Posted by Seeker [Seeker] on April 02, 1999 at 20:03:48 {ppHCdFLRUMbkYYamxmSw79YAW9JMpc}:
"Irritatingly, science claims to set limits on what we can do, even in principle. Who says we can't travel faster than light? They used to say that about sound, didn't they? Who's going to stop us, if we have really powerful instruments, from measuring the position and the momentum of an electron simultaneously? Why can't we, if we're very clever, build a perpetual motion machine "of the first kind" (one that generates more energy than is supplied to it), or a perpetual motion machine "of the second kind" (one that never runs down)? Who dares to set limits on human ingenuity?
In fact, Nature does. In fact, a fairly comprehensive and very brief statement of the laws of Nature, of how the
Universe works, is contained in just such a list of prohibited acts. Tellingly, pseudoscience and superstition tend to recognize no constraints in Nature. Instead, "all things are possible." They promise a limitless production budget,
however often their adherents have been disappointed and betrayed."
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"Attempts to reconcile religion and science have been on the religious agenda for centuries -- at least for those who did not insist on Biblical and
Qu'ranic literalism with no room for allegory or metaphor. The crowing achievements of Roman Catholic theology are the Summa Theologica and the Summa Contra Gentiles ("Against the Gentiles") of St. Thomas Aquinas...In the
Summa Theologica, Aquinas set himself the task of reconciling 631 questions between Christian and classical sources. But how to do this where a clear dispute arises? It cannot be accomplished without some supervening organizing
principle, some superior way to know the world. Often, Aquinas appealed to common sense and the natural world -- i.e., science used as an error-correcting device. With some contortion of both common sense and Nature, he managed to
reconcile all 631 problems. (Although when push came to shove, the desired answer was simply assumed. Faith always got the nod over Reason.)
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"By making pronouncements that are, even if only in principle, testable,
religions, however unwillingly, enter the arena of science. Religions can no longer make unchallenged assertions about reality -- so long as they do not seize secular power, provided they cannot coerce belief. This, in turn, has
infuriated some followers of some religions. Occasionally they threaten skeptics with the direst imaginable penalities."
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"The religious traditions are often so rich and multivariate that they offer ample opportunity for
renewal and revision, again especially when their sacred books can be interpreted metaphorically and allegorically. There is thus a middle ground of confessing past errors -- as the Roman Catholic Church did in its 1992 acknowledgment
that Galileo was right after all, that the Earth does revolve around the Sun: three centuries late, but courageous and most welcome nonetheless. Modern Roman Catholicism has no quarrel with the Big Bang, with a Universe 15 billion or so
years old, with the first living things arising from prebiological molecules, or with humans evolving from apelike ancestors -- although it has special opinions on "ensoulment." Most mainstream Protestan and Jewish faiths take the same
sturdy position.
"In theological discussion with religious leaders, I often ask what their response would be if a central tent of their faith were disproved by science. When I put this question to the current, Fourteenth, Dalai Lama, he unhesitatingly replied as no conservative or fundamentalist religious leaders do: In such a case, he said, Tibetan Buddhism would have to change."
-- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, pp. 270-278