Subj : The universe
To   : Frank Masingill
From : Bob Eyer
Date : Thu Jan 04 2001 02:37 am

BE:
-I cannot think of any scientific claim which shows science
-reconciling itself with religion.

>I believe Newton held science back quite a bit and for quite a
>long time by attempting to do PRECISELY that.

Elaboration?

I don't see how Newton's theory of gravitation involved
reconciling science with religion.

Newton himself thought discovering the laws of nature revealed the
ways of God to Man, and Alexander Pope, in his poetry of the
1720s, praised Newton for taking that stand.  Recall Pope's famous
line, "God said 'Let Newton Be' and All was Light!".

But there is no evidence that any religion had previously
espoused a theory of gravitation, and thus no evidence that
Newton bent his scientific thinking to fit a religious mould.

All he did with religion at most was re-interpret it in the light
of his own scientific findings.  And that's basically what Pope
did with his own understanding of the science of his time.  Pope
saw science as the inside track to God.  Indeed, the religion of
the Enlightenment--Deism--was drawn from precisely this approach.

Of course, 18th century fundamentalist Catholics and Protestants
quite deliberately attacked this approach as tantamount to
atheism.  But the leaders of the Enlightenment--Voltaire, Diderot,
Hutcheson, Jefferson, d'Alembert, Hume, etc--condemned their
reaction as that due to 'Ignorance and Barbarism'.  We remember
the Enlightenment; no one remembers the ideas of its opposition.

Today, of course, Deism is no longer attacked as atheistic,
because deistic tendencies suffuse the greater part of the
reaction of modern religions to the progress of science.  In other
words, most religious people (other than the fundamentalists of
the Southern Baptist Convention) are fully prepared to let science
do its thing, even when scientific methods are applied to Biblical
criticism.  And they accept scientific findings at face value,
choosing to re-interpret their religious faith in terms of them.
For them, there is no contradiction between science and religion.

Bob

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