more meaningful life and rack up as many good times as possible because this is as good as it gets. If this were true, then this is all there is. We have no responsibility for our actions and no eternal consequence for our sins; no Hell. We have no hope of being with God (no Heaven) and if there were a God, He’d probably be super bored with the eternal replay, watching us make the same selfish, dumb mistakes over and over.
21. Edward O. Wilson is skeptic of standard faith, yet he wrote a book that urges believers and non-believers to unite over conservation of the environment. He thinks that we can find common goals and work together for the good of the world. However, his passion seems to go beyond environmental conservation. He seems to genuinely desire the coming together and working together of science and religion. He desires a unity of knowledge (humanity and science) in order to attain a more complete picture of life. For the sake of our education system and a more thorough understanding, he feels that these two disciplines need to communicate with each other.
22. Freemon Dyson, a mathematician and Owen Gingerich, an astronomer, are two scientists that claim to be believers in God. As a mathematician, Dyson can use his imagination and come up with theories that turn out to be true. He can have an explanation for the universe and find that it works out that way. To him, it makes sense that the nonphysical can explain the physical. As an astronomer, Gingerich doesn’t see merely chance when he’s looking at the universe. Many of the scientists in the Beyond the Belief conferences say that the reason they don’t believe in God is because after all their study of nature, they see no evidence for Him. This is different from Gingerich’s experience. Things that seem unintelligent, by chance, w/ out design to us may not be the case in the long run, we’re just limited to what we see right now and the small glimpses of the past. Scientifically speaking, “random” and “by chance” are just ways of saying that science has yet to reveal the pattern in which those things work. For Beyond Belief scientists to claim that as the reason they are atheist doesn’t really make sense to me because they are putting all their trust in science, which has its limitations.
23. My favorite topic in the field of Biology thus far is the study on the origin of life. I’ve never thought of God as a “god of the gaps,” rather, I admire science because it fills in the gaps of how God did what He did. My faith in God doesn’t rest on the way I think He did something, it’s just the simple fact that He did it. My faith’s focus is more on Jesus than creation and is confirmed and solidified through everyday experience as God proves Himself faithful in my relationships and my relationship w/ Him. While at the California Science Teachers Association conference this weekend, I attended a workshop on the Origins of Life and was fascinated as the astrochemist presented evidence for cosmogenesis, the hypothesis that life came to earth from space via comets and meteorites. All I could think was, “Oh cool, is that how God did it?” Just because we had missing pieces about nature, doesn’t mean that God can now be dismissed because we’re finding more and more information. Plus, I agree w/ Collins when he said, “A word of caution is needed when inserting specific divine action by God in this or any other area where scientific understanding is currently lacking… There are good reasons to believe in God, including the existence of mathematical principles and order in creation. They are positive reasons, based on knowledge, rather than default assumptions based on (a temporary) lack of knowledge” (The Language of God, pg. 93). Plus, I think we need God for way more than just this temporary life. If there is more than this life, then heck yeah we need to believe in God.
24. My favorite reading? Well, I guess it would have to be The God Delusion because it had me writing down notes and thoughts furiously in my notebook. It got my mind racing and made me seek out some answers, a few of which I’m still working on. It was hard to pick out the scientific reasons from the personal opinions, but overall it was fun.
25. Yes, it is against the very nature of science to be able to investigate the existence of such things as angels because there are no tests scientists could create that could produce reproducible evidence for their existence.
26. My favorite thing I learned thus far is probably all the random stories our professor shared with us during class. I was looking online to find more information about some of the cults mentioned in class and came across an article found at: http://www.culthelp.info/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=824&Itemid=10&limit=1&limitstart=1. In it, our professor was interviewed and shared more about all of the crazy adventures he has gone on. Hehe, what a character!
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