A Very Short Introduction

Science and Religion

Thomas Dixon

Science and Religion Quotes

You can find Science and Religion quotes, Science and Religion book quotes, the most impressive sentences and paragraphs on 1000Kitap.
Religious leaders have come out against ID (Intelligent Design) too. An open letter affirming the compatibility of Christian faith and the teaching of evolution, first produced in response to controversies in Wisconsin in 2004, has now been signed by over ten thousand clergy from different Christian denominations across America. In 2006, the director of the Vatican Observatory, the Jesuit astronomer George Coyne, condemned ID as a kind of 'crude creationism' which reduced God to a mere engineer.
Sayfa 82 - Oxford University Press
Some philosophers, driven by the desire to develop a more scientific approach to morality, have constructed whole systems of 'evolutionary ethics'. For such thinkers, the fact that humanity’s conscience and moral feelings are the product of evolution requires that ethics should be pursued from an evolutionary rather than a religious or even a philosophical point of view. The problem that all such schemes encounter is that there is more to ethics than following nature. Even if it can be shown that we are endowed with a particular 'natural' instinct by our evolutionary history, that observation does not get us any closer to answering the ethical question of whether it is right to follow that instinct. Presumably the instincts that incline people towards violence, theft, and adultery have evolutionary origins too. Whichever interpretation of evolutionary biology we care to endorse, it is perfectly clear (as it has been to moral philosophers through the ages) that human beings are born with the propensity both to seek their own good and also the good of (at least some) others. The question of whether the altruistic instinct, for instance, is a natural one is completely separate from the question of whether it is one that we should follow, and to what extent.
Sayfa 121 - Oxford University Press
Reklam
The defenders of Intelligent Design, to an even greater extent than the 'Creation Scientists' of previous decades, try to stay scrupulously within the bounds of scientific discourse and mention a 'designer' and 'intelligence', but never God, and certainly not the Bible. Some suspect that this reflects not the scientific nature of their enterprise but simply a canny awareness of the fact that they will need to look and sound as much like scientists as possible if their views are ever going to make it into the classrooms of America’s public schools.
Sayfa 93 - Oxford University Press
The cases of altruism and sexuality considered in this chapter both give us some sense of why we should be suspicious of any ethical or political argument that is based on what is natural. We can be drawn into these kinds of arguments from all sorts of laudable motives. For instance, campaigners against anti-homosexual laws will often cite evidence of homosexual behaviour among various species of birds and mammals in support of the view that homosexuality is natural. Modern medical orthodoxy now holds that masturbation should be not only allowed, but positively encouraged, because it is natural. Religious critics of interpretations of evolutionary biology that suggest we must resign ourselves to a society ruled by selfishness have been led to insist that, on the contrary, human altruism is not only desirable but natural. But 'natural' in these contexts really means fixed, given, determined. It denotes not the act of a free individual, but the playing out of an unalterable physical law. Political questions about what sexual behaviour should be allowed, or how the interests of different groups within society are to be balanced and regulated, are decided by human laws, not by laws of nature.
Sayfa 122 - Oxford University Press
The Roman Catholic Church has not generally been supportive of the anti-Darwinian ‘Intelligent Design’ movement, however. The Pope’s warnings are not against evolution as science but against adopting the idea of evolution as an overarching view that deprives the world of meaning and purpose. It seems that the Catholic Church remains ambivalent towards evolution. One of the leading advocates of 'Intelligent Design', Michael Behe, and one of its most accomplished scientific critics, Kenneth Miller, are both Roman Catholics.
Sayfa 80 - Oxford University Press
The importance of faith is strongly emphasized in the New Testament – most famously in the story of the apostle Thomas, who says that he will not believe Jesus has risen from the dead until he sees him in the flesh with the marks of the nails in his hands and the wound in his side. Thomas then encounters the risen Jesus, and believes. Jesus says to Thomas: 'Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.' (...) More recently, Richard Dawkins has described Thomas as the 'only really admirable member of the twelve apostles', because of his scientific demand for empirical evidence.
Sayfa 54 - Oxford University Press
Reklam
11 öğeden 1 ile 10 arasındakiler gösteriliyor.