SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

 • Debates about science and religion are, on the face of it, about the intellectual compatibility or incompatibility of some particular religious beliefs with some particular aspect of scientific knowledge.

• What science often aims to show us is that things in themselves are not as they initially seem to us-that appearances can be deceptive.

• The real conflict is a political one about the production and dissemination of knowledge.

• The questions of intellectual freedom , political power, and human morality give the conflict between science and religion its drama and it's interest.

• Human knowledge and human power meet in one, for where the cause is not known the effects cannot be produced.

• Seeds do not become plants and bear fruits unless they are sown in the right conditions, are watered and fed, and are harvested in the right way .

• Theoretical hypotheses about the nature of reality, and reasoning about what experimental evidence is needed to surpport or refute them, are prerequisites of scientific knowledge.

• The whole project of modern science could be summarize as the attempt to weave these individually relatively feable threads into a more resilient web of knowledge.

• We have no way (at least not yet) to check our ideas about god against devine reality, and so propositions about god derived from scripture, tradition, or reason should not be treated as literally true but only as attempts to make sense of human experiences and ideas.

• If human reason is too weak to make any true statement at all about the attributes of god, then it would seem that the statement that God exist does not amount to much.

• The apparent power to resist the most irresistible of all forces - the forces of nature -  has provided hope to many communities facing percecutions, poverty, or natural disasters.

• Deism - The belief that God created the universe but is no longer active within it.

• The theologian dilemma... The theologian seems to have to choose between a capricious, wonder-working , tinkering God and an absent, uninterested, undetectable one.

• Does the success of science in explaining nature in terms of laws amount to proof that God cannot act in nature?

• The solid physical world of our everyday experience and of the Newtonian physics in some sense comes into existence only by being measured.

• Collective sense experience trumps testimony.

• It is the experience of remarkable and unexplained phenomenon in a specifically religious context that turns an anomaly into a miracle .

• If God created us and our moral sense, then why do God's own ways of acting in the world seem to us not to meet our own standards of what is just and good.

• Divine inaction is just as hard to explain as divine action.

• Variation and natural selection could counterfeit intelligent design.

• The adaptation of organisms to their environment, and the origins of separate species , should be explained not in terms of the creative acts but by geographical distribution, random heritable variations, competition for resources, and the survival of the fittest over vast aeons of time.

• One common response to human evil was to explain that God must allow his creatures free will, which could be turned to either good or evil.

• Ideas of evolution will surely nonetheless continue to carry a menacing undertone given the anti-Semitic uses to which they have been put in the past.

• The warnings are not against evolution as a science but against adopting the idea of evolution as an overeaching view that derives the world of meaning and purpose.

• The more powerful dynamic is a generally conceive conflict between the fundamentals of Christianity and the evils of modern world.

• Evolutionary theory can infact explain the biological complexity which intelligent design claims defeats it.... Intelligent design is excessively negative, looking for gaps in evolutionary science but without providing a coherent alternative theory in its place.

• There is no need for defenders of mainstream science to risk seeming ideological and doctrinaire by prejudging the kinds of entities that will feature in successful scientific theories in future.

• Religions teach individuals how to use spiritual exercises such as meditation and prayer , as well as ritual and liturgy, to achieve a state of greater enlightenment, spiritual awareness, and moral and religious strength.

• The value of altruism is something to be decided by political and moral discussion, not by an appeal to nature.

• Neither science nor religion can can determine, for some mythical neutral observer, which fundamental maxims we should adopt. But they can provide concepts, beliefs, practices, rituals and stories that can be used to piece together moral meanings.

• Should sexuality be considered as something unalterably given by one's biological nature rather than as an expression of individuality?

• The question of whether the altruistic instinct, for instance, is a natural one is completely separate from the question of whether it is one that we should follow, and to what extent. That question will be answered only by thinking about the rules and goals according to which we, individually and communally, wish to live pur lives.

• Naturalistic fallacy- The mistake of supposing that something is ethically desirable just because it can be shown to be natural, or evolved.

• It is perfectly clear(as it has been to moral philosophers through the ages )that human beings are born with the propensity both to seek their own good and also the good of (at least some) others.

• The tendency of hunsms to behave in a universally cooperative and altruistic way is indeed quite natural, and should be seen as a blessed misfiring of a mechanism which evolved initially to benefit only close relatives .

• So , the secular humanist can argue , we do not need to be religious, not to believe in an afterlife, in order to be good;we simply need to follow nature. 

• Believers may warn us that accepting a scientific view of human nature will mean that we behave like animals. But sinse behaving like animals , in certain cases, means sacrificing yourself for the good of others or collaborating , in pursuit of a shared communal goal , then perhaps we should behave like animals more often.

• If people cease to believe in heaven and hell, then they will free to indulge their most sensual passions and selfish appetites. Without religion we fear human society would descend into animalistic anarchy.

• Religious beliefs are necessary to provide moral guidance and standards of virtuous conduct in an otherwise corrupt, materialistic, and degenerate world.

• Subjective immortality - the humanist notion that the selfish desire for heavenly rewards in a future life should be replaced by a more humble hope that one might live on after death through one's friends, one's children, or one's work.

• To return to more traditional belief in bodily resurrection rather than spiritual immortality is , on one way, an elegant Religious solution to the problem on how to respond to advances in neuroscience.

• If modern science suggests that belief in an immortal soul is problematic, it might equally, to say the least, question the evidential basis for the notion that at some point in the future, God will bring history to an end in a final eschatological act in which the universe will be destroyed and recreated and the dead will be brought back in bodily form to be judged by their maker.

• A neurological explanation of an experience rules out a supernatural or Religious one. Science has explained away the supernatural. 

• To say that the mind is emergent or supervenient is to suggest it is autonomous, not in tge sense of being able to exist independently of the brain but in the sense that it exhibits properties and regularities that are not susceptible to systematic reduction to the neurological level.