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 Roger Bingham Director, The Science Network Edge was on the road this week to attend The Science Network's "Beyond Belief" Conference, at Salk Institute in La Jolla. The interesting program, organized by Science Network Director Roger Bingham, included more than a dozen Edge contributors such as Jerry Adler, Scott Atran, Mahzarin Banaji, William H. Calvin, Paul Davies, Richard Dawkins, Stuart Hameroff, Sam Harris, Lawrence Krauss, Carolyn Porco, V.S. Ramachandran, Terrence Sejnowski (Chair of the Science Network Advisory Board), and Michael Shermer. Among the other researchers present were Francisco Ayala, Patrcia and Paul Churchland, Melvin Konner, Sir Harold Kroto, Elizabeth Loftus, Loyal Rue, Richard Sloan, Neil de Grasse Tyson, and Steven Weinberg. The Reality Club: Scott Atran [From the "Beyond Belief" program:] Just 40 years after a famous TIME magazine cover asked "Is God Dead?" the answer appears to be a resounding "No!" According to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life in a recent issue of Foreign Policy magazine, "God is Winning". Religions are increasingly a geopolitical force to be reckoned with. Fundamentalist movements-some violent in the extreme-are growing. Science and religion are at odds in the classrooms and courtrooms. And a return to religious values is widely touted as an antidote to the alleged decline in public morality. After two centuries, could this be twilight for the Enlightenment project and the beginning of a new age of unreason? Will faith and dogma trump rational inquiry, or will it be possible to reconcile religious and scientific worldviews? Can evolutionary biology, anthropology and neuroscience help us to better understand how we construct belief, and experience empathy, fear, and awe? Can science help us create a new rational narrative as poetic and powerful as those that have traditionally sustained societies? Can we treat religion as a natural phenomenon? Can we be good without God? And if not God, then what? This is a critical moment in the human situation, and The Science Network in association with the Crick-Jacobs Center is bringing together an extraordinary group of scientists, philosophers, political commentators and writers to explore answers to these questions. |
Scott Atran |
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Free-for-All on Science and Religion Maybe the pivotal moment came when Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, warned that "the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief," or when a Nobelist in chemistry, Sir Harold Kroto, called for the John Templeton Foundation to give its next $1.5 million prize for "progress in spiritual discoveries" to an atheist — Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist whose book "The God Delusion" is a national best-seller. Or perhaps the turning point occurred at a more solemn moment, when Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and an adviser to the Bush administration on space exploration, hushed the audience with heartbreaking photographs of newborns misshapen by birth defects — testimony, he suggested, that blind nature, not an intelligent overseer, is in control. Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told. Carolyn Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., called, half in jest, for the establishment of an alternative church, with Dr. Tyson, whose powerful celebration of scientific discovery had the force and cadence of a good sermon, as its first minister. She was not entirely kidding. "We should let the success of the religious formula guide us," Dr. Porco said. "Let's teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome — and even comforting — than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know." She displayed a picture taken by the Cassini spacecraft of Saturn and its glowing rings eclipsing the Sun, revealing in the shadow a barely noticeable speck called Earth. There has been no shortage of conferences in recent years, commonly organized by the Templeton Foundation, seeking to smooth over the differences between science and religion and ending in a metaphysical draw. Sponsored instead by the Science Network, an educational organization based in California, and underwritten by a San Diego investor, Robert Zeps (who acknowledged his role as a kind of "anti-Templeton"), the La Jolla meeting, "Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival," rapidly escalated into an invigorating intellectual free-for-all. (Unedited video of the proceedings will be posted on the Web at tsntv.org.) [Photo caption: The author Richard Dawkins, with a book, says people are brainwashed to respect religion]. [ED. NOTE: In the photo Mahzarin Banaji and Richard Dawkins are perusing the newly published UK edition of What Is Your Dangerous Idea?] |
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John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
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Scott
Atran
Paul
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