Last week I sat down to write a post on the continuing rise of 'atheistic fundamentalism' led by Prof ("The God Delusion") Dawkins, but I have put that on one side for a moment to comment on an interesting symposium that took place at about the same time as I was collecting my thoughts.
Some of the best minds in science have just gathered in the seaside resort of La Jolla in California (well even scientists need to have some fun!) for the second 'Beyond Belief' symposium. At last year's symposium there was an outbreak of proselytising atheism (what some are calling 'Atheistic Fundamentalism'). The speakers almost to a man hammered home what they saw as the virtues of the new atheism.
According New Scientist magazine (10 Nov 2007) that gathering made much of the idea that humans can be 'moral' without believing in God, and that science should do away with religion altogether. The mood of this year's conference was altogether different.
While all delegates agreed that rational evidence-based thinking should always be the basis of how we live our lives, it was also conceded that people are sometimes irrational (or should that be non-rational?) beings by nature and that faith, religion culture, and emotion must be recognized as part of what it means to be human.
Edward Slingerland, and expert in human cognition at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, pointed out that 'Religion is not going away', and that even scientists rely on moral values - a set of distinctly unscientific beliefs. Eg: where does our conviction that human rights are universal come from?. 'Human rights to me are as mysterious as the holy trinity' Slingerland confessed to the audience. 'You can't do a CT scan to show where human rights are. It's not an empirical thing, it's just something we strongly believe in.'
Stuart Kaufmnan of the University of Calgary, an expert in complex systems and the origin of life pointed out that no matter how far science advances, there will be aspects of nature that remain unknowable.
Prof Dawkins in his famous book takes an altogether different view: that science has explained or will one day explain everything, and that already God can be explained away by pointing to an area of the brain that is responsible for such a belief. In asserting this he has fallen into the trap of 'the fallacy of nothing-buttery' (eg the brain is 'nothing but' a biological computer ...) that was first highlighted by Donald Mackay when he was professor of Communication at Keele University two decades ago.
The song writer David in the Bible reflects on the fact that our bodies are ingeniously designed - 'fearfully and wonderfully made' as he puts it. (Psalm 139 verse 14) . Perhaps even more amazing is the fact that we can also reflect on this in awe and wonder, as David did, and praise God for it.
More of that anon.