Listing entries tagged with nature

Anti-Thanksgiving

posted on 11.23.2006 at 10:59 AM

This from the New York Times account of that recent conference on science and religion in California:

Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and an adviser to the Bush administration on space exploration, hushed the audience with heartbreaking photographs of newborns misshapen by birth defects -- testimony, he suggested, that blind nature, not an intelligent overseer, is in control.

posted by Mitchell Stephens at 10:59 AM | Comments (0)

Religion and Science -- 2

posted on 07.18.2006 at 11:20 PM

Leonard Lopate had an interview this afternoon with Francis Collins, a former head of the Human Genome Project, on "how he reconciles his scientific knowledge with his religious faith." Collins has a book out on the subject, entitled, The Language of God. Stimulating fellow:

God is outside of nature. Science studies nature. Its tools are designed to study nature. So it is totally inappropriate to take scientiific conclusions and draw any particular conclusions about God.

This is the two-realms argument, which Lopate and Collins attribute to the late Stephen Jay Gould. But the question of whether anything can be "outside of nature" is precisely the issue, isn't it?

posted by Mitchell Stephens at 11:20 PM | Comments (3)