Re: Are science and religion compatible?

Description: Just admit you don't know something.

Transcript: I think it’s more of a problem in the United States than it is other places. I mean there are some places where science is less of an issue, and there’s other places where faith is less of an issue; but in the United States, it’s very nicely juxtaposed. And I think it’s actually very good dynamic. I think if I were . . . I think that part of the problem is there’s a tendency to focus on the extremes. It makes for good press, and for book sales, and so forth. And I think there’s a lot more need for meeting in the middle which is finding ways you can . . . If you really don’t know something, just admit you don’t know something. If you don’t know for sure that you can’t rule out an intelligent designer, then teach it in schools. If science is so fragile that they can’t teach exactly how you would question things and discover things, then I think we need to work on that. Make it much less fragile. So I think it could become a healthy dialogue. Right now it’s not healthy because of focusing on the extremes and not trying really hard to get people engaged. I mean people should be engaged in it more than just a gut reaction. They should actually want to, even if there is an intelligent design agenda that should be deeply informed about science, about technology, about how you actually answer questions.

I think that a lot of what we have are a set of accidents. And there is design in the world, and there will be lots of design going forward. And it’s an opportunity to embrace both the natural and the synthetic. There’s a lot of what’s natural is painful, and a lot of what’s synthetic is not completely thought out, but offers an alternative. My worldview is that dynamic between design and past and future. The parts of nature that we like, and the parts of nature which, for one reason or another, because of say population explosion is still natural, but it’s ________. It’s pathological from our human viewpoint, and we need to embrace ecology in a very intelligent way. And this requires that our politicians and regular folks know a great deal more about ecology in their world and their personal diversity than they currently know.

Question: Can science and religion coexist?

Transcript: I think that while science and religion . . . Science has very definite faith components, and most religions don’t stick to faith. They venture out into making predictions about our physical world. They don’t just say there’s something that is completely unconnected to us. They say actually it affects a lot. And when they do that they merge. We know that there is a connection between our feelings and our brain. Our brain is a scientific . . . something that we can study scientifically. So I think they can and should coexist. There’s a lot of faith expressed by scientists about science. It’s kind of an act of faith that science is a good thing. We don’t know that for sure. We won’t know that . . . We may not know that millions of years from now. And by good things, even phrasing goodness in a scientific context like survival of the species would be something that probably scientists would agree is a good thing. We won’t know whether science is a good thing for the survival of species rather than having entirely faith based. So I think these things are fair. They are solvable. They are addressable. We can bring them together, but it requires less extreme views . . . or what would benefit from less extreme views.

Recorded on: 7/6/07