Sunday, January 09, 2005

Science and Religion....

"Let’s put it this way. I think the physical sciences are more likely to be religious than the biological sciences because they have, as it were, perhaps, a simpler concept of the universe and they are not so involved in minutiae as the biological sciences. [I.e., they are not so myopic.] In The Human Mystery, I deal with findings that are relevant for the theistic view, the Big Bang theory, and the anthropic principle. What Heisenberg called the First Principle, the principle of order — I don’t know whether by that he meant God— as long as we carry on the tradition of this, which was derived from the Christian religion, some dim theistic view that goes onguiding us; if that should go, he said, that will be quite terrible, worse than concentration camps. I can see that very much today still. What you have is a scientistic view, science as a kind ofreligion. Jacques Monod is an arch-priest of this, or arch-prophet, but there are quite a lot of others in the same way in other movements like sociobiology denying anything human, value-systems which animals don’t have. The situation I regard as quite serious, and I don’t think that in the seminaries training Protestant andCatholic clergymen, I don’t think they are really training them properly to face the modern world, to go out into a world where the average man in the street says that science has disproved religion. This is what you’re up against. I think it is very important indeed to be examining the whole mental outlook, from time to time, that is governing our lives and that is developing into the future. I hope very much that we are recovering from the long deep depression of materialistic monism which has spread over the intellectual world like a dark fog blanketing out all of the brightness and illumination of the ideals and imaginations of human beings. I hope very much that we can be restored to some sanity in relationship to the mystery of existence and become more and more freed from this domination by the dogmatic assertions of materialists that can only lead to despair and nihilism."
--John Eccles
(The Intellectuals Speak Out About God
Edited by Roy Abraham Varghese :47-48)