RELIGION AND SCIENCE

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 421.

READING AND SPEAKING

Do you think religion is important for the humanity? What does it mean to be religious? To your mind, is there any connection between science and religion?

Look at the pictures and say what is depicted. How are the events in the pictures connected with the religious views?

Read and explain how you understand the following quotations.

Statement of The Center for the Study of Science and Religion: "Sciences respond to a felt need to understand the world, and religions respond to a felt need for the world to have meaning. From these different starting points, one issue emerges at the junction of any science and any religion: are these felt needs commensurate? That is, is the universe a moral place, so that the natural order is relevant to human lives and human values; do faith and family, love and charity mirror any larger meaning than the meanings we give to them? Today, to a first approximation, the answer to these questions from any religion is Yes, and the answer from any science is No."

Scientific American book review: "... there are two ways to think about science. You can be a theist, believing that behind the veil of randomness lurks an active, loving, manipulative God, or you can be a materialist, for whom everything is matter and energy interacting within space and time. Whichever metaphysical club you belong to, the science comes out the same."

Owen Gingerich: "One can believe that some of the evolutionary pathways are so intricate and so complex as to be hopelessly improbable by the rules of random chance, But if you do not believe in divine action, then you will simply have to say that random chance was extremely lucky, because the outcome is there to see. Either way, the scientist with theistic metaphysics will approach laboratory problems in much the same way as his atheistic colleague across the hall."

Albert Einstein: "After religious teachers accomplish the refining process indicated, they will surely recognize with joy that true religion has been ennobled and made more profound by scientific knowledge."

Mark Friesel: "The difference between faith and a conditional reliance on observation of the natural world is profound. It is the irresolvable difference between religion and science."

Work in pairs and discuss the following question: Can religion and science peacefully coexist or there will always be a battlefield?

Reading

God² - how science and religion rub along

Protests by atheists against 2010 papal visit to the UK have highlighted the age old friction between religion and science. But for hundreds of years thinkers with a foot in both camps have sought to reconcile these two beliefs, says Dr Thomas Dixon.

Professor Stephen Hawking's declaration last month, that physics no longer has any need for God has been making headlines.

His new book The Grand Design uses something called M-theory to claim that the laws of physics created our universe unaided. The cosmic fireworks of the Big Bang needed no supernatural spark to set them off. They can apparently light themselves, in an endless succession of universes, like those candles on birthday cakes that are impossible to blow out.

So, is Prof Hawking's denial of the deity just one more example of an age-old conflict between science and religion? Does history suggest that these two great human endeavours are destined to be forever locked in battle? Not exactly.

There have been plenty of rocky moments in the relationship between faith and science, perhaps most famously the condemnation of Galileo by the Inquisition in Rome in 1633.