Reading for 12-16-21 AFS SNEC Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Discussion Group

PDF of Reading Assignments

One of the World’s Most Powerful Scientists Believes in Miracles

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/one-of-the-worlds-most-powerful-scientists-believes-in-miracles/

“Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion.”

Isaac Newton

“Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ….get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.”

― Abraham Joshua Heschel

“The worship of reason is arrogance and betrays a lack of intelligence. The rejection of reason is cowardice and betrays a lack of faith.”

― Abraham Joshua Heschel

“The Search for reason ends at the known; on the immense expanse beyond it only the sense of the ineffable can glide. It alone knows the route to that which is remote from experience and understanding. Neither of them is amphibious: reason cannot go beyond the shore, and the sense of the ineffable is out of place where we measure, where we weigh. We do not leave the shore of the known in search of adventure or suspense or because of the failure of reason to answer our questions. We sail because our mind is like a fantastic seashell, and when applying our ear to its lips we hear a perpetual murmur from the waves beyond the shore. Citizens of two realms, we all must sustain a dual allegiance: we sense the ineffable in one realm, we name and exploit reality in another. Between the two we set up a system of references, but we can never fill the gap. They are as far and as close to each other as time and calendar, as violin and melody, as life and what lies beyond the last breath.”

― Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion

“It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion — its message becomes meaningless.”

― Abraham Joshua Heschel

Where the conversation has gone wrong:

“There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, and science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.”

― Stephen Hawking

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

From the Templeton Foundation

What factors influence the ways that people react to the findings of science and the teachings of religions, particularly when they seem to intersect? 

Arguments and evidence certainly have a role to play. But what accounts for the wide spectrum of opinion about the relationship between science and religion? 

Why are some people persuaded while others are not by the same arguments and evidence? 

How do underlying psychological, social, cultural or other contextual factors shape the different ways people approach the relationship between science and religion in various settings and with respect to various issues?

Sir John Templeton’s philanthropic vision: harnessing the power of the sciences to explore the deepest questions of the universe and humankind’s place and purpose within it.

Different and yet connected

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-science-takes-so-long-catch-up-traditional-knowledge-180968216/