新世界大学英语读写教程1教学全套课件教学资源包案例4 Its a big mystery.docxVIP

The big issue: it’s no mystery – science and religion cannot be reconciled. Scientists exist to defy, examine and explain the things that others might claim to be acts of God. While I am sure that there are many people working in scientific fields who would claim to be religious, it always seems to me that there really is a basic?conflict here, rather than a “misunderstanding” ( “Would you Adam and Eve it? Why creation story is at heart of major misunderstanding” ). How can any ultimately “supernatural” explanation (whatever that means) for a phenomenon ever be a “scientific” answer? At what point can any dedicated scientist investigating a difficult problem decide that there is no scientific answer to it and that it can be explained only as an act of God? How would such results be presented for scientific peer review and in what terms would they be couched? Exactly what “specific steps in the universe’s history?must?be the direct result of divine intervention” (quote:? Rowan Williams?– my emphasis)? Isn’t this supernatural view just a resort to mystery? And isn’t it the job of science to defy, examine and explain mystery? John Killingbeck Market Weighton Yorkshire No one, I am sure, will quarrel with Rowan Williams’s observations to the effect that religious-minded people should be active in explaining modern theological thinking on the origin of life. In fact, there is already a great deal of work going on in this area, eg, at the? Faraday Institute in Cambridge?and the? Ian Ramsey Centre for Science Religion in Oxford. Major contributors such as John Polkinghorne and Alister McGrath would, I think, not want to make a great deal of difference between theological and purely scientific thinking on human origins, certainly in terms of biology and evolution. Two other points, however, are worth making with regard to Williams’s comments. Rather general and donnish statements such as “