Is There A Conflict Between Science And Religion? : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR

• Is There A Conflict Between Science And Religion? : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR

  • Given quantum indeterminacy, at least according to Plantinga, we have no grounds for saying that miracles are impossible, even if we do have good grounds for thinking them highly unlikely.
  • Plantinga does have a stronger claim in mind though. He thinks that the truth of theism — which he explains thus: "the thought that there is such a person as God: a personal agent who has created the world and is all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good" — gives science the foundation it needs. In the absence of such a benevolent source of meaning, why suppose there is enough regularity or order in the world for the world to be knowable by us at all?
  • his reasoning can be summed up this way: from a naturalistic point of view, we have every reason to doubt that our cognitive faculties are reliable. Therefore we can't seriously believe naturalism. For to believe it would be to have grounds for doubting the reliability of our own inclinations to believe it.
  • our cognitive faculties have evolved to maximize our fitness, not to represent the world accurately.
  • Rationality is not a lock-step set of rules and regulations stipulating what we may and may not think. It is, rather, the appreciation of the way in which our interests, knowledge, evidence, and concerns, our sense of "other things being equal," shape what is likely, what is pertinent, what is useful, and what matters.
  • We don't need God to be rational and reasonable. Indeed, we couldn't make sense of God, or anything else — we couldn't make sense of "making sense" — if we were not sensitive to reasons and to the difference between good explanations and bad ones. Nor could a scientific theory — the theory of evolution, for example — give us evidence that we were not rational. Rationality, in the relevant sense, is presupposed by the way we live, not something for which we need to argue.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.