[asa] Science & Society

Please excuse me for the hiatus in commenting on the Creation Care thread I started. I haven't had a chance to read any of the notes for the past two days, let alone respond, since Jack Haas and I had the privilege of attending the "Science & Society" conference in Boston these two days. I'd like to comment on it briefly before going back and reading all your notes.

The conference was better than we had expected and was quite worthwhile. Speakers and panelists included Al Gore, Shirley Jackson, Rita Colwell, Alan Leshner, Philip Sadler, Connie Bertka, Larry Krauss, Eugenie Scott, and Gerald Wheeler. The last five were the featured panelists on a 3 hour session with Q&A on "Science, Pseudoscience, and Belief". Though none were "people of faith" and there were a few snide comments on creationism, their remarks were in sharp contrast to the Dawkins/Harris crowd. They spoke respectfully of religion and Christianity and emphasized that science did not make it impossible to believe in God, though they did think it made it possible to not believe in God. There was a lot of discussion about how to communicate science and teach the essence of science and pseudoscience

The last question from the audience was about Francis Collin's book and whether it would be helpful to have more scientists of his caliber write books of this type. Krauss and Bertka responded. Krauss said he had as much problem with Collins' book as he did with Dawkin's book. He thought Collins was saying that science provided evidence for him that God exists while Dawkins said science provided evidence that God didn't exist. Krauss thought both were wrong: "Science neither compels us to believe in God nor does it compel us to not believe in God." I think Krauss has a point though I'm not sure how carefully he read Collins. Bertka was very positive about Collins and felt his books showed that Christianity was not inherently in conflict with science. Some of her comments seemed to be taken directly from the meeting many of ASA folks had with her last November. She made lots of excellent points.

I think there are some Wheaton College folks who lurk on this list. Do any of you recall when Krauss and later Bertka were on campus? They both talked quite a bit about Wheaton and their experiences there. Bertka talked about how "Wheaton was caught between a rock and a hard place" and how they deal with impressions of incoming Freshmen. Krauss said that after he spoke there, one student had come up to him and said "thanks for saying that 'you don't have to be an atheist to believe in evolution'. No one had ever told me that before." My question to those of you from Wheaton: can you tell us about when these folks were on campus? What message did they bring and what was the reaction?

Randy

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Received on Sat Jan 20 17:01:56 2007