Jefferts Schori: Both Science & Religion Essential
The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, spoke Thursday night before a crowd of about 250 people at Oregon State University, drawing on her experiences in both the scientific and the religious worlds and concluded that both are essential.
“Both science and religion have important things to say to all human endeavor … and at this stage in human history, we may not develop an adequate response to the dilemmas of existence without attention to both ways of knowing,” Schori said.
Creating a world of peace and justice and one in which human beings can survive physically depends on the ability of science and religion to talk to each other and build alliances that can respond to suffering the world, according to Schori.
“Both science and religion lead people to see the world with enormous awe. The response can either be a burning desire to understand the workings of the physical world, or an equally burning desire to connect with whatever has brought this world in existence.
“Both kinds of passion can help us to care for this world and all its inhabitants and both are going to be needed if we are going to relieve the suffering of many and bring increasing hope to our own species and all others,” Schori said.
Science and religion are not two ways of knowing. Only science knows in the sense that it is falsifiable. "God created the world" is not falsifiable because there is no possible evidence that would make a believer stop "believing" in God.
Science is necessary, whereas religion, like poetry, is a luxury. One does not read a poem in order to find out something about the world anymore than one should look at religion as having anything empirical to communicate.
How interesting that Jefferts Schori seems to have forgotten ethics, which is about values! Religion and ethics are not necessarily the same. Ethics is more likely to have a broad appeal because it tries to be neutral as much as possible in discussing issues, even while looking at the inevitability of prescriptive language. Ethics may be necessary but religion as such (one would have to define religion of course, pretending that all the world's religions have a common property or as suchness) is not.
Religion at best is the opinion of an individual.
Gary Paul Gilbert
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January 1, 2008 7:04 PM