The truth about scientists and religion?

I thought this book review, from today’s WaPo, was worth highlighting:

Rice University sociologist Elaine Ecklund offers a fresh perspective on this debate in “Science vs. Religion.” Rather than offering another polemic, she builds on a detailed survey of almost 1,700 scientists at elite American research universities — the most comprehensive such study to date. These surveys and 275 lengthy follow-up interviews reveal that scientists often practice a closeted faith. They worry how their peers would react to learning about their religious views.

Fully half of these top scientists are religious. Only five of the 275 interviewees actively oppose religion. Even among the third who are atheists, many consider themselves “spiritual.” One describes this spiritual atheism as being rooted in “wonder about the complexity and the majesty of existence,” a sentiment many nonscientists — religious or not — would recognize.

More about the book here.

I’ll just mention that most of the practicing scientists I know are religious. But I usually meet them at church, so, a bit of a selection bias there.

Sermon questions left hanging

Today was our first attempt at church-going since the baby was born. We made it about half-way through before she started to fuss, and we’re still skittish enough about our baby-comforting skills that we decided to abscond.

What I did manage to catch from the part of the sermon I heard–it was Trinity Sunday–was a reference to Meister Eckhart and one to Hildegard of Bingen. I wonder where the preacher (a guest preacher) was going with those? And did he ever explain the relevance of the passage from Proverbs we read to the idea of the Trinity? I’m guessing the average parishoner might not make the connection to Wisdom Christology.

Administrative note

I’ve been giving the blogroll a long-overdue pruning and updating. A few sites have been removed that, while not officially inactive, haven’t been updated in a looong time (usually 6 months or more). But I’m always happy to re-link any blog that becomes active again. This all, of course, assumes that people still find blogrolls useful in these days of RSS feeds, Twitter, etc.

Varieties of liberalism

This post (via Crooked Timber) is about British politics, but it nicely lays out the distinction between “economic liberalism” and “social liberalism,” or what we in the U.S. would call “market liberalism” (or libertarianism) and egalitarian or left-liberalism.

For economic (or market) liberals,

there is at times a clear sense that the free market produces a distribution of income and wealth which is a kind of natural or moral baseline. It is departures from the baseline that have to be justified.

For egalitarian liberals, by contrast,

the ‘free market’ is simply one possible ‘basic structure’ for society along with an indefinite range of other possibilities. It has no morally privileged position. So how do we choose which ‘basic structure’ to have? Their answer is that we try to identify principles of social justice and then design a basic structure – including, if necessary, appropriate tax-transfer arrangements – to achieve justice so understood. On this view, taxation and ‘redistribution’ are not invasions into people’s pockets, a taking of what is presumptively already, primevally ‘theirs’. Tax-transfers are a way of ensuring that people do not pocket, through the market, more (or less) than they are genuinely entitled to. Tax-transfer schemes define entitlement; they do not invade it.

Of course, while the UK has at least one party (Labour) that is, theoretically, devoted to this egalitarian ideal, the U.S. has, essentially, more and less severe versions of market liberalism seasoned with generous dollops of crony capitalism.

More on HSUS vs. big ag

Thanks to commenter Hillary, who identified herself as affiliated with the Humane Society of the United States, for pointing out another (lengthy) article on HSUS’s political strategy and the controversy it’s engendered. Definitely worth a read.

The triumphant return of Friday Metal!

The trouble with tradition

Lutheran theologian Robert Benne laments the ELCA’s departure from the “Great Tradition” of marginalizing gay people and its descent into the dreaded “liberal Protestantism.” The problem, it seems, is that the ELCA hasn’t given sufficient weight to the opinions of white male pastors and theologians.

One thing I’ve noticed is that whenever someone makes an appeal to tradition (or Tradition), there will always come along someone else who’s more traditional than thou. Some of Benne’s commenters are already pointing out that the real problems began when Lutherans abandoned biblical inerrancy (or broke away from Rome). It’s also worth pointing out that some of our most outspoken “traditionalists” on gay relationships are “liberals” on questions like women’s ordination. And almost no Lutherans take the traditionalist position on artificial birth control. One man’s traditionalist, it turns out, is another man’s liberal–or heretic.

Which isn’t to say that it’s impossible to be a consistent traditionalist. But such a consistency would have to be purchased at the price of plausibility. Why, after all, should we think that all the interesting moral or theological questions were already answered in the first (or fourth, or thirteenth, or sixteenth) century? The Bible itself contains passages where people are wrestling with–and revising–their received tradition (e.g., the fifteenth chapter of Acts). This seems necessary if tradition is to be a resource of wisdom and inspiration and not an ideological rationalization of power and privilege.

Natural theology or theology of nature?

Following up a bit on this post…

In his book Religion and Science, which is based on his Gifford Lectures, Ian Barbour distinguishes between natural theology and the theology of nature. Natural theology tries to prove God’s existence by appealing to some feature of the created order. Barbour denies that natural theology can achieve its aim, but still sees a positive role for it:

I do not believe that design arguments of this kind are conclusive when taken alone. However, they can play a supportive role as part of a theology of nature. (Religion and Science, pp. 246-7)

A theology of nature differs from natural theology in that it offers a religious interpretation of the natural world by incorporating the picture of the world revealed by science into theology. Barbour continues:

Instead of a natural theology, I advocate a theology of nature, which is based primarily on religious experience and the life of the religious community but which includes some reformulation of traditional doctrines in the light of science. Theological doctrines start as human interpretations of individual and communal experience and are therefore subject to revision. Our understanding of God’s relation to nature always reflects our view of nature. (p. 247)

A theology of nature tries to relate, in an intellectually satisfying way, the findings of science to theology. For example, as I pointed out before, the “limit” or “boundary” questions raised by modern cosmology may not provide proof of God’s existence, but they may shed light on the relation between the Creator and creation. Similarly, the conclusions of evolutionary biology provide an opportunity for re-thinking ideas of human nature that Christians have inherited from their tradition. As Barbour argues, an evolutionary perspective blurs, or at lest softens, the sharp distinction between humanity and the rest of nature that the tradition sometimes tried to draw (by, for example, insisting that human beings alone had “immortal souls”).

Such a theology of nature allows both science and religion to shed light on each other without trying either to deduce scientific conclusions from religious doctrine (as fundamentalists do) or derive theological doctrine from science (as more zealous proponents of the “God hypothesis” might like). It also entails that theology will always be, to some extent, provisional, requiring revision as our understanding of nature changes.

“The Age of Tough Oil”

Elizabeth Kolbert on the disaster in the Gulf.

The apotheosis of Dr. Shephard

I’m still not entirely sure what I think about the controversial Lost finale (short version: my heart liked it, but my head is skeptical), but the best, or at least most enthusiastic, apology for it I’ve read has to be this exhaustive re-cap from Jeff “Doc” Jensen at Entertainment Weekly: part 1, part 2.