There’s an article up on the New York Times website that is an omnibus review of a whole slew of recent books on the relationship between science and religion. It focuses on books written by folks working in the biological sciences and how they understand the apparent contradictions between a religious world-view and the theory of evolution.

“‘I have been struck,’ Dr. Roughgarden writes, ‘by how the ‘debate’ over teaching evolution is not about plants and animals but about God and whether science somehow threatens one’s belief in God.’

Or as Dr. Collins put it, when religions require belief in ‘fundamentally flawed claims’ about the world, they force curious and intelligent congregants to reject science, ‘effectively committing intellectual suicide,’ a choice he calls ‘terrible and unnecessary.’

But does science require the abandonment of faith? Not necessarily, and certainly not entirely, these authors argue.”

The article also deals with arguments which attempt to prove and/or disprove the existence of God.

I wish I could find the reference, but I recall reading a piece by a philosopher who had gone back and re-examined Anselm’s work on the existence of God. The philosopher claimed that Aquinas had misunderstood what Anselm was attempting. Anselm wasn’t attempting to prove the existence of God – but to show that the “Fool who says in his heart that there is no God” was in fact a fool. This article went through Anselm’s argument, analyzed it with symbolic notation and discovered that in fact Anselm proves that it is impossible to prove that there is no God.

I’ve got to see if I can dig that article up.

Read the rest here: Faith, Reason, God and Other Imponderables – New York Times