User talk:Peterblaise
From EvoWiki
Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World
A Christian – Once an Anti-evolutionary Fundamentalist – Now Hears the Message of God in the Unfolding Evolutionary Process of the Universe
Michael Dowd, author of the forthcoming book, Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World
From http://interfaithradio.org/audio 2007-06-28
Michael Dowd was raised a Roman Catholic, but later moved to fundamentalist Pentecostalism. As a student at Evangel College, he was sure that Satan had taken over when he discovered that a biology text included a discussion of evolution. His views changed as he conversed with colleagues he respected and with a Buddhist monk who impressed him with his “Christian” behavior.
Today, he and his wife, Connie Barlow (a science writer), travel the country preaching evolutionary theology and spirituality. They have no home, but drive a trailer and live where they find hospitality.
Evolution, he says, is "public revelation," based on scientific evidence and methods. Faith, by contrast, is "private revelation." Dowd begins with the 14 billion year evolutionary process, telling the story in a sacred way, hearing the message of God in the unfolding. The vast majority of scientists, he notes – including most advocates of "intelligent design" – accept the reality of evolution.
He likens the universe to Russian "nesting dolls," or "nesting centers of creativity." Thus, there are sub-atomic particles within atoms, within molecules, within creatures, within the earth, within the universe. Using this image, God is the largest "nesting doll," the "whole" – both transcendent – greater than any one thing or creature – and immanent, a part of everything. Thus, nature does not exist for human beings; human beings exist to serve nature or the "whole" or "God."
Dowd thus understands human beings as growing from the process of evolution. We are, he says, nature reflecting on itself with the power to save the earth, to immunize it against disasters (like comets, for example) and to reverse the current trend of global warming. This ethic, he says, is what it means today to "know, love and serve God."
Although Dowd is himself a Christian, he says that this message is universal, and will, in fact, transform all religious traditions.
Dowd and his wife talk to groups across the United States as diverse as atheists, conservative evangelicals, Unitarians, Jews, mainline Protestants, Catholics, Hindus, and others – and they find that 80-90% of their audiences relate positively to this message.
Einstein on science:
"The belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science. Since, however, sense perception only gives information of this external world or of "physical reality" indirectly, we can only grasp the latter by speculative means. It follows from this that our notions of physical reality can never be final. We must always be ready to change these notions - that is to say, the axiomatic basis of physics - in order to do justice to perceived facts in the most perfect way logically." -- Albert Einstein, from http://www.amidabuddha.org/news/13Jul2007.html
"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge." -- Albert Einstein, from http://www.heartquotes.net/Einstein.html
More at a Google.com search for "einstein on science or religion":
Einstein's scientific achievements http://www.questacon.edu.au/html/einstein_s_science.html
"The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it's comprehensible" - Albert Einstein, from Science Hero: Albert Einstein http://www.myhero.com/myhero/hero.asp?hero=einstein
Hong Kong Baptist University has an interesting biography at http://www.sci.hkbu.edu.hk/scilab/math/einstein.html
Albert Einstein Online http://www.westegg.com/einstein/
American Institute of Physics - Albert Einstein: Image and Impact http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/
NOVA Online - "Einstein Revealed" a web site companion for the two-hour NOVA special aired in 1996 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/
Enjoy the stimulus and inspiration. Peter Blaise Peterblaise 09:38, 13 July 2007 (BST)
