On Tue, 27 Feb 2007 23:26:58 -0500 "Yoshie Furuhashi"
<critical.montages at gmail.com> writes:
> On 2/27/07, Jim Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, 27 Feb 2007 02:06:30 -0500 "Yoshie Furuhashi"
> > <critical.montages at gmail.com> writes:
> > > On 2/27/07, B. <docile_body at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > > > (And
> > > > like I 've said, I've actually read the Qur'an cover
> > > > to cover -- about as far out as the Bible.)
> > >
> > > The question is how people read the Bible, Qur'an, etc. and what
> > > they
> > > get out of them. Certain leftists -- such as yourself -- insist
> on
> > > reading them literally, but if you do so, all you understand is
> what
> > > literal-minded fundamentalists may get out of them. The thing
> is
> > > that
> > > most people of any religious faith are not fundamentalists, so
> they
> > > don't read the texts literally, which is the reason why they can
> > > reconcile faith and science.
> >
> > Well Stephen Jay Gould famously argued that religion
> > and science could be understood as two independent
> > and non-overlapping
> > magisteria. But the problem with that argument is
> > most forms of religious faith that exist in the US
> > and elsewhere do not have much in common with
> > religions like Unitarianism or Quakerism, for which Gould's
> > argument would work.
>
> Among the religions of the book, the oldest is Judaism, so one might
> suppose that it is the most difficult to square with science and
> modernity, but it turns out not only that the largest branch of
> American Judaism, Reform Judaism, is perfectly capable of doing so
> but
> also that Reform Jews hold a more progressive foreign policy view
> than
> secular "Just Jewish" Jews (who are themselves to the left of most
> other groups in America), according to the AJC survey cited by a
> recent Ha'aretz article (cf.
>
<http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20070219/0036
89.html>).
All that appears to be true, but I take it that you are not going to argue that Reform Judaism is anyway typical of the forms of religiosity that are prevalent in the US. You might also wish to keep in mind that in the US, and elsewhere, there has been a sharp shift to the right, theologically and even to some extent politically among Orthodox Jews. Within the world of Orthodox Judaism, you will find more than a few people who are sympathetic towards creationism and intelligent design. In fact in Israel some of the writings of American creationists like Duane Gish and Henry Morris have been translated in Hebrew and given circulation among ultra-Orthodox Jews there. There is also strong opposition to Darwinism among many American Orthodox Jews as well. (see: <http://tinyurl.com/o459y> for a study of attitudes towards evolution among Orthodox Jewish university students).
> An interesting irony that the oldest one has become the most
> modern.
>
> Stephen Jay Gould's view is also perfectly in keeping with the views
> held by Catholics, mainline Protestants, Muslims, Buddhists,
> Conservative Jews, Reconstructionist Jews, and so on. The main
> holdout in the USA (the only country in the world, it seems to me,
> where this Science vs. Religion controversy is so strikingly
> prominent
> in the public sphere) are very literal-minded Christians who seek to
> insert creationism into public education, a sizable minority but a
> minority nonetheless. The faithful of the other varieties are in
> fact
> allies in a struggle to keep creationism and the like out of
> scientific education.
Yes, the US is by far the leading stronghold of creationism but there are some strong proponents of creationism in Europe too, especially in eastern Europe where there have been attempts to suspend the teaching of evolution in state schools. Also, in Italy Berlusconi, back when he was prime minister attempted to limit the teaching of evolution in Italian schools, but he was forced to retreat in the face of public protests.
Over two years when were last disucssing the conflict between religion and science, I wrote the following: ---------------------------------- One can talk all one wants about Christian scientists, but we must also confront the fact that the scientific community has seen a very sharp drop in the proportion of its members who accept theism within the past 150 years. In 1914 US psychologist James H. Leuba did a survey study of religious belief among scientists and he found that 58% of 1,000 randomly selected US scientists expressed disbelief or doubt in the existence of God, and that this figure rose to near 70% among the 400 "greater" scientists within his sample. Leuba, twenty years later, repeated his survey in a somewhat different form, and found that these percentages had increased to 67 and 85, respectively.
Leuba's 1914 survey was repeated in 1996 by Edward J. Larson & Larry Witham. They found little change from 1914 for American scientists generally, with 60.7% expressing disbelief or doubt. That year, they closely imitated the second phase of Leuba's 1914 survey to gauge belief among "greater" scientists, and fund the rate of belief lower than ever - a mere 7% of respondents. They used membership in the National Academy of Sciences, as the criterion for designating which survey respondents were to be regarded as "greater" scientists.
Attempts to reconcile science with religious faith are certainly not new. Since the Scientific Revolution began in the 17th century there have been any number of such attempts. Sixty or seventy years ago, saw the efforts of prominent scientists like James Jeans and Arthur Eddington to "merge" science and religion which were supported in turn by philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead and General Jan Smuts of South Africa.
The British biologist (and unorthodox Marxist) Lancelot Hogben criticized these efforts in his book *The Nature of Living Matter* on the grounds that these efforts to overturn scientific materialism threatened to undermine the only sound bases for scientific progress. In Hogben's view these efforts to justify supernaturalism were motivated by the fact that:
...mechanistic philosophy cannot offer to the privileged a
supernatural sanction for the things they value most. It
cannot proffer to the underprivileged the shadowy
compensation of a world into which the thought of science
is unable to penetrate.
Hogben admitted that in the nineteenth century materialism and secularism had flourished and had enjoyed support within the bourgeoisie. But in his view that was because that was a period of prosperity and expansion while "the period in which we live is one of ferment and disintegration." Therefore, the ruling class and its apologists within the scientific community had to abandon materialism along with its benevolent liberalism in order to stabilize their social order.
Hogben was writing back in the 1930s but we can see similar efforts to brig science and religion together such as in the popular writings of physicist Paul Davies. And one suspects that the forces driving such efforts are similar to the ones Hogben described back in the '30s.
References:
Leuba, J. H. The Belief in God and Immortality: A Psychological, Anthropological and Statistical Study (Sherman, French & Co., Boston, 1916).
Leuba, J. H. Harper's Magazine 169, 291-300 (1934).
Larson, E. J. & Witham, L. Nature 386, 435-436 (1997).