Science versus Faith.

[Jim__]

I thought people might be interested in this. The Big Think is featuring a series this week - Science versus Faith. They are interviewing various people: David Gelertner, Richard Dawkins, James Randi, Robert Wright, Karen Armstrong, Rebecca Goldstein, and Lionel Tiger on the question of religion versus faith. On the page that I'm linking to, if you click on the person's name, you can go to their whole interview (usually about 40 minutes) or, click on the hyperlink text and you can go to an answer to a particular question (usually about 3 minutes). If you scroll down from the whole interview with a person, you can choose specific questions and listen to their answer.

Here's a brief answer (about 8 minutes) from Rebecca Goldstein on morality This may be the only piece of her interview available.

From the title page:

How can scientists be religious? How has religion evolved, according to science? In a special series this week, Big Think rounds up a learned cast of thought leaders—from a computer scientist who was injured by the Unabomber to an anthropologist who insists that universities teach "male studies"—to highlight some particularly vexing issues at the intersection of religion and science. While some of the experts in the series admit to having no faith beyond their belief in the scientific peer review process, others whom you might expect to fall in the devoutly atheistic camp provide a fairly convincing argument for the survival and importance of religion in our increasingly technological world.

According to evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, scientists never need faith, at least "not in the sense of faith as meaning belief in something for which there is no evidence." The self-described atheist says his "faith" is based upon his confidence in the scientific method. He may not be a physicist, he admits, but he has faith that there are physicists who can test, verify, and criticize the views of other physicists. James Randi, the "magician and curmudgeon by trade" who's made a career out of debunking the paranormal, pseudo-scientific, and the supernatural, agrees with Dawkins' skepticism of religion. "I am an atheist, tried and true," Randi says in his Big Think interview. After being tossed out of Sunday school as young boy, Randi dedicated his life to proving that science rules when it comes to the great unknown.

However, scientist-atheists may be on a crusade of their own, says David Gelernter, professor of computer science at Yale University. Gelernter doesn't name names, but presumably he fears that biologists like Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers "play on people's weaknesses and ignorance" while extolling hard facts over religious conviction. Even though Gelernter is a computer scientist, he reminds us that technology will eventually threaten human dignity and integrity, making the "wisdom" and "moral seriousness" found in religion even more important to future generations. Without the moral absolutes so readily supplied by religion, Gelernter says technology's increasing intrusion into human life via cloning and genetic engineering may present a "tremendously dangerous moral conflict of interest" to mankind.