Dr Paul Allen

English: Signature of Stephen Jay Gould (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) From what’s been said it seems that God lies outside the scope of the scientific method. In one sense science has nothing legitimate to say about God. As the great Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) rightly remarked,  ‘science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can’t comment on it as scientists.’ In fact Dawkins and other New Atheists comment rather a lot on this matter, but perhaps that’s because they speak here primarily as militant atheists rather than scientists. While scholarship has shown that the origins of ‘scientific atheism’ as a faith tradition can be traced back to the eighteenth century, the New Atheism has given it a new importance and profile through its appeal to the natural sciences in defence of its atheist outlook. In the New Atheist world-view, ...

English: Alvin Plantinga after telling a joke at the beginning of a lecture on science and religion delivered at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) One of the most misleading headlines imaginable recently appeared over an opinion column published in USA Today . Tom Krattenmaker, a member of the paper’s Board of Contributors, set out to argue that there is no essential conflict between evolution and religious belief because the two are dealing with completely separate modes of knowing.   Evolution, he argued, is simply “settled science” that requires no belief . Religion, on the other hand, is a faith system that is based in a totally different way of knowing— a form of knowing that requires belief and faith. The background to the column is the recent data released by the Pew Research Center indicating that vast millions of Americans still reject evolution. As the Pew research documents, the rejection of evolution has actually increased in c...

Westminster Abbey in London (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Charles Darwin died in April 1882. He wished to be buried in his beloved village, but the sentiment of educated men demanded a place in Westminster Abbey beside Isaac Newton . As his coffin entered the vast building, the choir sang an anthem composed for the occasion. Its text, from the book of Proverbs , may stand as the most fitting testimony to Darwin’s greatness: ‘Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and getteth understanding. She is more precious than rubies, and all the things thou canst desire are not to be compared to her.’ So wrote Stephen Jay Gould , the eminent Harvard paleontologist, professor of geology, and ardent evolutionist in Discover magazine in 1982. Darwin was not buried in Westminster Abbey because he was a staunch defender of the faith. While he was not a friend of the church, neither was he an atheist. Continues Gould, “He probably retained a belief in some kind of personal god—but he did not grant...

One of the most common ways of looking at the relationship between science and faith is the conflict thesis, which posits an inherent conflict between science and religion. The conflict thesis was popularized in the nineteenth century by John William Draper and by Andrew Dickson White . Despite the acknowledged poor scholarship underlying these works, the conflict thesis has persisted among both believers and unbelievers. Today, some scientists, including Peter Atkins , Daniel Dennett , and Richard Dawkins , are asserting that there should no longer be any conflict because science has shown us either that God does not exist or that God almost certainly does not exist. Not all scientists adhere to the conflict thesis. There are believing scientists such as Francis Collins and John Polkinghorne who argue that science and faith are complementary. Others, such as the atheist Steven Jay Gould , argue that science and faith may coexist because they deal with completely separate subject m...