reposted from: http://www.daneandrade.com/2007/08/31/a-effrontery-diacritical-mark/ via http://mojoey.blogspot.com/2007/09/blogroll-update-seven-solitudes.html

who say "Our newest Atheist Blogroll member is The Seven Solitudes written by Dane Andrade. Dane has been kind enough to write an introduction to his outstanding new blog.

My name is Dane Andrade. I am the sole contributor to my personal blog at www.DaneAndrade.com. Raised in the deep south, and graduate of a University of Notre Dame, I am an agnostic atheist, future lawyer, and skilled orator and debater. I am the founder of the Secular Covenant, and the head administrator of Facebook's largest Non-religious community, "Atheists, Agnostics, and Non-religious", with over 10,000 members, many of which are active daily. I currently work for the government in Newport, Rhode Island, my background is in Psychology, Computer Engineering, and Theology. I am studying and saving for law school in the New England area.

Excerpt from Blog:

"Every human can be taught to explain how the sun is not a god,

Beautifull writing - a very talented writer - WASP

emphasis

An Effrontery Diacritical Mark

August 31st, 2007 by Dane Andrade

Thought has become an impedance. Like a debilitating disease who keeps its’ host alive long enough to spread to others, eating away at the core of function.

There is a never ending supply of floating radicals in the memesphere; mental flatulence, polluting the once thirsty and starving brain.

I muse about the impeccable stability of ignorance that is held up as ideal in this bloated society.

It has become a common tactic among indolent thinkers to flood peremptory reality and common sense with coercive stagnation. Reason is attacked, and the outer skin of rational inquiry is stripped clean of its’ flesh, gaping and flailing about like a tattered flag, ripped and stuck to a branch protruding from some distant mountainous terrain. Dialogue is not imbued or inspired by complete destruction of partially laid canon in thought, debate is not made stronger by philosophical gymnastics. I can see the problem, even feel its’ source, frothing from the depths of civilization; the potential Vesuvius of evolution.

New thought is forced to survive on two fronts, the regressive desires of fettered minds and aging defenders against progress; and the evolution of thought. The oldest ideas of our civilization have undergone the most strenuous and arduous of tests. Thousands of years of selection, and utterly unlike their natural, physical counterpart, the selection of thoughts hold no benefit.

The conceptual God is as useless now as it has ever been. The only resort for thinking otherwise is the liberal acknowledgment of the general deindividuation and stupidity of our population.

Religion has evolved for years, only sidestepping the inquiry of reason in so far as it needs to survive in the dullest forms.

Every attack is simply met with a calm response about the imaginary benefits of the belief, and the hapless half wits march on, as if a great truth has somehow been discovered.

Far worse than the constituents that make up the zombie horde of idiocy are the defenders of these people, the enablers that allow them their comforts. And at the very end of the spectrum, the leader. The priest, the preacher, the pastor; these people must always desire power, because the moral implications of their existence reach no farther than charlatans, at the first level of superficial greed.

I am usually a champion of certain aspects of human greed, but the visage of service, of charity, of prizes beyond human grasp in order to demand slavery in the guise of comfort and obtain it willingly from the collective masses is beyond my ability to stomach.

From the first tribal shaman to the stadium evangelical, humanity has been in servitude to the most willing master deceiver.

Nothing in this regard has changed, only that aforementioned evolution of thought defending them.

To fight them, humanity has forged within her loins men and women of extreme intellectual prowess, and so far their only contribution has been to pass the fight, the battle to the next generation of potential saviors. We are going to lose this battle.

I spoke of the impedance of thought, a reality, explaining how vast and powerful the defense against reason has become…

Every human can be taught to explain how the sun is not a god, the world is not flat, the earth is not 6,000 years old.

The arguments become more refined, beyond the reach of science, and while she was dragging humanity on her back, the horde slipped in behind her, ready to knock her down at one moment’s weakness, beat her ruthlessly, defining her personage, as if she were a subjective nameless adolescent. Unprotected, she will soon be defined to include that which is untenable. The very ideal of anti-science, becomes science. A transmutation of thought, the poisonous gas of supposed supernaturalism and dogmatic metaphysics injected into her veins like cement mix in a forest oasis.

We have gone from sun gods, to sky gods, to moon gods, to personable gods, to one god, to one spirit, to one personal god, to the closet thing to reality, a pantheistic, deistic god impotent to creation, and then, as if we were no longer able to offer the counter, violent regression towards primordial worship. Back to sun gods, back to cleverly hidden polytheism in the form of a triune, back to antediluvian myths, back to young earths, primitive geology, and ancestral ghost worshiping, back to blood sacrifice and cannibalism, back to tongue languages, and back to promises of paradise and eternal torment.

Using the very defense against these things, the last known vestigial vanguard against the total domination of the lapsing tit for tat equilibrium; science.

The very same people who must defend her become lost in a sudden maze of conflicts from the gathering hordes of atavism.

For society’s intellectuals to have to stop and explain something as simple as the age of earth, while the concept of an eternal place of fire goes unchecked is immeasurably improvident.

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When is a bishop like a suicide bomber?

by Thomas Sutcliffe, Independent

via RichardDawkins.net
Reposted from:
http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnists_m_z/thomas_sutcliffe/article2730465.ece

Published: 03 July 2007

On the face of it, the Bishop of Carlisle and the young man who staggered blazing from that Jeep at Glasgow Airport on Saturday afternoon don't have a lot in common. The Right Reverend Graham Dow is a grey-haired man with a twinkling smile, rarely armed with anything more lethal than a crozier.

That wannabe martyr - his 72 expectant virgins currently tapping their fingers impatiently in Paradise - had a head wreathed in fire and a Molotov cocktail in his hand. The Bishop of Carlisle is a diocesan bishop in the Church of England, not a sect commonly associated with acts of terror, while the as-yet-unnamed jihadi is, one guesses, an adherent of Wahabi Islam, a sect which very much is. And yet, on a spiritual level, it seems that they do share one thing. They both believe in a vindictive God.

We already know how this belief was translated into action in the case of that young man at Glasgow Airport. He was prepared to incinerate young children and women and Muslims - anybody, frankly, who was unlucky enough to be on the other side of the entrance doors when he crashed through them. In the infamous words of a Christian zealot - "Kill them all, God will know his own".

The Bishop of Carlisle's expression of retribution took a much milder form: he expressed the view that the recent floods in the north of England were a sign of God's displeasure, not only at our environmental fecklessness but also at our wilful refusal, as a society, to discriminate against homosexuals.

"This is a strong and definite judgement because the world has been arrogant in going its own way," he said. "We are reaping the consequences of our moral degradation."

Some of us are reaping it a lot more directly than others, of course. Take Ryan Parry, a Sheffield schoolboy who was drowned last week. Or Michael Barnett, who got his foot stuck in a drain in Hull and succumbed after a four-hour battle to save him. Quite why these two people, and their grieving families, should have been singled out to bear the brunt of God's judgement isn't clear - and by yesterday afternoon, the Bishop's spokesman was busily back-pedalling. But he didn't explain away the Bishop's remark that the problem with "environmental judgement is that it is indiscriminate".

The logic of this seems to suggest that God is prepared to kill innocent people in order to get his message across. And if the Bishop is right, it isn't just us that God is disappointed with. He's furious with the people of Pakistan, where serious flooding has left 900,000 homeless, and Afghanistan, where 80 have died in recent storms, and Kansas and Texas, too, where floods have devastated communities and left people homeless. Then again, with a killer this "indiscriminate" about collateral damage, only a bishop could be sure what the message is.

Of course, there are important differences between the bishop and the Glasgow attacker. The bishop restricts himself to condoning the actions of a terrorist God, while the human fireball appointed himself as a direct tool of divine wrath. It's hardly a distinction to be sneezed at in these dangerous times. But it's not quite enough to quell the sense that the bishop finds himself in a distant intellectual kinship with the suicide bomber - both worshippers of a God who communicates through the deaths of innocents.

t.sutcliffe@ independent.co.uk

Pick of comments:

4. Comment #53742 by AdrianB on July 3, 2007 at 2:19 am

I thought this was an excellent article as well.

If somebody is prepared to condone the actions of a vindictive God, then it becomes impossible for that person to then condemn the actions of anybody committing atrocities in the name of a vindictive God.

If the Bishop of Carlisle does claim to find the actions of wannabe suicide bombers in Glasgow wrong, then logically the only possible reasons for them being wrong is that they chose the wrong vindictive God.

3. Comment #53740 by dreamcurve on July 3, 2007 at 2:04 am

In other news, Gene Robinson was hit by 9ft freak wave whilst speaking at a gay & lesbian rally about the love of God. Authorities have suggested that top UK bishops infiltrated the rally with SuperSoakers and water bombs. The Archbishop of Canterbury would not give an interview, but released a statement saying that '...while I myself can maintain the view that homosexuality is both acceptable to God and a sin in respect of the more conservative chapter, whom I would not wish to alienate with any argument over absolute truth, it is a well established fact that God moves in mysterious waves [sic] and we should not therefore imply anything from anything that might expose the stupidity of our beliefs.'

1. Comment #53735 by mikebreed on July 3, 2007 at 1:21 am

Someone had to say it, and good for Sutcliffe. He's too gentle on the Bishop, though. The latter's 14th Century outlook is a disgrace, and the ideas he promotes are every bit as repugnant as the ideas of the Wahhabis, even if he doesn't convert them into such direct and dangerous action. The Church needs to come out strongly on this, and condemn the Bishop's remarks. They won't, of course.

2. Comment #53736 by bamboospitfire on July 3, 2007 at 1:25 am

An excellent article which reveals the Bishop's pronouncement for what it was - an outrage. Imagine if the airport terrorist had succeeded in killing a boy and a man - both presumably innocent - as the flooding did. Would the Bishop have said "This is a strong and definite judgement because the world has been arrogant in going its own way. We are reaping the consequences of our moral degradation. Of course, the problem with suicide bombing is that it is indiscriminate,"? I don't see why that would be any worse than what he did in fact say.

6. Comment #53753 by Logicel on July 3, 2007 at 3:04 am

The bishop restricts himself to condoning the actions of a terrorist God, while the human fireball appointed himself as a direct tool of divine wrath.
________

Excellent article. The faith connection is enough of a connection between so-called moderates and extremists--non-evidential faith and its touting as a virtue.

In addition, though the Bishop is not advocating direct violence against gays, he is indirectly setting up scapegoats. If and when global warming's deleterious effects grow, there will be a ready group to silence, gays. There will be some panic-stricken and ill-prepared people of faith who will act like dangerous fools, who will be compelled to do hateful and criminal acts based on their faith, in order to appease their God and to save their imaginary eternal souls.

It is important to keep allowing these supporters of religious superstitions to yap and yap and yap, and it is equally important that articulate rational people target and pinpoint the dangerous irrationality lurking behind that stoopid-looking crozier of the bishop's.

8. Comment #53758 by parrja on July 3, 2007 at 3:40 am

Fantastic article. We need this sort of response to every ridiculous statement uttered by the clergy.

10. Comment #53760 by hungarianelephant on July 3, 2007 at 3:47 am

In both cases, they do not speak for the vast majority of religious believers.

Actually Paul, I suspect the bishop at least does.

There is a reasonable argument that doing what we like without regard to natural processes will ultimately result in harm in unpredictable ways. Building on flood plains will put strain on the natural systems and result in occasional serious flooding. (It appears that the flooding in Sheffield would have occurred anyway, but to continue ...) You don't have to believe in anthropogenic global warming to understand that burning up oil stored over many millions of years in a few decades is not the brightest idea.

Most people sense this, but in the absence of the science or philosophy to explain it properly, many religious people fall back on God's judgment as the preferred explanation. And if that leaves difficult questions, such as why a judgemental god cannot direct His wrath more accurately, there is a ready-made, and self-serving, answer: it is not for us to second-guess His will.

I have personally heard the "God's Judgment" argument advanced by apparently reasonable people in respect of each of the following: floods; earthquakes; heatwaves; droughts; AIDS; ethnic cleansing in Bosnia; the diseases affecting successive Lords Chief Justice of England; and I am sure some others I have forgotten.

Which is why articles like this have real value.

20. Comment #53788 by wagnerpe on July 3, 2007 at 6:45 am

Excellent.

We really need to continue to draw these parallels.

25. Comment #53797 by jimbob on July 3, 2007 at 8:03 am

If you think the bishop is nutty, then check out Pat Robertson's site (www.patrobertson.com) to put him in perspective.

As an example, here is the summary from Pat's 2007 prayer retreat:

"In conclusion: Ahead is a year in which we celebrate the 400th Anniversary of the founding of the United States of America. This year will begin with unimagined blessings yet will end, unless there is national repentance and prayer, with unspeakable acts of terror brought about by evil men. Then a great time of worldwide rejoicing in the Lord."

As George Carlin joked about the punitive, vindictive, pestilence-spreading big daddy in the sky "But he loves you!"

28. Comment #53803 by Diplo on July 3, 2007 at 9:22 am

Great article! It's heartening to see the broadsheets are, at last, laying into the craziness that exemplifies religious thought patterns. Irrational thinking leads inextricably to irrational acts and this message needs to keep being hammered home.

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We of little faith by Sue Blackmore

reposted from Guardian

Sue Blackmore

Religious belief is inconsistent with reason and corrosive to the human mind - and I don't want to live in a world where it is respected.

June 8, 2007 9:30 AM

"Religious faith is not inconsistent with reason."

I nearly choked on my breakfast when I heard this on the Today programme. These words were spoken by Mr Blair, in his inimitably sincere style. He was addressing an Islamic conference in London, on June 4, and pledging more money to support Islamic studies in British Universities.

When I'd calmed down I went to check, and it really is true. In the full text of his speech, on the No 10 website, he says:

"In the face of so much high profile accorded to religious extremism, to schism, and to confrontation, it is important to show that religious faith is not inconsistent with reason, or progress, or the celebration of diversity."

But religious faith is inconsistent with reason (and much more that we value as well).

I'm not referring to the ordinary kind of faith by which we have faith in another person's honesty, or that taking an aspirin will reduce our headache. I am talking about religious faith, as Tony Blair was too. In this context faith means believing without reason. Indeed, this is precisely how it is defined, for example as "Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence" or in Merriam Webster as "firm belief in something for which there is no proof". Does this make faith inconsistent with reason? I would say yes. Reason demands that you look for evidence and believe accordingly - which is exactly what we do when we trust a friend because they've been reliable in the past, or doubt a rumour until we've checked on the facts.

Faith is corrosive to the human mind. If someone genuinely believes that it is right to believe things without reason or evidence then they are open to every kind of dogma, whim, coercion, or dangerous infectious idea that's around. If someone is convinced that it is acceptable to base their beliefs on what is written in an ancient book, or what some teacher tells them they must believe, then they will have no true freedom of thought; they will be trapped by their faith into inconsistency and untruths because they are unable to throw out false ideas when evidence against them comes along.

The whole point of a university education is to learn to think for yourself, to criticise theories, to compare ideas and to find out the truth by research, exploration and experiment. Whether you are studying French, chemistry, or psychology, you are given tools for thinking independently and ways of evaluating other people's claims. In this there is no room for faith, and should be no room for faith.

I want to be clear about some things I am not saying. First I am not saying that everything has to be rational. There is much about human life that has little or nothing to do with rationality; there's love and affection, art and poetry, happiness, beauty and intuition. But none of these things has to be taken on faith. University courses include much that is not rational, not just in arts courses but even in science, where one has hunches or enjoys beautiful ideas, but again there is no room for holding onto religious faith - wherever the ideas come from they must ultimately be thrown out if they are shown to be wrong.

Second, I am not saying that no students should have religious beliefs. This is (and must be, in a free society) a matter for them, in the privacy of their own minds. There will always be some students who believe things on faith and others who don't, but the job of a university course is to make people think and to give them the tools for doing so. Faith is not one of those tools. Indeed, by and large, a university education reduces religious belief, as indeed it should.

I have had countless students on my psychology courses who began as believers in God, or the afterlife, or spirits and souls, and then had to question those beliefs through the process of learning how the mind actually works. I have seen them (and I hope helped them) go through this painful process of throwing off their restrictive childhood religious beliefs and learning to live with the uncertainties and open-mindedness needed for real learning.

Finally, I am not saying there should be no courses on Christianity or Islam or any other religion. There are and should be, for there is much of importance to study: the history of the religions, the beliefs, their cultural background and much more. But universities should be teaching people how to think, question, and understand these things, not to have faith in "truths" proclaimed without reason or evidence.

Tony Blair pronounces the word "faith" with just that touch of special reverence in his voice, as though it were something to respect, something we should admire in others and grant them licence to believe whatever they want on its account. Indeed he proclaimed that the conference was "an opportunity to listen; to hear Islam's true voice; to welcome and appreciate them; and in doing so, to join up with all those who believe in a world where religious faith is respected". How despicable. How creepy. How frightening when we see the dire consequences of faith-based actions all around us.

Of course people of faith want us to respect their beliefs. For they have no other way of defending them than to appeal to respect, to promise rewards for believers, or threaten punishments for unbelievers. So anyone who cares about the truth should resist these meme tricks. Religious faith is something that we should struggle to throw off when we have better ways of learning the truth about the universe we live in; something we should overcome rather than something we should respect.

I, for one, do not want to live in a world where religious faith is respected. I do not want more "faith-based initiatives". I do not want more faith schools, and our great universities should continue to teach people to think for themselves, to respect the truth, and to take nothing on faith.

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The Atheism FAQ with Richard Dawkins by Diganta

Richard Dawkins, the author of the NY Times bestseller - The God Delusion - has been interviewed many a time recently. The questions asked were mainly related to his book, the views on atheism, morality and present world.


Reposted from:
http://richarddawkins.net/article,1219,n,n
Reposted from:
http://desicritics.org/2007/05/26/003610.php

Thanks to ranjani for the link.

He answered all questions in a flawless and confident way. Each and every answer speaks about his passion and eagerness to explain his stance on every point. It's an amazing experience to watch him speak. I have tried to pick up a few commonly asked questions and his answers on different topics.

Why are you against faith?

Because, I am a kind of person who cares about the Truth. The religion and any sort of dogma are the biggest obstacle against the Truth. Not only that, I am worried about the position religion enjoys in our society. You can attack other's political view, criticize a football coach but cannot attack one's religious faith. It's a kind of immunity from criticism that religion enjoys, despite being proven to be mostly illogical.

There are billions of people across the world following their faiths and living their life. How do you describe them?

Of course, there are billions of people living their religious life and most of them are harmless people. But, they are carrying a virus of faith with them, that they transmit from generations to another, and could create a 'epidemic' of faith any time. As I said, I am a kind of person who cares about the truth and also want to see people following the truth. The truth is not a revelation, but truth that has been established though evidences and repeated experiments.

There are scientists who are religious. How do you feel about them?

Yeah, unfortunately there are many good scientists who do this. Although, I do not clearly understand their position in life, it seems to me, either they act like religious people consciously for some other purpose or compartmentalize their views based on the context.

Religious people claim they derive their morality from religion. Where from an atheist derive his morality?

Religious people do not derive their morality from religion. I disagree (with the interviewer) on this point. Almost all of us do agree on moral grounds where religion had no effect. For example we all hate slavery, we want emancipation of women - they are all our moral grounds. These moral grounds started building only a few centuries ago and long after all major religions were established. We derive our morality from the environment we live in, Talk shows, Novels, Newspaper editorials and of course by the guidance of parents. Religion might only have a minor role to play in it. An atheist derives his morality from the same source as a religious people do.

But all the religious books have given moral guidance to the people, like not killing the neighbors. Why do you think they are still bad?

The religious books do talk about not killing your neighbors, at the same time they talk about not showing skin of women or killing the infidels. The God of the Old Testament, as I described, is not at all a good 'person'. The God is certainly a lot better in New Testament. However, when you pick and choose the good verses out of a religious book, the parameters, those you use, does not certainly come from the religion itself. For example, when you say New Testament is better, you are certainly not using Christianity as a judge. The parameters you use, are the effect of the morality that is already with you, assimilated from different sources in your life time.

In your book, you've said that God 'almost certainly' does not exist. Why are you leaving open the possibility?

Any scientific people will leave open that possibility, that they cannot disprove whatever unlikely the event might be. I would be the first person to accept God once evidence comes in favour of it.

So you accept Science cannot disprove God. What is the problem if people follow religions till God is disproved?

Science cannot disprove God as well as they cannot disprove Apollo or Juju or Thor with his hammer or even a Flying Spaghetti Monster creating the universe. However, we do not believe them as they are unlikely to exist. We do neither believe in fairies of Hans Andersen although we cannot disprove them. To believe in an unlikely event or a deity only because we cannot disprove it, sounds foolish to me.

Why don't you think that the Universe, huge, complex and mysterious, is not a creation of a Supreme Being, where we see all complex things are in fact created?

First of all if you assume that all complex things are created, then a God, capable of creating such a complex Universe, should also be a complex being and should also have a creator. On the other hand, if you follow the Darwinian Evolution path, you'd see how a complex organism can be built upon relatively simpler beings by the process of Natural Selection. And it is far more logical to believe that we and the Universe in general, started from a simpler start that a complex creator starting it up.

When you stand on the top of a mountain doesn't the vastness of the world strike you? Don't you feel charmed by the beauty of the nature, and the mysterious laws of the vast Universe?

Of course I do. And I have mentioned about it in the first chapter of my book as the spirituality followed by Einstein. He was so charmed about the mysteries of the world and it was such an exciting experience to explore it. It's a kind of spirituality that does not require God, a personal deity to explain the mysteries of Nature. It is quite different from a religion centered around a God who can read mind, keeps track of sins, judges people after death punishes the disbelievers and rules the Universe.

What is your opinion about Stalin and Hitler as Atheists?

I have said in my book that Hitler is not at all atheist, as he was religiously biased against Jewish people. Stalin was following communism dogmatically. I have already said that none of us, in effect derive our morality from religion. Stalin, in fact, used the dogmatic communism as his source of morality - if we call it morality at all. Being atheist does not ask you to become dogmatic or communist, but only ask you not to believe in God. A person working in a Mafia group can also be an atheist although it will be illogical to say that atheism pushed him to the Mafia group. There are other colleagues working with him who are religious.

Why do you link religion with 'Child-abuse'?

I link the marking of children as 'Jewish boy' or 'Muslim child' as a child abuse, since, in childhood they are yet to choose their religious views. Not only that, they are brought up in a way that he gets separated from other religious groups and views so that he follows the religious faith of his parents. Obstructing the view of children clearly comes under child abuse.

Your ambition is that people reading this book should abandon their faith. Isn't it?

There is no harm in aiming high and you can say that is my ambition. But, in practice, we want the people who follow the middle ground, who never have thought deeply on this topic, to think twice and consciously reject God. Also, I can see that in United States 10-15% people are Atheists, larger than any minority religious groups. However, they don't have any political power or a lobby compared to strong Jewish lobby. I want Atheists to come together and establish a God-neutral political view, a view of their own, for a better balanced world.

References

1) Interview with Jeremy Paxman on BBC.
2) Interview on CNN on Darwin Day.
3) TV Ontario interview (part 1, part 2 and part 3).
3) The Hour interview, (part 2).
4) The debate - part 1, part 2 and part 3.
4) RichardDawkins.net for more video/interview resources.

Diganta Sarkar is a Software Professional. He is curious about the world of science and culture. His aim of writing is to present his logical view to the world. He presents his views in his own blog (horizonspeaks) as well as in desicritics.

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What I Think About Evolution by Kansas Senator Sam Brownback

In our sound-bite political culture, it is unrealistic to expect that every complicated issue will be addressed with the nuance or subtlety it deserves. So I suppose I should not have been surprised earlier this month when, during the first Republican presidential debate, the candidates on stage were asked to raise their hands if they did not "believe" in evolution. As one of those who raised his hand, I think it would be helpful to discuss the issue in a bit more detail and with the seriousness it demands.


reposted from:
http://richarddawkins.net/article,1214,n,n
Reposted from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/31/opinion/31brownback.html?th&emc=th

The premise behind the question seems to be that if one does not unhesitatingly assert belief in evolution, then one must necessarily believe that God created the world and everything in it in six 24-hour days. But limiting this question to a stark choice between evolution and creationism does a disservice to the complexity of the interaction between science, faith and reason.

The heart of the issue is that we cannot drive a wedge between faith and reason.

Faith is the belief in pronouncements made by a supernatural being. Scientific evidence* suggests that in all probability no such supernatural being exists. Therefore Faith is unreasonable.

Indeed we should make strenuous efforts to highlight the falsity of faith by driving wedges between faith and reason.

* Victor Stenger's 2007 book God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist, Prometheus Books, ISBN 1591024811.

I believe wholeheartedly that there cannot be any contradiction between the two. The scientific method, based on reason, seeks to discover truths about the nature of the created order and how it operates, whereas faith deals with spiritual truths. The truths of science and faith are complementary: they deal with very different questions, but they do not contradict each other because the spiritual order and the material order were created by the same God.

People of faith should be rational, using the gift of reason that God has given us. At the same time, reason itself cannot answer every question. Faith seeks to purify reason so that we might be able to see more clearly, not less. Faith supplements the scientific method by providing an understanding of values, meaning and purpose. More than that, faith — not science — can help us understand the breadth of human suffering or the depth of human love. Faith and science should go together, not be driven apart.

The question of evolution goes to the heart of this issue. If belief in evolution means simply assenting to microevolution, small changes over time within a species, I am happy to say, as I have in the past, that I believe it to be true. If, on the other hand, it means assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence, then I reject it.

There is no one single theory of evolution, as proponents of punctuated equilibrium and classical Darwinism continue to feud today. Many questions raised by evolutionary theory — like whether man has a unique place in the world or is merely the chance product of random mutations — go beyond empirical science and are better addressed in the realm of philosophy or theology.

The most passionate advocates of evolutionary theory offer a vision of man as a kind of historical accident. That being the case, many believers — myself included — reject arguments for evolution that dismiss the possibility of divine causality.

Ultimately, on the question of the origins of the universe, I am happy to let the facts speak for themselves. There are aspects of evolutionary biology that reveal a great deal about the nature of the world, like the small changes that take place within a species. Yet I believe, as do many biologists and people of faith, that the process of creation — and indeed life today — is sustained by the hand of God in a manner known fully only to him. It does not strike me as anti-science or anti-reason to question the philosophical presuppositions behind theories offered by scientists who, in excluding the possibility of design or purpose, venture far beyond their realm of empirical science.

Biologists will have their debates about man's origins, but people of faith can also bring a great deal to the table. For this reason, I oppose the exclusion of either faith or reason from the discussion. An attempt by either to seek a monopoly on these questions would be wrong-headed. As science continues to explore the details of man's origin, faith can do its part as well. The fundamental question for me is how these theories affect our understanding of the human person.

The unique and special place of each and every person in creation is a fundamental truth that must be safeguarded.

WASP: This is a religious arguement without any evidence.

I am wary of any theory that seeks to undermine man's essential dignity and unique and intended place in the cosmos. I firmly believe that each human person, regardless of circumstance, was willed into being and made for a purpose.

WASP: ditto

While no stone should be left unturned in seeking to discover the nature of man's origins, we can say with conviction that we know with certainty at least part of the outcome. Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order.

WASP: Evidence for this 100% certainty? Prouncements of sky-gods are zero evidence.

Those aspects of evolutionary theory compatible with this truth are a welcome addition to human knowledge. Aspects of these theories that undermine this truth, however, should be firmly rejected as an atheistic theology posing as science.

Without hesitation, I am happy to raise my hand to that.

Sam Brownback is a Republican senator from Kansas.

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Question to Weinberg: On Believing in Multiple Universes and Religious Faith

Question to Weinberg: On Believing in Multiple Universes and Religious Faith

Gingerich: Steve, here’s a final question for you. You completely reject any notion of a divine designer, but on what basis beyond faith can you justify the idea of multiple universes being more valid?

Weinberg: Oh, I thought I had answered that but I would be happy to say it again. I don’t maintain that that idea (multiple Universes) is true. I mean, that is a possibility that has emerged and it remains a possibility. When I become convinced of its truth, it will be because the equations of physics that unify the various forces - quantum mechanics, relativity, all that - have that as a consequence. It won’t be an act of faith. It will be a deduction from laws which we, unfortunately, at present don’t know. Now you may say that it is an act of faith because we will not be able to observe these other Big Bangs, or these other terms in the wave function. But that’s the fate that science has been in for a long time. We don’t really observe quarks and we never will see the track of a quark. And yet we believe in quarks because the theories that have quarks in them work. And in the same way, if we come to that - and we have not yet come to that - we will believe in these other Big Bangs or these other terms in the wave function because the theories in which they appear work.

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