Proof: we need better questions on religion and science
By Mark Vernon on Wednesday, May 13 2009, 08:00 - Religion - Permalink

There was just one interesting moment yesterday evening at the Theos debate, Did Darwin Kill God?, in Westminster Abbey, the place in which he is buried - the great naturalist that is.
The panelists Lord Robert Winston, Professor Steve Jones, Dr Denis Alexander and Professor Nancy Rothwell spoke entirely to the scripts you'd expect. Personally, I appreciate pretty much everything Robert Winston utters, particularly on this subject, so I sided with him.
Any serious Jewish commentator on the Bible must, indeed is duty-bound, to interpret the text, including Genesis.
Being religious is very uncomfortable since its about dealing with uncertainty, as indeed is science. It's when the two become confident of their certainties that they become dangerous.
Richard Dawkins is polarizing society in an entirely unnecessary way.
(The only thing I didn't quite understand was why he would not talk about his personal belief. He was 'not prepared to', he said. I think he meant his own convictions are irrelevant: everyone must work out their own salvation, as it were. Perhaps he's nervous of becoming some kind of religious icon.)
Anyway, the point is that you have already decided whether you are an atheistic anti-religionist who thinks that science is extinguishing belief in a thousand empirical discoveries, or a religiously-inclined believer or agnostic who thinks the whole thing is more complex than any simple confrontation allows.
Hence the singularness of the interesting moment last night. Right at the end, as a parting shot, Sarah Montague, who was in the chair, asked the audience whether the debate they'd heard had led them to change their minds in anyway whatsoever. She set the bar very low. Out of a crowd of about 800, roughly 20 people put up their hands. That is as statistically close to no-one as no-one.
That's the problem with this debate, exemplified in the evening. It is only as good as the question you ask. Framing it as a zero-sum game, such as whether Darwin killed God, gets you precisely nowhere. The evening was proof, if proof is needed, that we need better questions about religion and science.










Comments
Steve Allen: “Once the untrained mind has made a formal commitment to a [religious] philosophy -- and it does not matter whether that philosophy is generally reasonable and high-minded or utterly bizarre and irrational -- the powers of reason are surprisingly ineffective in changing the believer's mind."
Science and religion seek the answers to the same questions. One is reductionist while the other is holistic.