blake johnson

The Pope has been appologizing repeated in the last few days for some remarks about Islam. I too found the quote that he used to be rather inflamatory. Yesterday, however, I read the Pope’s full remarks. While I still think he could have chosen a better quote, seen in context it is not nearly so bad. The interesting thing is that the speech has very little to do with Islam. Rather, the topic is the relationship between reason and faith.

This had special relevance to me now because I attended a couple lectures at a science and religion conference here at Yale last week. Physicist Laurence Krauss made a presentation which addressed this issue of reason and faith, so it was a topic still rattling around in my thoughts. This quote from the Pope caught my attention:

The scientific ethos, moreover, is the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which reflects one of the basic tenets of Christianity.

Something I also learned from the Pope’s address is that the greek word in the first chapter of John’s gospel is logos: In the beginning was the logos. If I remember correctly from communication class in high school, logos refers to logical reasoning in speech. This makes a huge difference in my reading of that text.

There’s a neat essay on a blog I just found of a theoretical physicist. The purpose of the post, I think, is to convey a bit about how a scientist thinks. It is long but largely successful.

The NYTimes has an excellent series of articles on the evolution and intelligent design debate, recently stirred up again by remarks by President Bush and Bill Frist. Today’s Times has a fantastic article about religious belief among scientists. Two interesting statistics: 40% of American scientists believe in God, specifically a God to whom they can pray and expect to receive an answer; but only 10% of “elite scientists” (in this case, members of the National Academy of Sciences) believe in God.

I suppose that I am rather surprised by this second statistic. I have certainly encountered a great deal of skepticism about religious organizations among the physicists that I know. Consequently, I would not be surprised to find out that many physicists believe in a general Deism, or that their practice of religion would be limited to such pluralistic forms as Unitarianism. However, even in my lab there are 3 graduate students (including me) who are practicing Catholics. So, I am also well aware of scientists who seem to reconcile their faith with science. I guess there are fewer of us than I thought.

For the NYTime’s complete coverage of the Evolution debate, go here.

In response to Sammy’s post: Yet another thing conservatives don’t understand about America. I was thinking about this recently… It has alwasy seemed to me that there is an inherent danger that the religious in the Vatican must be entirely out of touch with the real church. For example, it must certainly be hard to grasp the real shortage of priests when you are completely surrounded by priests every day in the Vatican. The thought which was new to me, though, was that there might be something valuable in this separation because it allows the church leaders to pursue doctrinal purity. We certainly don’t want the church changing its positions simply because they are out-of-sync with popular thought. We want the church to change its positions when church leaders come to a new understanding of something.

The real danger of this separation, though, is that while the Vatican leaders are working toward some ideal notion, they risk losing their church. This is what I see as the current state of the church. We desperately need to allow women to become priests. The church needs to recognize the life-saving potential of stem cell research. And the church needs to realize that contraception is not the same as abortion. But, I can’t see these changes coming from the isolated Vatican community.

The Humble Boast: Ignorance Is A Two-Way Street is a post about the frequent mis-categorization of all religious people as right wingers. What I found interesting, though, was this paragraph at the end:

“Religion” itself - depending on your interpretation of the Greek - means “reading” or “re-reading.” I prefer the latter translation, which implies that religious study requires constant analyzation, and then re-analyzation. This not only applies to religious texts, but life in general. Understanding - in the broad, esoteric sense - is gained through constant evaluation.

Something that occurred to me while reading this post is that the author’s interpretation of religion as “re-reading” and continual reevaluation is strikely similar to Nietzsche’s process of “becoming” where man attempts to continually remake himself. Of course, it is rather amusing when we find a similarity between religion and Nietzsche’s philosophy.