Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Speaking of Science

Einstein’s God: Conversations about Science and the Human Spirit by Krista Tippett is a collection of 13 interviews with distinguished scientists and writers on science, each with a thoughtful introduction from Tippett. Here, again, her interviewees are people with deep knowledge and unique perspectives on science and religion; among them are distinguished physicist Freeman Dyson, Darwin biographer James Moore, and psychologist Michael McCullough, who studies revenge and forgiveness. The premise behind each conversation is that science and religion are not in conflict, and that believing they are has led us all astray. As Hindu scholar and physicist V. V. Raman tells Tippett, though we talk about a “cognitive dissonance” between religion and science, many of us live with an “experiential consonance.” It almost goes without saying, as Tippett puts it in one podcast, “we are not going to talk about Richard Dawkins.”

The paragraph above comes from an essay on the Killing the Buddha site and was written by Brook Wilensky-Lanford. It's an interesting piece, though she does seem to have a bit of a fixation on the political aspect of religion/science, and in particular is concerned to push the Intelligent Design movement into a thoroughly political position.

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