Reconciliation

What modes of action are better for finding a balance between religion and science, and what modes tend to exacerbate the conflict?

What should the aims of a reconciliation effort be? Are they attainable?

Personal Truth Values Inventory

I think one can do themselves a good service by inventorying their personal views, beliefs and actions when it comes to how scientific and religious modes of operating and questioning interplay in their own worldview.

Questions useful might include:

• Do I "believe" in science? Why?
• Do my religious beliefs bear scrutiny? By what standard of truth?
• What are the standards of truth I apply?
• Do I think through the implications of things I believe?
• Do I try to uncover inconsistencies? Do anything about them when discovered?
• Does scientifcally based insight contribute to my appreciation of God or does it drive me closer to a cynical conviction of the meaninglessness of it all? Why? Is this inevitable?
• What do I think is real? (For example, are the sub-atomic particles in the atoms in the molecules in the chemicals in the tissues that make up my body more real than I am?)
• Does religion make any demands on you?
• Does science?
• To what extent do I take scientific truth as given and fixed?
• To what extent do I take religious truth as given and fixed?
• Do I actively seek to challenge my beliefs and broaden my understanding or do I have a comfort level that I want to stay with? In either case what is the goal, the motivation?
• Do I care enough to enter in to the work of forging or finding a common ground? Do I think I'm capable of doing so or that it is up to others to do so?

What other questions can you think of that belong in such an inventory?

My purpose here is more encourage discussion of the inventory itself, and discoveries made in the process of taking it, than to encourage you to share the content of your personal inventory.

Science and Religion per se

What are the nature of "Science" and "Religion" when looked at simply as phenomena in their own right? What other phenomena (e.g. education, the family...) seem related when looked at in this way? What has been each one's separate history? What has been their interaction? What of their future? Is it conceivable that they were once one and the same? Is it conceivable that they will one day be so?

How do people use the term "Scientific"?

Of course, no one answer fits, for there are a variety of uses, motives and shades of meanings commly found. What I want is simply enummerate them and probe a bit deeper into what's really going on.

The question of evolution.

No topic has touched so much on the question of apparent conflict between science and religion than that of the evolution of species of organisms. The debate predates Darwin by a century at least and continues (one might say "evolves") even today. Why is this so? Can we find language that allows us to shed more light than heat? What would be the value in doing so? Why does this topic expose so much of the underlying stress in our current take on, and capacity for, truth? What are the dangers in settling too quickly on glib formulations?