The constant fire: Beyond the science vs. religion debate

The Constant Fire: Beyond the Science vs. Religion Debate

Volumn , Issue , 2009, Pages

  Frank, Adam ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER   (United States)

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References (211)

1. For more on Newgrange, see Michael J. Kelly, Newgrange: Archaeology, Art and Legend (London: Thames & Hudson, 1995).
2. This is clearly a male perspective. I am not sure if female scientists have a similar metaphor or perspective.
3. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Penguin Classics, 1982), 6.
4. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience (New York: Random House, 1998), 45.
5. There are serious and illuminating discussions in these arenas. The works of B. Alan Wallace and Piet Hut stand out as thoughtful encounters between science and contemplative practice.
6. Mircea Eliade, Myths, Rites, Symbols: A Mircea Eliade Reader, edited by Wendell C. Beane and William G. Doty (New York: Harper Colophon, 1959), 9.
7. Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror (New York: Ballantine Books, 1987).
8. Ursula Goodenough, The Sacred Depths of Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
9. Dorothea Singer, Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought (New York: Greenwood Press, 1950), 180.
10. Antonio Calcagno, Giordano Bruno and the Logic of Coincidence: Unity and Multiplicity in the Philosophical Thought of Giordano Bruno (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), 25.
11. Robert Green Ingersoll, The Works of Robert Ingersoll, vol. 3 (New York: Ingersoll League, 1933).
12. Bruno Memorial Award, SETI League, www.setileague.org/awards/brunoquo.htm. Accessed June 22, 2007.
13. Calcagno, Giordano Bruno and the Logic of Coincidence, 19.
14. Calcagno, Giordano Bruno and the Logic of Coincidence, 9.
15. Richard Pogge, The Folly of Giordano Bruno, www.setileague.org/awards/brunoquo.htm. Accessed June 15, 2007.
16. Timothy Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 65.
17. J. L. E. Dryer, A History of Astronomy (New York: Dover, 1963), 318.
18. John North, The Norton History of Astronomy and Cosmology (New York: Norton, 1995), 283.
19. Newberry Library, Glossary of Terms, www.newberry.org/k12maps/glossary/index.html. Accessed August 16, 2006.
20. Alister McGrath, The Foundations of Dialogue in Science and Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 22.
21. Stout, quoted in MacGrath, The Foundations of Dialogue, 22.
22. McGrath, The Foundations of Dialogue, 23.
23. Percy Shelley, The Complete Poetical Works of Shelley (Boston: Houghton MiZin, 1901).
24. S. F. Cannon, Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period (New York: Science History Publications, 1978), 2.
25. McGrath, The Foundations of Dialogue, 21.
26. David C. Lindberg, "Exploring Science and Religion's Past," Science and Theology News, April 21, 2006. www.stnews.org/Books-2749.htm.
27. Lindberg, "Exploring Science and Religion's Past".
28. Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), 528.
29. McGrath, The Foundations of Dialogue, 16.
30. McGrath, The Foundations of Dialogue, 16.
31. E. Rosen, "Calvin's Attitudes towards Copernicus," Journal of the History of Ideas 21 (1960): 431.
32. Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, www.theoi.com/Titan/TitanPrometheus.html.
33. I have based my telling of the story on Padraic Colum, The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived before Achillles (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949).
34. Taken from Stephen Jay Gould's excellent essay "Nonoverlapping Magisteria," in his Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and Diet of Worms (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998), 269.
35. The Fundamentals, Welcome to the Fundamentals Homepage, www.xmission.com/~Wdelis/. Accessed March 20, 2007.
36. For the full text of the Butler Act and the law that repealed it, see Tennessee Evolution Statutes, www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/tennstat.htm. Accessed September 18, 2007.
37. This was due in part to the eVect of the play, Inherit the Wind (1955), which was later made into a popular Wlm (1960). See Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
38. Barbara Forrest, The Wedge at Work: Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 5.
39. Phillip E. Johnson, Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1997), 92.
40. Quoted in Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: Norton, 1986), 4.
41. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, 4.
42. Earth is now known to be approximately 5 billion years old.
43. National Academy of Sciences, Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences (Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences Press, 1999), 10.
44. See, for example, John Rennie, "15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense," Scientific American, June 2002.
45. For an excellent overview of arguments for and against Intelligent Design, with sections by Behe and Wells, see "Intelligent Design?" Natural History, April 2002.
46. Quoted in Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 206.
47. JeVery Bub, Interpreting the Quantum World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
48. Larry Witham, The Measure of God (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2005). I have drawn liberally from Witham's description of William James and his GiVord Lecture.
49. Witham, The Measure of God, 2.
50. Carol Zalesky, "William James The Varieties of Religious Experience," First Things 101 (March 2000): 60.
51. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, edited with an introduction by Martin E. Marty (New York: Penguin Classics, 1982), 31.
52. James, Varieties, xix. This quote is from the introduction to the Penguin edition by Martin E. Marty.
53. James, Varieties, 6.
54. James, Varieties, 30.
55. James, Varieties, 31.
56. The neurology of religious experience has become a domain of research, as discussed in chapter 2. See, for example, R. Joseph, ed., NeuroTheology: Brain, Science, Spirituality, Religious Experience (San Jose, Calif.: University Press, 2003).
57. James, Varieties, 14.
58. James, Varieties, 70.
59. Daniel Quinn, Providence (New York: Bantam, 1995), 63.
60. James, Varieties, 603.
61. James, Varieties, 58. Original emphasis.
62. James, Varieties, 610.
63. James, Varieties, 604.
64. Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 232.
65. Proudfoot, Religious Experience, 16.
66. Proudfoot, Religious Experience, 15.
67. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 21.
68. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 7.
69. Of course, the case can be made that "Whole Lotta Love" is a direct encounter with God.
70. Proudfoot, Religious Experience, 234.
71. Proudfoot, Religious Experience, 223.
72. Proudfoot, Religious Experience, 232.
73. Carsten Colpe, "The Sacred and the Profane," in Encyclopedia of Religion, edited by Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 12:511.
74. Colpe, "The Sacred and the Profane," 11.
75. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1959), 8.
76. Eliade, Sacred and Profane, 10; my emphasis.
77. Eliade, Sacred and Profane, 10.
78. Eliade, Sacred and Profane, 11.
79. Eliade, Sacred and Profane, 11.
80. Andrew Wiget, "A Siberian Connection," www.nmsu.edu/~english/hc/hcsiberia.html; accessed September 19, 2007. For a description of Khanty practices, see Peter Jordan, Material Culture and Sacred Landscape: The Anthropology of the Siberian Khanty (New York: Rowman Altamira, 2003).
81. Eliade, Sacred and Profane, 14.
82. Eliade, Sacred and Profane, 13.
83. Ursula Goodenough, The Sacred Depth of Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 12.
84. Jagdish Mehra and Helmut Rechenberg, The Historical Development of Quantum Mechanics (New York: Springer, 2001), 36.
85. My description of Pauli's life comes from two sources: Charles P. Enz, No Time to Be Brief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); and the introduction to Atom and Archetype: The Pauli/Jung Letters, 1932-1958, edited by C. A. Mier (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
86. Enz, No Time to Be Brief, 211.
87. Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).
88. Ursula Goodenough, "Religious Naturalism DeWned," http://religiousnaturalism.org/defs.html. Accessed September 10, 2006.
89. Elenor Bustin Mattes, Myth for Moderns: Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough and Religious Studies in America, 1938-1955 (London: Scarecrow Press, 1997).
90. Ursula Goodenough, The Sacred Depth of Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 10.
91. Mattes, Myth for Moderns, 11; my emphasis.
92. Goodenough, The Sacred Depth of Nature, 10.
93. Hutchinson, James Clerk Maxwell and the Christian Proposition.
94. Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, based on Mein Weltbild, edited by Carl Seelig (New York: Bonanza Books, 1954), 8-11.
95. Alice Calaprice and Trevor Lipscombe, Albert Einstein: A Biography (New York: Greenwood Press, 2005), 5.
96. Max Jammer, Einstein and Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 138.
97. Jammer, Einstein and Religion, 123.
98. Albert Einstein, The World as I See It (New York: Citadel Press, 2006), 27.
99. Jammer, Einstein and Religion, 97.
100. Einstein, The World as I See It, 5.
101. Einstein, The World as I See It, 28.
102. Edwin Krupp, Beyond the Blue Horizon (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 17.
103. Becoming Human, www.becominghuman.org/. Accessed September 20, 2006.
104. Robert J. Sternberg and James C. Kaufman, The Evolution of Intelligence (Philadelphia: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001), 71.
105. Russell Dale Guthrie, The Nature of Neolithic Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
106. Much of this section comes from Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth (New York: Canongate, 2005). Note that Armstrong draws on Eliade quite heavily in her telling of the way myths changed during the course of the evolution of human culture.
107. Armstrong, Short History of Myth, 7.
108. Armstrong, Short History of Myth, 14.
109. Armstrong, Short History of Myth, 30.
110. Dennis D. Hughes, Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece (Oxford: Routledge, 1991), 6.
111. Wade, Before the Dawn, 101.
112. Armstrong, Short History of Myth, 41.
113. Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee, Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe (New York: Springer, 2003), 126.
114. Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation (New York: New World Library, 2004), 189.
115. Wendy Doniger, A Very Strange Enchanted Boy, New York Times Book Review, February 2, 1992, 7.
116. Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1988).
117. Robert Alan Segal, Theorizing about Myth (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 19.
118. Krupp, Beyond the Blue Horizon, 17.
119. Robert Alan Segal, A Very Short Introduction to Myth (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 14.
120. Segal, A Very Short Introduction to Myth, 14.
121. Segal, A Very Short Introduction to Myth, 29.
122. Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 5.
123. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1959), 205.
124. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 205.
125. Segal, Theorizing about Myth, 19.
126. Segal, Theorizing about Myth, 30.
127. Leo Lionni, Fredrick and His Friends (New York: Random House, 1989).
128. TiVany C., www.spaghettibookclub.org/review.php3?review_id=301. Accessed September 30, 2007.
129. Dennis Danielson, ed., The Book of the Cosmos (Cambridge, Mass.: Helix Books, 2002), 265.
130. Helge S. Kragh, Cosmology and Controversy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 219.
131. Bradley Carroll and Dale Ostlie, Modern Astrophysics (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1996), 93.
132. One of my favorite advanced textbooks on general relativity is Sean Carroll, Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity (New York: Addison-Wesley, 2004).
133. A galaxy is a collection of 100 billion stars. All stars are part of galaxies, and galaxies are the basic "units" of structure in the universe.
134. A nice introduction to stories of scientiWc discoveries, including CMB, can be found in Franck Ashall, Remarkable Discoveries! (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 79.
135. Helge S. Kragh, Cosmology and Controversy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 219.
136. Actually they understood enough to push back to a few millionths of a second after the Big Bang, but I begin the story later. See Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (New York: Basic Books, 1993).
137. The proton is the nucleus of the hydrogen atom. It does not count since thermonuclear fusion is not required to create a proton.
138. Andrew Liddle and David Lyth, Cosmological Inflation and Large Scale Structure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
139. For more on dark matter and its cosmological implications, see Martin J. Rees, Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
140. It is not just the temperature but the way the temperature varies in CMB that was too uniform.
141. Liddle and Lyth, Cosmological Inflation, 4.
142. Alan H. Guth, The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
143. For an engaging discussion of this debate, see Martin Rees, Our Cosmic Habitat (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
144. Marcelo Gleiser, The Dancing Universe: From Creation Myths to the Big Bang (New York: Penguin Group, 1998).
145. I adapted my telling of this myth from Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
146. Roy Willis, World Mythology (New York: Owl Books, 1996), 63.
147. Gerrit Verschuur, Impact: The Threat of Comets and Asteroids (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 104.
148. Thule Air Force Base Home Page, Camp Century, www.thuleab.dk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=27&Itemid=48.
149. John Cox, Climate Crash (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2005), 14.
150. Thomas Cronin, Principles of Paleoclimatology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 414.
151. Roger Revelle, in Scientific American 247 (1982): 33-91.
152. For a technical discussion, see Satoh Masaki, Atmospheric Circulation Dynamics and General Circulation Models (New York: Springer, 2004).
153. Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming, 30.
154. The current state of the global model eVort can be found in the latest executive summary of the IPCC preports or the detailed reviews created by the IPCC process. See Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, www.ipcc.ch/.ch/. Accessed June 19, 2007.
155. R. A. Warrick, E. M. Barrow, and T. M. Wigley, Climate and Sea Level Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
156. For an excellent popular account of the link between ice and climate, see Mark Bowen, Thin Ice (New York: Henry Holt, 2005).
157. Alan Dundes, The Flood Myth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 1.
158. Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming, 155.
159. Hans Kelsen, The Principle of Retribution in Flood Myths, edited by Alan Dundes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 125.
160. Dundes, The Flood Myth, 167.
161. Dundes, The Flood Myth, 167.
162. James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia (New York: Norton, 1988).
163. Walter Gratzer, Eurekas and Euphorias: The Oxford Book of Scientific Anecdotes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 13.
164. The Houghton Mifflin Dictionary of Biography (New York: Houghton MiZin, 2004), 843.
165. W. H. Brock, The Chemical Tree: A History of Chemistry (New York: Norton, 2000), 264.
166. Gerrylynn Roberts and Colin Russell, Chemical History: Review of the Recent Literature (London: Royal Society of Chemistry, 2005), 64.
167. We now know this conclusion is incorrect. Graeme Hunter, Vital Forces: The Discovery of the Molecular Basis of Life (San Diego: Elsevier, 2000).
168. A. E. Cavazos-Gaither, Chemically Speaking: A Dictionary of Scientific Quota tions (Philadelphia: Institute of Physics Publishing, 2002), 158.
169. Eugene P. Wigner, "The Unreasonable EVectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences," in Symmetries and Reflections (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967). Essay found at ew/cr.slu.edu/~srivasta/wigner.pdf. Subsequent quotations from Wigner are from this source.
170. Roger Penrose, The Road to Reality (New York: Knopf, 2005), 12. 7. George LakoV and Rafael Nun~ez, Where Mathematics Comes From (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
171. Lakoff and Nun~ez, Where Mathematics Comes From, 366.
172. Carl Jung, The Psychology of the Child Archetype; quoted in Alan Dundes, Sacred Narratives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 245.
173. Dundes, Sacred Narratives, 245.
174. Jung, quoted in Dundes, Sacred Narratives, 245.
175. Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space (Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2002), 69.
176. Robert Alan Segal, "The Romantic Appeal of Joseph Campbell," Christian Century, April 4, 1990, 332.
177. Segal, "The Romantic Appeal of Joseph Campbell," 332.
178. Werner, quoted in Wendy Doniger, The Implied Spider (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 138.
179. Doniger, The Implied Spider, 138.
180. Mircea Eliade, Myths, Rites, Symbols: A Mircea Eliade Reader, edited by Wendell C. Beane and William G. Doty (New York: Harper Colophon, 1976), 133.
181. Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (New York: Pantheon, 1964), 28.
182. Eliade, Myths, Rites, Symbols, 138.
183. Doniger, The Implied Spider, 138.
184. Doniger, The Implied Spider, 145.
185. Lévi-Strauss, quoted in Doniger, The Implied Spider, 147.
186. Doniger, The Implied Spider, 147.
187. Doniger, The Implied Spider, 149.
188. For a scientiWc autobiography of Pauli, see Charles P. Enz, No Time to Be Brief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
189. Meier, Atom and Archetype, 179.
190. Meier, Atom and Archetype, 31.
191. Enz, No Time to Be Brief, 416.
192. Meier, Atom and Archetype, 203.
193. Meier, Atom and Archetype, 203.
194. Pauli, in Enz, No Time to Be Brief, 418.
195. Meier, Atom and Archetype, 37.
196. Ursula Goodenough, The Sacred Depth of Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 224.
197. David A. Clary, Rocket Man: Robert H. Goddard and the Birth of the Space Age (New York: Hyperion, 2003).
198. Arthur C. Clarke, The Promise of Space (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 15.
199. Clary, Rocket Man, 13.
200. Mike Gruntman, Blazing the Trail: The Early History of Spacecraft and Rocketry (Reston, Va.: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2004), 13.
201. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of Eternal Return (New York: Arkana, 1989).
202. James George Frazer, The Illustrated Golden Bough (London: George Rainbird, 1978).
203. James L. Christian, Philosophy: An Introduction to the Art of Wondering (Belmont, Calif.: Thompson/Wadsworth, 2005), 443.
204. David Scott and Alexei Lenov, Two Sides of the Moon (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2006), 81.
205. Robert Zubrin, "Getting Space Exploration Right," The New Atlantis, www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/8/zubrin.htm. Accessed June 18, 2007.
206. One of the best books on the road to the atomic bomb is Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986).
207. Larry McCaVery, Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).
208. Martin Rees, Our Final Hour (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 48.
209. George Musser, "The Climax of Humanity," Scientific American 243 (June 2005): 44.
210. Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Penguin, 2006).
211. Edwin Schrodinger, What Is Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 117.