Translation: If we rewrite 'religion' to remove any and all empirical content, we can make it compatible with ANYTHING!

Now go and sell that to the fundamentalists...

Implicitly the author equates religion with theistic religion. One can be religious without a belief in God. Buddhism is an example of a non-theistic religion. One may believe in a god but not believe that any scripture describes the god that is believed in. Spinoza rejected the historic religions of Judaism and Christianity and believed in a God that he equated to the natural world. In short religion can be a large number of delusional systems if one chooses to believe in unprovable propositions.

As soon as I saw the title of the article, I could tell quantum physics was going to be mentioned there somewhere. Theists use quantum physics as a way of shoehorning their god into science. But if the Abrahamic God has such an important message for us all, then why would he be hiding in such obscure places?

This is the nail in the coffin for the Christianity.

Furthermore, if this God transcends our reality/universe/realm, then that means we are superior to him/her/it in some way, thus he/she/it is not a god.

<<Events that can be recorded by scientific instruments as violations of known natural laws would simply be absorbed by science as new observations, new facts.>>

In other words, you would never be able to distinguish between a divine act and a natural occurrence. That's a big problem for anyone who values the truth of their beliefs.

<<…it is not true that religion and science contradict each other, only some interpretations of religion and some interpretations of science do. Also, it is not true that religion and science are mutually irrelevant, only "uninterpreted" religion and "uninterpreted" science are.>>

It absolutely is true that they contradict each other, if you’re referring to the Abrahamic religions.

An omnibenevolent would not leave humans (that it supposedly loved) out in the wild for 200,000 odd years to die from their teeth, be eaten alive by wild animals and suffer such cruel and unimaginable grief with a phenomenally high infant mortality rate; only to then decide that it would finally intervene as of 5000 years ago and botch all that up too.

A god like that is either evil or impotent.

These are desperate theological re-interpretations from those whose intellects have obviously led them to a place that they find incredibly uncomfortable. And as such, they invent a new and more absurd god than the ones that came before it. But while those old concepts of gods are patently false, they still provided explanations that were good at the time and are still good for anyone not willing to investigate reality.

David

I agree there are lots of variations of faith and belief that don’t fall within George’s article, but I think he’s done quite a good job of surveying the compatibility between the beliefs of many scientists and acceptance of “divine action”. There are other forms of belief, though, which fall somewhere between deism and acceptance “divine action”, which I think are worth exploring in the context of science and religion. These include process theology, and the related idea of the world made free to make itself (which Polkingorne espouses). These see God’s presence in the world evident not so much as in finite events (“actions”) as in an evolving cosmos conducive to the development of sentient beings. And of course Peter Sellick writes regularly for OLO espousing a theology which firmly rejects any scientifically intelligible causal relationship between God and the world.

AJ Philips

If God has a message to the world, it isn’t written in quantum mechanics. If the relationship between science and religion is worth exploring it’s about how and whether the divine and mundane interact, not what they have to say to each other. I agree that the question of evil is a bigger issue, and personally I disagree with George that it is unrelated to the relationship of science and religion, but that’s a whole other discussion.

The fundamentalists might disagree, but the historical evidence shows that Christianity and Judaism never interpreted scriptures as literal accounts of the origins of humanity and earth in the manner of a physics or biology textbook. For example, the first two books of the bible provide two very different, and on a literal level contradictory, accounts of “creation”. If they were meant to be taken literally this would be a strange thing for the Bible’s compilers to do, but as complementary theological accounts they have enduring value.

George Virsik,

Are you George who comments on olo articles?

Interesting article...all I know is Isaac Newton was Christian and Lady Gaga and Keira Knightly are atheists.