NewsTrust - Science and Religion - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

Atheism: class is a distraction

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Carlo Strenger - Oct. 15 (Opinion) - Reading through some of the contributions on class and atheism I am struck by a glaring omission. Brown's opening salvo has been to argue that atheism can be a class thing worn for the status it presumably imparts in certain circles – thus implying that there might not be an intrinsic, intellectual reason for choosing atheism. Nick Spencer shows that there is indeed a correlation between educational level and atheism. In the US this phenomenon is far more pronounced: a recent Pew survey shows that among scientists in the US only one-third believe in God, as opposed to 83% in the general population.

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Author’s Personal Forecast: Not Always Sunny, but Pleasantly Skeptical

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Patricia Cohen - Oct. 10 (Review) - Barbara Ehrenreich wants to make clear that she is not a spoilsport. “No one can call me a sourpuss,” she declared. “I have a big foot in the joy camp.” She is the author of “Dancing in the Streets,” a history of “collective joy,” she notes, and a lot of fun at parties. So her new book, “Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America,” should not be mistaken for a curmudgeonly rant. It is serious social history. Many of the 17 books that Ms. Ehrenreich has written during the past three and half decades have taken her into alien worlds. In her fantastically successful 2001 book, “Nickel and Dimed,” for example, she details her experience of trying to get by on the salary of an unskilled, minimum-wage worker. By contrast, this newest volume is based on her stay in a world that she became intimately familiar with: the smiley-faced, pink-ribboned, positive-thinking culture that surrounds breast cancer patients. Ms. Ehrenreich found out she had the disease in 2000, and the news left her dazed, fearful and, most of all, angry. What she found when she sought information and support, however, was cheerfulness, and that shocked her. “There were exhortations to be positive,” Ms. Ehrenreich said. She had stopped for lunch recently in Manhattan’s theater district after meeting with her publisher at Metropolitan Books, and before returning to Alexandria, Va., where she moved two years ago to be close to her daughter and grandchildren. Smartly dressed in pants and a sweater with black rectangular glasses that frame her blue eyes, Ms. Ehrenreich, 68, looks like someone who is content to be fashionable rather than fashion forward. The unrelenting message was “that you had to be cheerful and accepting and that you would not recover unless you were,” said Ms. Ehrenreich, who also writes frequently for The New York Times. Most infuriating, she added, was the advice to “consider your cancer a gift.”

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Reporting From the Front Lines of the Texas Evolution Debate

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Juli Berwald - Apr. 01 (Opinion) - Just hours before the Texas State Board of Education held its final hearings on the science education standards that would be put in place for the next decade, I set my kitchen timer for three minutes. I practiced my testimony among open jars of peanut butter and jelly strewn about from making kids' lunches. Ding. I still had my conclusion to read. What could I cut? For months I had been slinking around the controversy in Texas. I had gone to every public hearing, sitting on the floor in the back of the packed room. Behind rows of folding chairs, I had gotten to know the voices, if not the faces, of the board members. At issue was the wording of a science standard that states students must be taught the "strengths and weaknesses" of evolution. Since Kansas passed similar legislation in 2005 and Dover, Pennsylvania, in 2006, scientists have viewed these three words as a means for inserting the creationist theology that goes under the name "intelligent design" into science classes.

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Creationism Feels Right, but That Doesn't Make it So

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Jesse Bering - Mar. 22 (Review) - Presently I’m attending a small symposium on “Belief and Reason” at Trinity College, Cambridge, being sponsored by the Perrott-Warrick Fund. It’s a rather intimate affair with mostly cognitive scientists discussing the latest research and theory on everything from paranormal beliefs to free will to the placebo effect. One of the standout talks Monday was by Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, who gave a presentation titled “Is Religion Natural?” He focused on the puzzling case of creationist beliefs.

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Mind Matters

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Steven Johnson, Jonah Lehrer - Mar. 18 (Review) - Most great stories revolve around decisions: the snap brilliance of Captain Sullenberger choosing to land his plane in the Hudson, or Dorothea’s prolonged, agonizing choice of whether to forsake her husband for true love in “Middlemarch,” or your parents’ oft-told account of the day they decided to marry. There is something powerfully human in the act of deliberately choosing a path; other animals have drives, emotions, problem-solving skills, but none rival our capacity for self-consciously weighing all the options, imagining potential outcomes and arriving at a choice. As George W. Bush might have put it, we are a species of deciders.

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The Darwins' marriage of science and religion

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Los Angeles Times - By Deborah Heiligman - Jan. 29 (Opinion) - Although they never were able to see eye-to-eye on the question of religion and God, they were able to reach their hands across the gulf. In the end, each of them accepted and, it seems, truly understood what the other believed. If it is a sign of intelligence to be able to hold two opposite thoughts or opinions in your head, then it is a mark of a successful marriage to be able to truly see the other person's point of view. This is also the mark of a successful society.

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Why should I respect these oppressive religions?

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

The Independent - By Johann Hari - Jan. 28 (Editorial) - The Universal Declaration of Human Rights stated 60 years ago that "a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief is the highest aspiration of the common people". It was a Magna Carta for mankind – and loathed by every human rights abuser on earth.

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Divine Impulses: Kath Jefferts Schori

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - Dec. 22 (Interview) - The presiding bishop of the Episcopal church talks about homosexuality as a gift and the future of her church

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Equating evolution with atheism will turn Muslims against science

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Salman Hameed - Dec. 12 (Opinion) - The next battle between science and Creationism is likely to take place in the Muslim world, argues Salman Hameed today in the US journal Science. Here, he suggests how scientists should approach the debate

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Sarah Palin's War on Science

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Christopher Hitchens - Oct. 28 (Opinion) - With Palin, however, the contempt for science may be something a little more sinister than the bluff, empty-headed plain-man's philistinism of McCain. We never get a chance to ask her in detail about these things, but she is known to favor the teaching of creationism in schools (smuggling this crazy idea through customs in the innocent disguise of "teaching the argument," as if there was an argument), and so it is at least probable that she believes all creatures from humans to fruit flies were created just as they are now. This would make DNA or any other kind of research pointless, whether conducted in Paris or not. Projects such as sequencing the DNA of the flu virus, the better to inoculate against it, would not need to be funded. We could all expire happily in the name of God. Gov. Palin also says that she doesn't think humans are responsible for global warming; again, one would like to ask her whether, like some of her co-religionists, she is a "premillenial dispensationalist"—in other words, someone who believes that there is no point in protecting and preserving the natural world, since the end of days will soon be upon us.

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What's God's interest in pipeline?

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Post Intelligencer - By Hubert G. Locke - Sep. 25 (Opinion) - On Nov. 4, voters have a vested interest in ensuring that someone who is so glibly confident about knowing God's plan does not get within a heartbeat of the presidency of the United States. People who profess to know what God is thinking engage in the worst, most dangerous form of self-delusion. They should never be allowed anywhere near positions of public responsibility that put the rest of us -- and the world -- at risk.

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Without God

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

The New York Review of Books - By Steven Weinberg - Sep. 22 (Review) - In his celebrated 1837 Phi Beta Kappa Oration at Harvard, titled "The American Scholar," Ralph Waldo Emerson predicted that a day would come when America would end what he called "our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands." His prediction came true in the twentieth century, and in no area of learning more so than in science. This surely would have pleased Emerson. When he listed his heroes he would generally include Copernicus and Galileo and Newton along with Socrates and Jesus and Swedenborg. But I think that Emerson would have had mixed feelings about one consequence of the advance of science here and abroad--that it has led to a widespread weakening of religious belief.[1]

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Subconscious Decisions: Voting in Churches and Buying Designer Labels

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Jonah Lehrer - Aug. 31 (Interview) - Jonah Berger, a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania, made news a few months ago when he published the results of a study demonstrating that where people cast ballots affects how they vote. Although voters think they are making rational decisions based solely on the issues and facts, they are actually subtly influenced by a long list of other variables, most of which operate at an unconscious level. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Berger about what this new research can teach us about elections, expensive clothing and the human brain.

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Review interview: Richard Dawkins

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

The Times - By Rosie Millard - Aug. 03 (Interview) - Well, it's a distinction of sorts. Professor Richard Dawkins, who holds the chair for the public understanding of science at Oxford, was last week nominated as one of the country's Groovy Old Men - a group of sexy "silver foxes" that also includes the actors Bill Nighy and Terence Stamp. There is even an ongoing poll to choose the favourite. "Although Richard's not really old enough to be up there with David Atten-borough, is he?" complains his third wife, the actress Lalla Ward (who was once the sidekick to another groovy older man - Tom Baker - in his incarnation as Doctor Who). At 67, Dawkins is certainly rather gorgeous. Actually, he looks somewhat like an older version of David Tennant, the Doctor Who de nos jours, with his deep green eyes and distinguished profile. He's also a serial smiler - until he starts talking about religion, at which point he becomes glittery-eyed and red-cheeked with indignation.

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The Neural Buddhists

Tue, 13 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - May. 13 (Opinion) - In 1996, Tom Wolfe wrote a brilliant essay called "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died," in which he captured the militant materialism of some modern scientists. To these self-confident researchers, the idea that the spirit might exist apart from the body is just ridiculous. Instead, everything arises from atoms. Genes shape temperament. Brain chemicals shape behavior. Assemblies of neurons create consciousness. Free will is an illusion. Human beings are "hard-wired" to do this or that. Religion is an accident.

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The science of religion - Where angels no longer fear to tread

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Economist - Mar. 27 (Review) - By the standards of European scientific collaboration, E2m ($3.1m) is not a huge sum. But it might be the start of something that will challenge human perceptions of reality at least as much as the billions being spent by the European particle-physics laboratory (CERN) at Geneva. The first task of CERN's new machine, the Large Hadron Collider, which is due to open later this year, will be to search for the Higgs boson--an object that has been dubbed, with a certain amount of hyperbole, the God particle. The ï¿½2m, by contrast, will be spent on the search for God Himself--or, rather, for the biological reasons why so many people believe in God, gods and religion in general.

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Respecting the Religious (or the A-Religious)

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

ScienceBlogs.com - Mar. 11 (Opinion) - Discussion of a paper titled "Respect and Religion," by Simon Blackburn, is making its way through the blogosphere, and sparking some interesting discussion (particularly over at Crooked Timber, but this is a good read too). The key quote from Blackburn's article is this: We can respect, in the minimal sense of tolerating, those who hold false beliefs. We can pass by on the other side. We need not be concerned to change them, and in a liberal society we do not seek to suppress them or silence them. But once we are convinced that a belief is false, or even just that it is irrational, we cannot respect in any thicker sense those who hold it--not on account of their holding it. We may respect them for all sorts of other qualities, but not that one. We would prefer them to change their minds. Or, if it is to our advantage that they have false beliefs, as in a game of poker, and we am poised to profit from them, we may be wickedly pleased that they are taken in. But that is not a symptom of special substantial respect, but quite the reverse. It is one up to us, and one down to them.

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Religion vs. science vs. politics

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0800

MSNBC - By Alan Boyle - Dec. 20 (Opinion) - "The thing that is, I think, so very, very worrisome is that so many people will not realize how dangerous it is for candidates for the presidency to really pander to the religious resentments of people," she said.

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Evolution and Texas

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 23:12:49 -0800

New York Times - Dec. 04 (Editorial) - Is Texas about to become the next state to undermine the teaching of evolution? That is the scary implication of the abrupt ousting of Christine Comer, the state's top expert on science education. Her transgression: forwarding an e-mail message about a talk by a distinguished professor who debunks "intelligent design" and creationism as legitimate alternatives to evolution in the science curriculum.

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Goodbye to All That

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 11:44:45 -0800

Atlantic Monthly - By Andrew Sullivan - Nov. 05 (Opinion) - The logic behind the candidacy of Barack Obama is not, in the end, about Barack Obama. It has little to do with his policy proposals, which are very close to his Democratic rivals' and which, with a few exceptions, exist firmly within the conventions of our politics. It has little to do with Obama's considerable skills as a conciliator, legislator, or even thinker. It has even less to do with his ideological pedigree or legal background or rhetorical skills. Yes, as the many profiles prove, he has considerable intelligence and not a little guile. But so do others, not least his formidably polished and practiced opponent Senator Hillary Clinton. Obama, moreover, is no saint. He has flaws and tics: Often tired, sometimes crabby, intermittently solipsistic, he's a surprisingly uneven campaigner. A soaring rhetorical flourish one day is undercut by a lackluster debate performance the next. He is certainly not without self-regard. He has more experience in public life than his opponents want to acknowledge, but he has not spent much time in Washington and has never run a business. His lean physique, close-cropped hair, and stick-out ears can give the impression of a slightly pushy undergraduate. You can see why many of his friends and admirers have urged him to wait his turn. He could be president in five or nine years' time--why the rush?

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Is 'Do Unto Others' Written Into Our Genes?

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Nicholas Wade - Sep. 18 (Review) - Religious behavior may be the result of natural selection, in his view, shaped at a time when early human groups were competing with one another. "Those who found ways to bind themselves together were more successful," he said. Dr. Haidt came to recognize the importance of religion by a roundabout route. "I first found divinity in disgust," he writes in his book "The Happiness Hypothesis."

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Is Your Baby Gay? What If You Could Know? What If You Could Do Something About It?

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 08:21:12 -0800

AlbertMohler.com - By R. Albert Mohler - Mar. 02 (Opinion) - Homosexual activists have claimed that sexual orientation cannot be changed. What if a hormone patch during pregnancy will do the job? ... After all, the human genetic structure, along with every other aspect of creation, shows the pernicious effects of the Fall and of God's judgment.

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Transforming the Alchemists

Tue, 01 Aug 2006 16:36:14 -0700

New York Times - By John Noble Wilford - Aug. 01 (Editorial) - Historians of science are taking a new and lively interest in alchemy, the often mystical investigation into the hidden mysteries of nature that reached its heyday in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries and has been an embarrassment to modern scientists ever since.

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Pull of science eroded born-again view

Sat, 27 May 2006 20:06:06 -0700

Miami Herald - By Patrick S. Pemberton - May. 27 (Interview) - As one of the nation's foremost skeptics, Michael Shermer's days as a born-again Christian might seem like another lifetime to him.

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