"There is no opposition between faith's understanding of creation and the evidence of the empirical sciences," Pope Benedict told a group of scientists who visited the Vatican this week for a meeting on "Scientific Insights Into the Evolution of the Universe and of Life." The gathering was hosted by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Francis Collins, former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, told Vatican Radio that it was "a very interesting meeting, bringing together scientists and theologians to talk about truth—the truth that you can learn from science and the truth that you can learn from faith. In many people's minds, there's a potential conflict there. I think that's what we're explaining in this meeting: Are there conflicts, and if so, how can they be resolved?"
For Collins, "a scientist who's also a believer, I don't see these conflicts," he said, "but I can certainly understand how many people do." —Heather Wax

Mike McCullough, a professor of psychology at the University of Miami and the author of Beyond Revenge, will be hitting the airwaves on "Speaking of Faith" with Krista Tippett to talk about "Getting Revenge and Forgiveness." During the radio program, McCullough will describe the science that explains the purpose that revenge came to have in human life and how taking that seriously could help us react more effectively to crises like school shootings, terrorism, and partisan divides. But he'll also stress that science is revealing humans to be more instinctively equipped for forgiveness than we tend to believe. The show will explore how we can calm the revenge instinct in ourselves and others, and embolden this forgiveness intuition.
The program airs tomorrow through next Wednesday on public radio stations nationwide.

It looks like voters in Michigan have passed a ballot measure that will loosen the state's restrictions on embryonic stem cell research. Proposal 2 would amend the state constitution so that infertility patients in Michigan could donate their extra embryos for stem cell research, provided that the embryos would otherwise be discarded.
Deriving stem cell lines from embryos (which destroys the embryo) is legal under federal law, but a state law in Michigan prohibited the destruction of embryos in most cases. According to the University of Michigan, the state was one of the most restrictive in the country with regard to embryonic stem cell research.
The amendment will take effect on December 19. —Heather Wax

Check out where Barack Obama stands on the scientific issues.

Evolutionary biologist and very vocal atheist Richard Dawkins says he's planning to become a children's author. In an interview with Britain’s More4 News, Dawkins, who recently retired as the Charles Simonyi Professor in the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, says he wants to write a book that explores children’s relationships with fairy tales and myths, and whether these stories affect their ability to think about the world rationally and scientifically.
Bringing children up to believe in spells and wizards and things turning into other things is "unscientific" and "anti-scientific," he says. "Whether that has a pernicious effect, I don't know."
Dawkins says he will "look at mythical accounts of various things and also the scientific account of the same thing. And the mythical accounts that I will look at will be several different myths of which the Judeo-Christian one will just be one of many. And the scientific one will be substantiated by appeals to the children to think for themselves, to look at the evidence. Always look at the evidence." —Heather Wax

FROM RABBI RICHARD ADDRESS, UNION FOR REFORM JUDAISM: Increasingly, studies are uncovering the value and benefits of health, and awareness of what constitutes a healthy lifestyle is a major factor in creating an ecology of healthy aging. Last month, The Week magazine cited a study from the Harvard School of Public Health that looked at the health record of thousands of people over a three-decade span. No surprise, they found that healthier lifestyles equated to longer lives. In my work with the Sacred Aging project of the Union for Reform Judaism, it is not unusual to observe that baby boomers and the elderly have greater concern for and involvement with their health than do their children and grandchildren.
Gradually, there seems to be growing interest in studying the relationship between extended life and health (no doubt driven by the boomers' own aging process). These studies have validated some religious approaches to this issue. And several years ago, the journal The Gerontologist noted that, “Because of the growing recognition that religious and spiritual beliefs and practices are widespread among the American population and that these beliefs and practices have clinical relevance, professional organizations are increasingly calling for better training of clinicians concerning the management of religious and spiritual issues in assessment, treatment and research.”
Jewish tradition is no stranger to these discussions. The link between health and the spirituality of an individual is part of the daily prayer ritual of the Jew. Judaism is a “holistic” medical model. Health is a commandment that is mandated so that each individual, mindful of his or her relationship with God, can remain in that sacred relationship. Thus, health is a pathway to the sacred and we are commanded to care for the body, which is a gift from God.
In his own medical practice and writings, Maimonides supported this notion that health is a divine path, and he validated the notion that bodily movement is essential to the maintenance of health. In his essay “Preservation on Youth”, Maimonides notes that exercise is the main principle involved in staying healthy and in the repulsion of most illnesses. “And there is no such thing as excessive bodily movement and exercise," he wrote. "Exercise removes the harm caused by most bad habits, which most people have. And no movement is as beneficial, according to the physicians, as body movement and exercise. Exercise refers to both strong and weak movements, providing it is movement that is vigorous and affects breathing, increasing it.”
Health, movement, exercise and their impact on aging are now part of the science and religion discussion—and they're sure to stay. The scientific study of healthy aging is a sacred task.

FROM NANCEY MURPHY, PROFESSOR OF CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY AT FULLER SEMINARY: In his day, early modern philosopher Rene Descartes used Latin and French terms for the “soul” that could also be translated as “mind,” and it was only later that philosophers adopted the second term, while the former predominated in religious circles. Descartes thought the mind was a nonphysical substance separate from the brain, a version of “substance dualism” influenced by fifth-century theologian Augustine and his Platonic predecessors. Thomas Hobbes, on the other hand, was among the first of the modern philosophers to deny the existence of a mind or soul, arguing instead that humans are entirely physical.
At the time, most Christian thinkers associated their theories of human nature with Descartes’ dualism, but in the 19th century, many adopted the popular philosophy of “absolute idealism,” meaning that all of reality (including humans) is essentially mental or spiritual. Meanwhile, Charles Darwin’s work on the continuity between humans and animals led some to conclude that if animals have no souls, then neither do humans. Others avoided this conclusion by arguing that while the human body may have evolved, God creates a soul for each individual at conception.
Throughout the 20th century, biblical scholars, historians of doctrine, and theologians increasingly concluded that the body-soul dualism is not inherent in biblical teaching, and many opted for physicalism. By mid-century, philosophers were divided between mind-body dualism and physicalism. And developments in neuroscience have put dualists more and more on the defensive. Among physicalists, the important debate today is between reductionists and anti-reductionists; that is, if we are purely physical, then must it not be the case that all thought and behavior are simply determined by physics, genetics, or neurobiology? Scholars engaged in the science-and-religion dialogue have joined with anti-reductionist philosophers of mind to explain how our higher human capacities, such as reason, morality, and even spirituality, arise out of our complex neural equipment but are not entirely determined by it.
Today, scientists, theologians, and philosophers have converged on a physicalist account of human beings: In other words, we do not have minds or souls. But informal polls show that the majority of people in this country are divided between body-soul dualism and a tri-part account of humans as body, soul, and spirit. It’s important that we keep this split between scholars and the general public in mind during political discussions of issues like abortion and stem cell research.

Nancey Murphy appears with J.P. Moreland, Richard Swinburne, Daniel Dennett, Peter van Inwagen, the Venerable Yifa, and Huston Smith in "Do Persons Have Souls?" the eighth episode in the Closer to Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series, hosted and created by Robert Lawrence Kuhn. The series airs Thursdays on the PBS HD network and many other PBS stations. Every Friday, participants will share their views on the previous day's episode.