All tagged science-and-religion
Here’s a story often told: Sometime in the 17th century, Galileo taught that the Earth revolved around the Sun, which is obviously true. Refusing to believe him because it made them feel cosmically insignificant, the Church authorities tried to silence him. They even refused to look through his telescope when he offered it to them to see for themselves. Ultimately, they banned his books and sentenced him to imprisonment.
Obviously, the Earth revolves around the Sun. This is obvious now in part because we—maybe not me or you, but someone—can go to space, and see it happening. The trouble is that is was not at all obvious in 1543. Nicolaus Copernicus died in 1543: he lived just long enough to see the publication of his magnum opus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. It is said that he held a copy of it on his death bed.
Nobody talks like this anymore, but the etymology of “psychology”—from the Greek psyche and logia—is plausibly rendered as “science of the soul”. Perhaps it is apt that talk of souls is out of vogue, as our modern conception of psychology is much narrower than those of our ancestors: Aristotle’s starting point was that the soul is “the principle of animal life” [1], whereas modern psychologists are mainly interested in the mental aspects of that life […]
In the first post in this series, I tried to say something about God and what it means for God to be the creator of the world, and why it’s a mistake to think that the doctrine of creation could be contradicted by some scientific theory or the other. I would like now to try to say something about the scientific enterprise, and how it is related to what philosophers and theologians do. […]
Scientists are in the business of describing and explaining stuff that goes on in the world. Cognitive scientists like myself are principally in the business of describing and explaining stuff that goes on in our heads. We are, that is to say, interested in the gamut of human experience, from the mundane matters of taste and touch to the sublime sensations associated with romantic and, indeed, religious passion. This makes some people uncomfortable, this apparent encroachment of scientists into the rightful realms of saints. The “scientific study of religion” seems oxymoronic, a contradiction, if not of terms, then at least to our sensibilities. […]
