May 04 2009
Why We Need Religion… and I Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself
Here is a shocker, an article expressing a positive opinion on religion in the NEW YORK TIMES! Stanley Fish reviews the book “Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate” by Terry Eagleton. In the book, Eagleton argues that science cannot replace religion for the simple reason that science has nothing to do with the questions, needs, and purposes religions fills. Likewise, religion has no functions to answer the questions of science. Here is my favorite excerpt from the article:
Eagleton likes this turn of speech, and he has recourse to it often when making the same point: “[B]elieving that religion is a botched attempt to explain the world . . . is like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus.” Running for a bus is a focused empirical act and the steps you take are instrumental to its end. The positions one assumes in ballet have no such end; they are after something else, and that something doesn’t yield to the usual forms of measurement. Religion, Eagleton is saying, is like ballet… it’s after something else.
To use science to address religious concerns perverts it. Likewise, to use religion to address scientific concerns is a debacle. We need to stop choosing between the two, and instead recognize the purpose and limitations of both.
Here is the link to the New York Times article:
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/god-talk/
Here is the link to the book on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Reason-Faith-Revolution-Reflections-Lectures/dp/0300151799/
Here is a link to my past article on this topic:
How Science and Religion Can Play Nicely Together… and Should!
It is in this life (the Lord told us) that we will have...
Excellent article. I should dust off the obsolete library card and get this book.
Yeah…that’s great.
So the next time Science goes out in search of answers to purely empirical questions such as the age of the universe or the origin of carbon-based life, we can trust Religion to STFU and stay the hell out of the way?
I think the part of the point is that the origin of life has yet to be an empirical question. Empirical means that we can verify a hypothesis with a repeatable and demonstrable experiment. Until we can create a universe in a lab or life from a petri dish, we are stuck *gasp* with religion.
Although I would agree that the age of the universe is not a question either can really answer well at this point. I would also concede that religion, while identifying a source of life, cannot answer HOW that life actually came into existence.
Again, it is about logically and realistically acknowledging our limitations. There is too much we don’t know, that science or religion claiming an answer to is foolish.
However, there are questions of context and purpose where religion gives us a direction, a history, and point of reference that science cannot offer.
I need the Christ centered belief because I need God in my life.
@yaholo
actually, based on the leftover radiation from the beginning of the universe, ours is about 14 billion years old. science answered that one.
@junesattack
Since you didn’t cite your source, I can’t directly address what gave you that particular impression. Radiation testing, and other similar methods like carbon-dating, are touchy at best. In order for them to be accurate, you have to know for sure the radiation levels at the beginning of the universe (no one knows that). We can make educated guesses, but we don’t know.
Also, radiation half-lifes can be effected by the surrounding environment. For an accurate measurement, we would have to assume that the conditions determining the current measurable half-life are identical to the past conditions.
You should read into the concept of “assumption of strong priors”, which is basically states that all these theories have to make assumptions of prior conditions.
I am not disagreeing that current evidence and methodology points to a 14 billion year universe, but I am objecting to the assumption that we “know” it is 14 billion years old or that it is “answered”. You are exposing a very “faith” like trust in science if that is your position. And not even science, you are putting faith in contemporary science, which has a long history of absurdity.