Mark Gould Religion Within Reason

Sarah Churchwell: The wilful ignorance that has dragged the US to the brink

Here's a monumental historical irony: a moment in the origins of the United States that every American schoolchild learns to view with pride, the Boston Tea Party, has now become a symbol of our (inter)national shame. In one sense, it is difficult to know what to say in response to the utter irrationality of the Tea Party's self-destructive decision to sabotage the American political process – and thus its own country's economy, and the global economy.

Last week, while the US government was locked in stalemate and risked defaulting on its national debt for the first time in its history (and thus also defying the Constitution that Tea Partiers supposedly hold sacred, which declares in the 14th Amendment that it is illegal for Congress to default), Michele Bachmann instructed her followers not to listen to those who attempted to "scare" them with untruths that the US would default if it didn't raise the debt ceiling. When, of course, that is precisely what it would have done. But the Tea Party has never let facts get in the way of its belief system, and now that belief system is genuinely threatening the wellbeing of the nation they claim to love.

Mottos are supposed to express a philosophy: in so far as the Tea Party can be said to have anything so exalted as a philosophy, their motto is quite telling. They are one of the most inaccurately named movements in American political history, but that inaccuracy is itself emblematic of the party's adamantine ignorance. Any American schoolchild can tell you the motto of the historical Boston Tea Party from which they take their name and – they mistakenly believe – their inspiration: "No taxation without representation."

Impatient with those extra two words, evidently, the Tea Party has truncated this proposition to something simpler: "No taxation." Never mind that the US has among the lowest levels of taxation in the developed world, matched only by Mexico and Chile (are these the nations the Tea Party would like to emulate?). Never mind that the nation's actual Founding Fathers were perfectly prepared to pay taxes – they just thought those taxes should purchase them a democratic voice in their own government.

The motto that came out of the Constitutional Convention was not "In God We Trust": it was "E Pluribus Unum," out of many, one. The phrase "In God We Trust" emerged from the American Civil War, but it wasn't put on US currency until the Cold War, in 1955. The following year, the same year he signed the Civil Rights bill into law, Eisenhower made it the nation's motto.

Hugh Ross: Interpreting Creation– Science-Faith Models « Ratio ...

In part 1 of this four-part series on Reasons To Believe’s apologetics and hermeneutical methods I reviewed the different apologetics methods used by Christian leaders. I also explained why I believe all these methods should be used and fully integrated in our apologetics and evangelism. Here, in part 2, I will briefly describe four different classes of models in current use across the creation-evolution spectrum of beliefs for dealing with science-faith issues, which one we employ at Reasons To Believe, and why.

Creationists and evolutionists employ dozens of models for addressing science-faith issues and for developing interpretative tools within the framework of those models. But all these models fall into four general categories:

science and faith are independent of one another, science and faith can be constructively integrated.

Separate Magisteria Model

Late evolutionary biologist and paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould eloquently expressed the first model category more than a decade ago in a now classic article entitled “Non-Overlapping Magisteria.” The article was first published (1997) in Natural History1 and later (1999, 2002) in Gould’s book Rock of Ages.2 It proposes “a blessedly simple and entirely conventional resolution to…the supposed conflict between science and religion.” The solution Gould avers is recognition that science and religion define two different and completely independent domains of teaching, questions, and research. Since, according to Gould, the two domains do not overlap one another, there is no need for any conflict between the two.

Gould avoids overlap by limiting the magisterium of science to the empirical realm, to the collection of facts about the universe through experiments and observations, and to the developing of theories that explain why the universe works in the way that it does. Meanwhile, he limits the magisterium of religion to addressing questions of ultimate meaning and morality. To put it another way, science would address the “what” and “how” of phenomena while religion would tackle the “why.”

Gould was quick to point out that his proposal is not original to him. The Roman Catholic Church, at least since Pope Pius XII’s 1950 encyclical, Humani Generis, has adopted a similar position. Thirteen years before Gould’s writings, the National Academy of Sciences USA wrote in its official publication Science and Creationism, “Religion and science are separate and mutually exclusive realms of human thought whose presentation in the same context leads to misunderstandings of both scientific theory and religious belief.”3 And since the publication of Gould’s writings, most scientists holding membership in the National Academy of Sciences USA and many within the American Institute of Biological Sciences have embraced his resolution to creation-evolution and science-religion conflict issues.

Revolution in the development of capitalism, the coming of the English revolution

Cyclopaedia of English literature, a selection of the choicest productions of English authors, from the earliest to the present time, connected by a critical and biographical history

The Works of Orestes A. Brownson: Philosophy of religion

Unity

How to relate science and religion, a multidimensional model