For the Anti-Evolutionists, Hope in High Places: “Look East or West and you can detect the rumblings from an irreconcilable divide between science and religion.”

In a new book, “The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality,” the Dalai Lama laments what he calls “radical scientific materialism,” warning that seeing people as “the products of pure chance in the random combination of genes” is an invitation to nihilism and spiritual poverty. “The view that all aspects of reality can be reduced to matter and its various particles is, to my mind, as much a metaphysical position as the view that an organizing intelligence created and controls reality.” Both, he suggests, are legitimate interpretations of science.

I really need to sit down and gather my thoughts about this whole question. In short, I believe in Intelligent Design. I believe it as a practicing Christian and as student of Philosophy and Physics. But I have yet to be convinced that Intelligent Design can be shown to be a sufficient and necessary explanation to the present structure of the Universe and bio-diversity. The whole question of what is meant by the terms “necessary and sufficient” is going to have be teased out – and the difference between believing something and proving something as well.

But I’m certainly being asked to share my thinking more and more frequently… I guess it’s the times we live in. It’s important because of what the Dalai Lama points out above. If we dismiss the whole concept out of hand, we end up taking ourselves down a road that no one wants to travel.

(Via The New York Times > Science.)