[vn-families] Chuye^.n da`i tu ta^'n: Intellectuals raise stakes in battle of science vs. religion

[binhp at mylinuxisp.com]

Cha`o qui' vi.,

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Ba`i co' nhie^`u ddie^?m hay\.

Tuy ba`i kho^ng ne^u le^n, qui' vi. Pha^.t tu+? se~ tha^'y
la` Pha^.t gia'o phu` ho+.p vo+'i khoa ho.c\.

Pha.m Quo^'c Bi`nh
http://vmdd.tech.mylinuxisp.com/buddhism/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tutam/


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Source: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/life/religion/4373233.html

Intellectuals raise stakes in battle of science vs. religion

Conferees urge less timidity in challenging teachings about nature
based solely on belief


By GEORGE JOHNSON
New York Times

Maybe the pivotal moment came when Steven Weinberg, a Nobel
laureate in physics, warned that "the world needs to wake up
from its long nightmare of religious belief," or when a 1996
Nobelist in chemistry, Sir Harold Kroto, called for the John
Templeton Foundation to give its next $1.5 million prize for
"progress in spiritual discoveries" to an atheist — Dr. Richard
Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist whose book The God
Delusion is a national best-seller.

Or perhaps the turning point occurred at a more solemn moment,
when 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.

Somewhere along the way, a forum last month at the Salk Institute
for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have
been one more polite dialogue between science and religion,
began to resemble the founding convention for a political
party built on a single plank: In a world dangerously charged
with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role,
vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.

Carolyn Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space
Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., called, half in jest,
for the establishment of an alternative church, with Tyson,
whose powerful celebration of scientific discovery had the
force and cadence of a good sermon, as its first minister.

She was not entirely kidding.

"We should let the success of the religious formula guide us,"
Porco said. "Let's teach our children from a very young age
about the story of the universe and its incredible richness
and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome —
and even comforting — than anything offered by any Scripture
or God concept I know."

She displayed a picture of Saturn taken by the Cassini-Huygens
spacecraft and its glowing rings eclipsing the sun, revealing
in the shadow a speck called Earth.

There has been no shortage of conferences in recent years —
commonly organized by the Templeton Foundation — seeking to
smooth over the differences between science and religion and
ending in a metaphysical draw.

Sponsored instead by the Science Network, an educational
organization based in California, and underwritten by a San
Diego investor, Robert Zeps (who acknowledged his role as a
kind of "anti-Templeton"), the La Jolla meeting, "Beyond Belief:
Science, Religion, Reason and Survival," rapidly escalated into
an invigorating intellectual free-for-all. (Unedited video of
the proceedings will be posted on the Web at tsntv.org.)

A presentation by Joan Roughgarden, a Stanford University
biologist, on using biblical metaphor to ease her fellow
Christians into accepting evolution (a mutation is "a mustard
seed of DNA") was dismissed by Dawkins as "bad poetry," while
his own take-no-prisoners approach (religious education is
"brainwashing" and "child abuse") was condemned by anthropologist
Melvin J. Konner, who said he had "not a flicker" of religious
faith, as simplistic and uninformed.

After enduring two days of talks in which the Templeton
Foundation came under the gun as smudging the line between
science and faith, Charles L. Harper Jr., its senior vice
president, lashed back, denouncing what he called "pop conflict
books" like Dawkins' God Delusion, as "commercialized ideological
scientism" — promoting for profit the philosophy that science
has a monopoly on truth.

That brought an angry rejoinder from Richard P. Sloan, a
professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical
Center, who said his own book Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of
Religion and Medicine was written to counter "garbage research"
financed by Templeton on, for example, the healing effects
of prayer.

With atheists and agnostics outnumbering the faithful (a few
believing scientists, like Francis S. Collins, author of The
Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, were
invited but could not attend), one speaker after another called
on his colleagues to be less timid in challenging teachings
about nature based only on Scripture and belief.

"The core of science is not a mathematical model; it is
intellectual honesty," said Sam Harris, a doctoral student
in neuroscience and the author of The End of Faith: Religion,
Terror and the Future of Reason and Letter to a Christian Nation.

"Every religion is making claims about the way the world is,"
he said. "These are claims about the divine origin of certain
books, about the virgin birth of certain people, about the
survival of the human personality after death. These claims
purport to be about reality."

By shying away from questioning people's deeply felt beliefs,
Harris said, even the skeptics are providing safe harbor for
ideas that are at best mistaken and at worst dangerous. "I don't
know how many more engineers and architects need to fly planes
into our buildings before we realize that this is not merely
a matter of lack of education or economic despair," he said.

Weinberg, who famously wrote toward the end of his 1977 book
on cosmology, The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the
Origin of the Universe, that "the more the universe seems
comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless," went a step
further: "Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold
of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest
contribution to civilization."

In the end it was Tyson's celebration of discovery that stole
the show. Scientists may scoff at people who fall back on
explanations involving an intelligent designer, he said, but
history shows that "the most brilliant people who ever walked
this earth were doing the same thing."

When Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica failed to account for
the stability of the solar system — why the planets tugging
at one another's orbits have not collapsed into the sun —
Newton proposed that propping up the mathematical mobile was
"an intelligent and powerful being."

It was left to Pierre-Simon Laplace, a century later, to take
the next step. Haughtily telling Napoleon that he had no need
for the God hypothesis, Laplace extended Newton's mathematics
and opened the way to a purely physical theory.

"What concerns me now," Tyson said, "is that even if you're
as brilliant as Newton, you reach a point where you start
basking in the majesty of God, and then your discovery stops —
it just stops."