https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tec...n-religion
EXCERPTS: Many historians now agree that the notion that science and religion must be in conflict was a Western invention of the 19th century, and yet this idea still distorts popular understanding of scientific history. [...] religious belief persists in the group of people you might think would be most resistant to it – scientists themselves. Based on international surveys, they report that not only is religious belief surprisingly common in this group, but religion and science overlap in scientific work, and even atheist scientists may see the pursuit of science as having a spiritual dimension.
[...] Religion shapes how scientists approach science. But as knowledge accumulates, science can’t help but encroach on religious territory, if only because the two ask some of the same questions. Where do we come from? Where are we going? What’s the nature of the universe and are we special in it?
In 2020 many astronomers consider it unlikely that rational, intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe, though they do think that relatively simple, microbial extraterrestrial life will be discovered before long. In light of that, the Brazilian-born theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser argues that it is time to move beyond the idea that we are merely average residents of the Milky Way. Gleiser, a self-declared agnostic, said in an interview in 2019 that we must accept that we have a moral duty to preserve this exceptional planet because “we understand how rare this whole game is and that for all practical purposes we are alone”.
Some see this increasingly explicit tendency of scientists to place humans back at the centre of the universe – from where Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo ousted them – as a symptom of Western science’s terminal malaise. They dismiss it as “neo-geocentrism” and worry that it means scientists are running out of ideas. Yet for others, making sense of our age of global crises requires a return to the old fluidity, in which science and religion are free to inspire each other.
Many environmental and social movements have emerged in recent years, in response to fears of climate change-fuelled civilisational collapse. [...] the author and former academic Pablo Servigne, has spoken about how the prospect of calamity has forced humans to consider their place in the world. What is our relationship to the rest of nature, or to the future of this planet? “Science offers no solutions to these questions,” he told an interviewer earlier this year. For Servigne, a collective spiritual reflection is called for: “If we satisfy ourselves with private beliefs, little spiritual hummingbirds flitting here and there, we will not achieve anything.”
Like Greta Thunberg, who has been compared to Joan of Arc, Servigne has been described as a guru with an evangelical message – something that is always suspicious to scientists. But perhaps a mature, confident scientific community should recognise that people ask questions for many reasons, none of them untainted by ideology, and that this is how we muddle towards knowledge. After all, argues the German neuroscientist and agnostic Wolf Singer, there is so much more to know.
[...] Singer sees no objection to hearing the same question framed differently – as long as the scientific method is respected in answering it – and has never shied away from dialogue with religion. A member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences since 1992, he remarked on what he considers the academy’s failures – its inability to change the Church’s position on birth control, for example – but also its successes. After the Dutch-born chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen described the dire after-effects of nuclear war at an academy meeting in the early 1980s, the Vatican and its embassies helped introduce the concept of a nuclear winter to global governments, influencing the disarmament debate. And Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’, in which he adopted the scientific consensus on climate change, was heavily influenced by the academy’s deliberations.
Singer has debated free will and consciousness with Buddhist monks, and even recruited them to his experiments [...] This research is an example of another way in which the two realms have inspired each other. ... At the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center in Chicago, the Religious Orders Study is approaching its fourth decade. This project tracks the physical and cognitive capacity of more than a thousand ageing nuns, priests and monks across the US, on the grounds that, belonging to religious communities, they tend to stay in one place and to lead similar lifestyles. The study’s architects claim that it has shed light on the neurobiological pathways that both lead to and protect against dementia... (MORE - details)
EXCERPTS: Many historians now agree that the notion that science and religion must be in conflict was a Western invention of the 19th century, and yet this idea still distorts popular understanding of scientific history. [...] religious belief persists in the group of people you might think would be most resistant to it – scientists themselves. Based on international surveys, they report that not only is religious belief surprisingly common in this group, but religion and science overlap in scientific work, and even atheist scientists may see the pursuit of science as having a spiritual dimension.
[...] Religion shapes how scientists approach science. But as knowledge accumulates, science can’t help but encroach on religious territory, if only because the two ask some of the same questions. Where do we come from? Where are we going? What’s the nature of the universe and are we special in it?
In 2020 many astronomers consider it unlikely that rational, intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe, though they do think that relatively simple, microbial extraterrestrial life will be discovered before long. In light of that, the Brazilian-born theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser argues that it is time to move beyond the idea that we are merely average residents of the Milky Way. Gleiser, a self-declared agnostic, said in an interview in 2019 that we must accept that we have a moral duty to preserve this exceptional planet because “we understand how rare this whole game is and that for all practical purposes we are alone”.
Some see this increasingly explicit tendency of scientists to place humans back at the centre of the universe – from where Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo ousted them – as a symptom of Western science’s terminal malaise. They dismiss it as “neo-geocentrism” and worry that it means scientists are running out of ideas. Yet for others, making sense of our age of global crises requires a return to the old fluidity, in which science and religion are free to inspire each other.
Many environmental and social movements have emerged in recent years, in response to fears of climate change-fuelled civilisational collapse. [...] the author and former academic Pablo Servigne, has spoken about how the prospect of calamity has forced humans to consider their place in the world. What is our relationship to the rest of nature, or to the future of this planet? “Science offers no solutions to these questions,” he told an interviewer earlier this year. For Servigne, a collective spiritual reflection is called for: “If we satisfy ourselves with private beliefs, little spiritual hummingbirds flitting here and there, we will not achieve anything.”
Like Greta Thunberg, who has been compared to Joan of Arc, Servigne has been described as a guru with an evangelical message – something that is always suspicious to scientists. But perhaps a mature, confident scientific community should recognise that people ask questions for many reasons, none of them untainted by ideology, and that this is how we muddle towards knowledge. After all, argues the German neuroscientist and agnostic Wolf Singer, there is so much more to know.
[...] Singer sees no objection to hearing the same question framed differently – as long as the scientific method is respected in answering it – and has never shied away from dialogue with religion. A member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences since 1992, he remarked on what he considers the academy’s failures – its inability to change the Church’s position on birth control, for example – but also its successes. After the Dutch-born chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen described the dire after-effects of nuclear war at an academy meeting in the early 1980s, the Vatican and its embassies helped introduce the concept of a nuclear winter to global governments, influencing the disarmament debate. And Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’, in which he adopted the scientific consensus on climate change, was heavily influenced by the academy’s deliberations.
Singer has debated free will and consciousness with Buddhist monks, and even recruited them to his experiments [...] This research is an example of another way in which the two realms have inspired each other. ... At the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center in Chicago, the Religious Orders Study is approaching its fourth decade. This project tracks the physical and cognitive capacity of more than a thousand ageing nuns, priests and monks across the US, on the grounds that, belonging to religious communities, they tend to stay in one place and to lead similar lifestyles. The study’s architects claim that it has shed light on the neurobiological pathways that both lead to and protect against dementia... (MORE - details)