Saturday, March 18, 2006
Masking The Debate
This little blurb in the NYTimes is fascinating.
I also wonder if his comments are not more aimed at typical Bristish civility than at the fact that there is no genuine culture war - if anything England is far more secular than the US, but they are also generally far less rancourous in debate than we are (Except in Commons where they are downright rude).
But most of all this struck me as an attempt by the extremely liberal Times to say "see its not so bad."
Uh-huh.
Related Tags: religous prize, Darwin, Westminster Abbey, culture wars
Continuing a recent trend in which the world's richest religion prize has gone to scientists, John D. Barrow, a British cosmologist whose work has explored the relationship between life and the laws of physics, was named the winner yesterday of the 2006 Templeton Prize for progress or research in spiritual matters.The good doctor is quite right about the origins of the idea of an ordered and therefore examinable universe, but I think noting that Darwin is buried in the Abbey says more about the state of the Anglican Church and the Abbey in particular than it does about the co-existence of science and religion in England. I saw that tomb this past summer and sort of winced when I did.
[...]
Dr. Barrow, 53, a mathematical sciences professor at the University of Cambridge, is best known for his work on the anthropic principle, which has been the subject of debate in physics circles in recent years. Life as we know it would be impossible, he and others have pointed out, if certain constants of nature ? numbers denoting the relative strengths of fundamental forces and masses of elementary particles ? had values much different from the ones they have, leading to the appearance that the universe was "well tuned for life," as Dr. Barrow put it.
[...]
Noting that Charles Darwin is buried in Westminster Abbey, Dr. Barrow said that in contrast with the so-called culture wars in America, science and religion had long coexisted peaceably in England. "The concept of a lawful universe with order that can be understood and relied upon emerged largely out of religious beliefs about the nature of God," he said.
I also wonder if his comments are not more aimed at typical Bristish civility than at the fact that there is no genuine culture war - if anything England is far more secular than the US, but they are also generally far less rancourous in debate than we are (Except in Commons where they are downright rude).
But most of all this struck me as an attempt by the extremely liberal Times to say "see its not so bad."
Uh-huh.
Related Tags: religous prize, Darwin, Westminster Abbey, culture wars
