Recently in Science and Faith Category

Spiked-online:

But the corruption of religion is not the only outcome of today’s cynical attempt to invent a new green God. When so-called atheists, scientists and secular thinkers demand that their views should be treated as sacred, they degrade the status of scientific reasoning, too. Science emerged through an intellectual struggle to free humanity from the tyranny of sacred dogma. Belief in science is unlike pre-scientific belief. A belief in the power of science to discover how the world works should not be taken to mean that science itself is a belief. On the contrary, science depends on an open-minded and open-ended attitude towards experimentation and the testing out of ideas. Indeed, science is an inherently sceptical enterprise, since it respects no authority, other than evidence. As Thomas Henry Huxley once declared: ‘The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority as such.’ ‘Scepticism is the highest of duties’, said Huxley, ‘blind faith the unpardonable sin’. That is why Britain’s oldest and most respectable scientific institution, the Royal Society, was founded on the motto: ‘On the word of no one.’ And that includes the green God.

Christianity Today:

Our planet requires oxygen and a warming sun and water in order for us to live here, and we appreciate this, even though we recognize that people can get sunstroke and drown in the ocean. So, too, it seems that plate tectonics are, as Ward and Brownlee put it, a "central requirement for life" as we know it.

This is not to suggest, as the scientist and philosopher Leibniz once argued, that ours is the best of all possible worlds. But ours may be the best of all feasible worlds, at least as viewed from a human perspective. This recognition will not stop people from bemoaning the next earthquake, but it should at least stop us from blithely assuming that the Creator could have done a much better job.

Interesting.

Another explanation for earthquakes here. In this case, the Flood and the geologic upheaval that resulted was a righteous God's response to sinful people. I don't know if Ward and Brownlee's model accounts for that.

At any rate it does give this passage new meaning...

John Schroeder:

The point is this - science does not know everything, despite claims to the contrary. Quantum mechanics is indeed mysterious, but it gives a lot better answers to a lot of questions than a lot of other branches of science. You see, the essential point is not what we don't know, but that we will never know if for no other reason than there is always more to know. In fact, we can't know. And therein lies the issue. When science has a problem with religion its becasue they think they can know. It's not about science, it's about ego. It's a personal issue.