Last post I looked at some of the ways science and religion interact without conflict in western culture. Today – what psychologists have found about how people in the US think about science and religion.
You may be surprised at some of their findings (I was).
Conventional ‘wisdom’ says that religion and science are at war, or at least opposed. Certainly you’ll find many atheists and many believers saying that. But there is another side to the story.
Some scientific discoveries seem (to some) to support belief, and many scientists are believers. And in recent times, the scientific study of religion as a social and biological phenomenon has become an active area of research.
Let’s explore.
Money’s not supposed to be important, but we all know it is. The poor can’t do without it, the rich act as if they can’t either, and everyone’s after their share of the pie. And if you’re reading this, most likely you (like me) are among the word’s richest, even though you probably don’t feel like it.
So how well is the money getting shared around?
I am a bit of a maths nerd – I enjoy using spreadsheets and graphs to analyse and illustrate. But I can’t claim much expertise – I did once obtain a Distinction in Statistics at Uni, but I’ve forgotten all of that now.
So while writing up some material on healing miracles (see Healing miracles around the world and Healing miracles and God) it occurred to me that miracles were a subject just asking to be looked at statistically. But it certainly wasn’t easy.
If you’re not a maths nerd, I suggest you read the summary only, which I’ve thoughtfully placed at the top.
Craig Keener is a New Testament scholar who decided to test whether the accounts of miraculous healings in the Bible had parallels in reports today. He read hundreds of written accounts, interviewed hundreds of eye witnesses (including some of his in-laws in Africa) and obtained written documentation where he could, and wrote his findings up in his book Miracles.
It’s a big book, but here are a few of the stories. (See more detail at More healing miracles.)
A few days ago I looked at the number of christian denominations with different beliefs, as a first step to examining the argument that 40,000 denominations (as some said) showed that God couldn’t exist, or couldn’t get his act together.
I concluded that there were not nearly so many differences in beliefs as that figure suggested to some people. Now to see how this affects the argument.