John Casper, 236, said,
>>“Always remember that Science is a verification process while Religion is not.”
>”History is the verification of religion.”

Um. History doesn’t do verification. That’s not History’s job.

Science verifies what people think is history.

What is being overlooked is the word “process”.

History is not a process. Religion is not a process.

Only Science is a process.

John Casper, 236 also said,

>…religious texts have to survive the test of history.

But to what purpose. What does that mean? There are religious text from the ancient Greeks and Egyptians.

Surviving does not give them accuracy in any shape or form.

Religious text survive if people find them useful, as in tools.

But tools are picked up, modified and discarded over time. (Some wind up in muesums.)

The Test of History is meaningless for religion. History can’t save religious faith.

Remember religious faith is about declared unverified starting positions.

Those unverified starting positions are what are vulnerable to the Science process.

Which is what scares Faith so much.

Science process has the Power to destroy the starting positions. Destroy enough starting positions and you destroy the faith, hence the religion.

Which was unintended by people of faith exploring their world around them long ago. Theologians did not see the power in science they were uncorking as they explored the world around them. Indeed, They had no idea that the
process they were engaged in would in the end would have the ability to destroy faith systems.

However, The impact of the Science process on Spirituality is something completely different.

Religious faith is doomed; Spirituality is not.

If youre interested, the full text of Blairs speech is here

I read Thomas Kuhn as part of a book club run by a professor emeritus from Penn State. A book of great importance and the concept of paradigm very helpful.

This professor used a card series lecture to teach us about how we are trained to look for symmetry in patterns by the hard sciences. The student struggling the most with this lecture was the daughter of the head of the biology department.

At any rate the professor would sit in a chair and read us facts as we tried to solve a card problem. Three cards on the board and we were to predict the next card. This was our only work. Each week we would come in and work on the solution. As we did this a microcosm of society developed. The teacher would “validate” or “attend” to the students who were developing predictions and theories closer to the answer or solution. He would sit and spew stories, anecdotes and facts and call himself Nature.

As he would attend to a student who was “getting hotter”, the class would attack that student. In this setting I was the student solving the problem. It was fascinating. As he would spend time talking to me the other students would get restless and even hostile. The daughter of the physics student actually assailed me in the restroom stating “I don’t know why he keeps talking to you.” Eventually I solved the problem and the class was incredulus. The solution was simply that the following care would have asymmetrical. That is it would not fit the pattern that the three on the board established and this would happen every third time. It was amazing because as I began to theorize the solution the class would not follow.

I was not a science student per se, and had not had years of drilling about the process of gathering data and the use of math in sequences. These students had been so trained that they could not “get outside the box”. And it was horribly stressful for them.

At any rate it paralled Kuhns discussion about paradigm shifts and the back lash and precursory denial.

Bateson described loose thinking and hard thinking and that all sciences benefit from both.

And then Thomas Kuhns work led into discussion about Chaos theory.

Truth…validity is my God.