Secularists oppose a truly secular state

Recent riots involving parts of the Muslim community in Australia have stimulated significant debate. I thought this Opinion piece by Paul Kelly, Editor at Large of The Australian newspaper was quite insightful and appropriate, reflecting on what it means for Australia to be a secular state. Here is an extract:

It is equally important, however, to acknowledge the secular state is under assault not just from religious crusaders but from secularists. In Australia today racist language is a taboo, yet attacks on religious belief are frequent and almost fashionable. 

The sanction extended to media displays of contempt for people with religious belief, notably Christianity, seems to reflect a new prejudice by people many of whom aspire to drive religion from the public square into the exclusively private realm. 

Perhaps they do not comprehend, but this is a direct assault upon the secular state and the terms of peaceful co-existence between the state and religion. In this concept, the state became neutral between believers and non-believers and neutral among different types of believers. 

Freedom of religion does not mean freedom from religion.

It is important to acknowledge that even the term "secular" was coined by Christians and used in a positive light by Augustine and Luther. That was something I learnt recently in a fascinating history seminar.

Science vs. Religion: Does anything change?

In his 1933 biography of Thomas Aquinas, G. K. Chesterton wrote words he intended as a retrospective but which are just as descriptive of the 1990s as of the 1860s. They could serve as a summation for Ronald Numbers' extraordinarily helpful book:  

"Private theories about what the Bible ought to mean, and premature theories about what the world ought to mean, have met in loud and widely advertised controversy, especially in the Victorian time; and this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion."

Mark Noll, in a  Review (published in First Things in 1992) The Creationists by Ronald Numbers,
The review is really worth reading, particularly as it provides such a nice summary of the book [which has since been updated and republished].

Justice and truth matter

The dramatic images below are taken from the start of last weekends English Premier League football game between Liverpool and Manchester United

They mark the recent release of a long overdue UK Government report into the Hillsborough disaster in which 96 Liverpool fans died.

Regardless of what postmodernists say truth does matter and we are wired with a yearning and passion for truth and justice. Where does this come from? Perhaps, from being made in the image of the God of truth and justice.

Worrying about the Bomb

I enjoyed watching The Crimson Tide, which depicts (fictional) events in a US nuclear submarine at the brink of a nuclear holocaust caused by Russian nationalist extremists seizing control of nuclear weapons in the 1990s. The movie is built around the clash of personalities and the struggle for power between an aging battle hardy coarse white captain [Gene Hackman] and his younger well-educated and diplomatic black deputy [Denzel Washington] who has no combat experience.

Two memorable lines:

We are about saving democracy, not practising it. 

There is no nuclear war, only nuclear holocaust.

The movie ends with the claim:

As of January 1996, primary authority and ability to fire nuclear missiles will no longer rest with U.S. submarine commanders... Principal control will reside with the President of the United States.

Besides being good entertainment the movie had two striking messages.

First, the importance of personal relationships for a meaningful life. Hackman's character is tragic/pathetic because his coarse and authoritarian life means he is left with only one meaningful relationship: with his comfort dog, a cute little terrier.

Second, the scenario for the outbreak of nuclear war is quite believable. I think the end of the Cold War has increased rather than decreased the chances of nuclear war. This seems contrary to public perceptions and priority. The issue of nuclear weapons seems to get less political attention than during the Cold War. Why am I so concerned?
The very large nuclear arsenal [about 20,000 weapons] in the former Soviet Union is not particularly well maintained or secure and so is prone to theft, accident, or seizure by extremist political or terrorist groups. The Wikipedia page on Nuclear Terrorism gives good reason to be concerned.

1983 demonstration in Sydney, Australia

Should theologians talk about science?

As a scientist it can be "interesting" at times to see what some theologians write about science, both in general or specific aspects of science. Sometimes they seem to struggle to distinguish between what is mainstream science, what is idle speculation, and what is plain wrong. This is understandable.

I am reading through the chapters on the environment in Jurgen Moltmann's Ethics of Hope. I was disappointed to see that he begins his discussion with the Gaia Theory of the Earth, due to James Lovelock, as if this is some well established part of scientific knowledge. Just reading the abstract of this 2003 scientific paper The Gaia Hypothesis: Conjectures and Refutations one can see that there are significant problems with Gaia.

There are many reasons why Christians should be concerned about the environment. Indeed, Moltmann has some nice discussion about some of the relevant Biblical texts. However, invoking contentious "scientific" speculations does not help the case.

There is a simple antidote to the problem with theologians and pastors mis-speaking about science. It is to check first with a range of scientists that what one has written or plans to say is actually accurate or appropriate.

Is the Higgs boson the Atheist particle?

Lawrence Krauss has a breathless piece How the Higgs Boson Posits a New Story of Our Creation on the Daily Beast. Here argues that the existence of the Higgs boson validates the inflationary model of the early universe, leading to the following final paragraph:

If these bold, some would say arrogant, notions derive support from the remarkable results at the Large Hadron Collider, they may reinforce two potentially uncomfortable possibilities: first, that many features of our universe, including our existence, may be accidental consequences of conditions associated with the universe’s birth; and second, that creating “stuff” from “no stuff” seems to be no problem at all—everything we see could have emerged as a purposeless quantum burp in space or perhaps a quantum burp of space itself. Humans, with their remarkable tools and their remarkable brains, may have just taken a giant step toward replacing metaphysical speculation with empirically verifiable knowledge. The Higgs particle is now arguably more relevant than God.

I find this a rather weak argument. I don't think the existence of the Higgs field is really of any greater philosophical significance than any other important scientific discovery. Just because we can explain something does not mean that God is not involved. This was the age old issue discussed by Laplace and Napoleon.
Increasing scientific knowledge is only a problem if you subscribe to the problematic notion of "the God of the Gaps" and/or you believe that science and theology are competing for the same intellectual territory.

A Biblical view of Creation is that God [YHWH in the Old Testament, and the Father of Jesus Christ] upholds and sustains the universe and governs the laws that scientists discover. Because we are made in the image of this Creator God we have the amazing ability to actually discover what these laws are.
Just because we can understand something in natural terms does not prove that God is not involved. Furthermore, we are still always left with the questions:
Why are the laws what they are?
What is the significance of the fact that they lead to our existence?

Historical origins of the science-religion "conflict thesis"

Last night I attended a really nice public lecture by Professor Peter Harrison  "Has science made religion obsolete?"  This was part of Research Week at the University of Queensland where I work.

I will just mention a few highlights. 

First, Peter briefly reviewed the wide range of conflicting views about religion held by different scientists including Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Francis Collins, Simon Conway Morris, and Stephen Jay Gould. This shows science has not made religion obsolete.

Key historical interactions between science and Christianity were discussed, including Galileo and Darwin. Contrary to popular perceptions, the conflict between Galileo and the Roman Catholic church was really just about science. Darwin was well received in many Christian circles.

So where did the idea of conflict come from? It was largely promoted in two books from the late 19th century. The first book was by Andrew Dickson White, the first President of Cornell University. Wikipedia states:

History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), whose primary contention was the conflict thesis. Initially less popular than John William Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874), White's book became an extremely influential text on the relationship between religion and science. In this book, White argued that "the great majority of the early fathers of the Church, and especially Lactantius, had sought to crush it beneath the utterances attributed to Isaiah, David, and St. Paul"^[33] White's conflict thesis has, however, been discredited by contemporary historians of science.^[34][35][36] The warfare depiction nevertheless remains a popular view among the general public.^[37]

What led to this approach to history, with its emphasis on "progress", which meant religion being supplanted by "science"?
The birth of social sciences.

Auguste Comte was the founder of sociology. He believed there was a continual progression and advancement or social evolution from the theological to the metaphysical to the scientific.
James George Frazer was the founder of anthropology.
He believed in a progression from magic to religion to science.
In this context White and Draper's books fit neatly into this new world view. The problem is they are don't accurately represent the actual historical interaction between science and Christianity. Rather they distort history to fit the progressive framework required by social scientists.