Science Ascendant?

The first time I saw the photo above, my response was awed and immediate:

What a powerful God we have!

Of course, others had different reactions. The response of Carolyn Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., was more like this:

Let’s teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome — and even comforting — than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.

Porco's quote appears in the most e-mailed story in today's NYT, a must-read for anyone interested in either God or science or both, A Free-for-All on Science and Religion. It's misnamed; it's really a pile-on, not a free-for-all, as it describes a conference funded by anti-God money man Robert Zeps designed to not find common ground between science and religion, but to promote science over religion.

Here are just a few quotes from the article:

• “Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.”
  
  
• I am utterly fed up with the respect that we — all of us, including the secular among us — are brainwashed into bestowing on religion."
  
  
• “What concerns me now is that even if you’re as brilliant as Newton, you reach a point where you start basking in the majesty of God and then your discovery stops — it just stops."

To those of us who hold a life without God as an empty life indeed, these are troubling thoughts -- even if we can rest in the fact that science cannot replicate the giving of life, and until it can, God reigns supreme. Still, that's metaphysical, and here on the earlthy plane we have more reason than ever to be troubled.

As fundamental Islam sweeps the world and the headlines, it is eroding the trust many non-religious people have that religion, even if it's not their thing, is not particularly harmful. Now, they're seeing fundamentalism in as life-threatening, science-squelching, freedom-hating -- and they don't have the understanding needed to differentiate between Christian and Muslim fundamentalism.

Fascist Islam does indeed pose a grave threat to our civilization -- but it's not a threat too great for God to endure.

Related Tags: Religion, Science, Islam, Christianity