"If the Darwin Festival told us anything about science and religion, it was the same old message underlined once again: that science and religion are first cousins that occasionally squabble, but far more as friends than as foes," Denis Alexander, director of The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, writes in a piece on the festival in today's Telegraph.

This is lovely:

"Our next generation of great science communicators should be flesh-and-blood people with personalities, every one different and every one with different priorities, all singing out enthusiastically for everything from astronomy to zoology, and they should sometimes be angry and sometimes sorrowful and sometimes deliriously excited. They shouldn't hesitate to say what they think, even if it might make Joe the Plumber surly," PZ Myers writes on Pharyngula. "If you want to improve American science and the perception of science by the public, teach science first and foremost, because what you'll find is that your discipline is then populated with people who are there because they love the ideas. And, by the way, let them know every step of the way that science is also a performing art, and that they have an obligation as a public intellectual to take their hard-earned learning and share it with the world."

"When you study robotics, it forces you to rethink, in a very quantitative way, the attributes we hold close and consider unique in our definition of what it means to be human," Hod Lipson, director of Cornell University's Computational Synthesis Laboratory and a leader in bio-inspired robotics, tells Forbes.
"For example, what is creativity? If machines can create new things and ideas that infringe on patents, which humans have traditionally defined as being creative, what does that mean about creativity? When we have computers that can generate experiments and ask questions, what does that mean about curiosity? Traditionally, we use terms like creativity and self-reflection in a very loose way to cloak something we don't understand very well, but when you actually work with robots trying to emulate these very characteristics, it forces you to think about them in a very precise and quantitative way. Ultimately, I think it leads to deeper questions and better understanding of these concepts."

"It’s a shocking outrage in our country. It’s a moral outrage that we have almost 50 million people without coverage, without access to a doctor, and we have even hundreds of thousands more that can’t even use the coverage that they have. That’s wrong. We have to change it," Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of the Catholic social justice lobby NETWORK, tells anchor Bob Abernethy in a recent episode of Religion & Ethics Newsweekly. NETWORK is part of an interfaith coalition of religious organizations calling for health care reform.
"There’s a lot of evidence that the fear of dying keeps us holding on to life in such ways that extraordinary means get used on a regular basis, and that makes it really challenging for limiting costs. There are other places where cost savings can be obtained, too, but that’s a big one," she says.
"Culturally as a nation," she adds, "we do not see death as integrated with living. We see it as something that’s to be feared. We’re getting better at it, but—with the hospice programs and other programs—but we as a culture need to accept dying is part of living, and it’s integrated. It’s one piece."

"I think from my experience in war and life and science, it all has made me believe that we have one life on this planet," genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter, who was drafted into the Vietnam War, tells the San Francisco Chronicle. "We have one chance to live it and to contribute to the future of society and the future of life. The only 'afterlife' is what other people remember of you."

"Religion and science don’t conflict with each other—they are mutually supportive,” former astronaut Charles Bolden Jr. told Baylor College of Medicine graduates earlier this week, speaking publicly for the first time since being nominated to lead NASA.

“As you embark on the next stage of life’s great challenge, remember that, unique on this planet, human beings carry the spark of rationality,” theoretical physicist and cosmologist Paul Davies told the undergraduates at Chapman University during his commencement address. “Somehow the universe has engineereed, not just its own awareness, but its own comprehension. Not only is your body literally made of stardust cooked in the nuclear furnaces of a bygone stellar generation; your brains are wired to make sense of it. … Your great asset, then, is your mind, and its extraordinary ability to comprehend the world and to be creative. Please don’t take it for granted!”

"We all thought it was really surprising that anybody thought there was a ghost on our show," Grey's Anatomy creator Shonda Rhimes told Entertainment Weekly after last night's season finale. (For much of the season, the character of Dr. Izzie Stevens saw and spoke with her dead boyfriend Denny, later revealed to be a hallucination caused by a brain tumor.) "We're a medical show. We thought it was surprising that anybody would look at it and go, 'Gee, that's a ghost.' So that was surprising to us."

"Growing up, I never prayed except during airplane takeoffs and landings. Now I try to pray every morning, because even if God is not in heaven checking his cosmic in-box for my prayers, the process of praying helps make me more compassionate and treat people better. Prayer doesn’t change things, prayer changes me, and then I change things," Kevin Roose, a Brown University student who studied at Liberty University for a semester, tells the Religion News Service. Roose, raised secular and liberal, wrote the new book The Unlikely Disciple about his experience at the largest evangelical Christian college, his "shifting beliefs," and his re-examined stereotypes.
"I still pray," he says. "I still read the Bible from time to time, and more importantly, I have a new attitude about how to approach people who are different from me. I used to be scared of Christian culture, the other side of this “God divide,” and now I actively embrace those differences."

"A word that is commonly used among scientists is wonder, though you won’t often see that word used in their scientific papers," the Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne tells the Religion News Service. "Doing research is laborious, and often the reward for all that is the sense of wonder that people get from time to time. Scientists’ experience of wonder is, in a sense, an act of worship."

"Do we use the “God” word? I believe we must. We have been largely stripped of our spirituality, we have become commoditized. We buy and sell plastic purple penguins for the poolside, in a gyre of material economic growth sustained by our current value system as we despoil the planet, and reach its bounds. Surely, in the midst of this terrible economic collapse, we can recognize that persistent economic growth is not sustainable ecologically on a finite planet. We have much to rethink about what is truly of value to our lives and how to orient ourselves," Stuart Kauffman, director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary and Watson Visiting Professor of Science and Religion at Harvard Divinity School, wrote in the Ottawa Citizen over the weekend.
"Are we mature enough to begin to give up the Creator God and keep the creativity? I think just maybe we verge on being ready to do so: Let God be our name, our chosen invented symbol, for the fully natural creativity in the universe. We are not made in this God’s image; we too are this God, along with butterflies, lichen, and streams. All of life and the planet are sacred."

"In the interest of reconciling science and faith, a helpful distinction would be to say that science deals with things and religion deals with words," the Rev. Henry Brinton, pastor of Fairfax Presbyterian Church in Virginia, writes in yesterday's USA Today. "When scientists perform their experiments, they are making measurements of the physical properties of things, and no words are allowed to change the results of their research. When religious people use words, on the other hand, they are attempting to create new realities by expressing their understandings, experiences and deepest convictions. There is nothing empty or cheap about religious words used well. In fact, they can influence numerous lives and change the course of history."

"From the perspective of Christian theology, biological evolution and creation are by no means mutually exclusive .... None of the evolutionary mechanisms opposes the affirmation that God wanted—in other words, created—man. Neither is this opposed by the casual nature of the many events that happened during the slow development of life, as long as the recourse to chance remains a simple scientific reading of phenomena," Father Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti, a professor of fundamental theology at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, said during a Vatican press conference yesterday. "I hope that the natural sciences may be used by theology as a positive informational resource, and not just seen as a source of problems."

"We can start with the phrase "believe in evolution" .... Using the same word to describe faith in God and support for a scientific theory strikes me as foolish and pernicious. It's bad for both science and faith, creating a false dichotomy between the two positions—one which serves nobody but a small group of culture warriors dedicated to making our public culture as stupid and ugly as possible," Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, writes on his "On Faith" blog.
"How can one use identical language to describe the decision to follow a particular spiritual path which is necessarily beyond scientific testing, and the decision to rely on a theory which is the product of such ongoing testing? We may use the same word, but are they really the same kind of belief?"

"I have experiences where the person next to me on a plane asks what I do. I say I'm an astronomer. I can do two things when they tell me they're fundamentalist. I can have my back up and say, 'How can you believe those crazy things?' or I can show them that science has incredible power to reveal the mechanisms by which the world came to be and has a place for their feelings of rapture, awe, and wonder," University of Rochester astrophysicist Adam Frank says in a Q&A with the Rochester City Newspaper.
Frank, who recently wrote The Constant Fire, a book about the science and religion debate, says that if "you look at what mystics were doing, they weren't looking for easy answers and they weren't necessarily describing the world. They were interested in going inward and having this internal exploration of their experience. They described a sense of unity, a fundamental oneness. That aspect of religion is often not looked at. We tend to see its social control side. The debate can't focus on the stories about the physical world that individual religions make up. We have to go beyond it and below it and before it to see where the roots of both science and religion emanated from. That's why mythology is so important."

"If someone could actually prove scientifically that there is such a thing as a supernatural force, it would be one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science. So the notion that somehow scientists are resisting it is ludicrous," biologist E.O. Wilson, who recently released his latest book, The Superorganism, tells Esquire magazine. "The intelligent-design folks say, 'You haven't explained everything.' What they don't appreciate is that that's what biologists do for a living. And, one by one, the things that can't be explained are explained."
Religion, Wilson adds, is a "manifestation of deep emotion that will [come] out, one way or the other. Either in an atheistic political ideology or an excessive fierceness in being secular. Or the Red Sox. In other words, we constantly seek a tribe that we feel is innately superior and has the great truths, and we want to identify with them. We shouldn't deny that."
Yet, he says, we "have to get an entirely new mentality. Getting set for a long haul into the future. In which we grow. Not in numbers—we'll probably shrink in numbers—but we grow. In our understanding, in our happiness, in our harmony. Because we realize that there's no other way to survive as a species."

"I believe there are these misconceptions, and if people would just talk about them, like Charles and Emma did, they’d find they have much more in common than not. What really upsets people is that they think Darwin was an atheist and that everybody who believes in evolution believes the same thing. If I were devout, that would horrify me as well," Deborah Heiligman, author of the new book Charles and Emma, tells the School Library Journal. The book looks at how Darwin's work on evolutionary theory affected his personal life and marriage—and how his marriage affected his scientific work.
"Darwin really didn’t know if there was a God or not. His belief fluctuated," Heiligman says. "He did not have the Creator being part of creation in the first edition of The Origin of Species, and he put God in the subsequent editions. There is such beauty in the way that Darwin and other scientists look at the world, and there is such beauty in the way religious people look at the world—and they are not mutually exclusive. That’s what I feel Charles and Emma’s marriage shows."

"If a persuasive argument for the existence of God is wanted, then philosophy has come up empty," Alex Byrne, who teaches philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writes in a piece for Boston Review that looks at how creationists, "intelligent design" proponents, and the "new atheists" use and abuse what philosophers say about the existence of a deity. "The traditional arguments have much to teach us, but concentrating on them can disguise a simple but important point," Byrne concludes. "As Anselm and Paley both recognized, the devout are not exactly holding their collective breath. For the most part, they do not believe that God exists on the basis of any argument. How they know that God exists, if they do, is itself unknown—the devout do not know that God exists in the way it is known that dinosaurs existed, or that there exist infinitely many prime numbers. The funny thing about arguments for the existence of God is that, if they succeed, they were never needed in the first place."

"In the Muslim world there is tremendous respect for science itself. The general thinking is that Islam and science are compatible, or that Islam is a scientific religion. If evolution can be shown as a sound science, then the general belief that Islam and science are compatible may lead people to accept evolution within Islamic framework, especially if it is presented with good evidence," Salman Hameed, who teaches courses on science and religion at Hampshire College, tells New Scientist. "I think it's not a doomed situation. This is the time when people are starting to inquire more about evolution, so I think the next five to 10 years are crucial in solidifying people's opinions." The Quran, he says, "does not provide a single clear-cut verse that contradicts evolution," and young-earth creationism doesn't exist in Muslim countries, but the problem is the "misperception that evolution equals atheism" and the sense that evolution is "a symbol of the West and everything that is bad about the West—usually translated as material culture or materialism."
According to Hameed, who recently wrote a piece on Islamic creationism for the the journal Science, "the next major battle over evolution is likely to take place in the Muslim world (i.e., predominantly Islamic countries, as well as in countries where there are large Muslim populations). Relatively poor education standards, in combination with frequent misinformation about evolutionary ideas, make the Muslim world a fertile ground for rejection of the theory." (Click on image for larger view.)

"I applaud the convergence by naturalistic philosophers, psychologists and other researchers in the life sciences on the physical and biological foundations of the phenomena which compose the humanities: ethics, art and music, humor, and of course religion, to name a few," philosopher Daniel Dennett writes in an autobiographical piece in Philosophy Now magazine. "The shrill defensive cries of those in the humanities who view their topics as off-limits to science, as somehow transcending all gross considerations of how their favorite phenomena can be located within the creative swirl of the physical world, are, in a word, embarrassing. I view myself as a defender of the humanities, not a traitor. I have been trying to show how our understanding and our appreciation of consciousness, free will and ethics, religion, and the arts grows when it is grounded in a detailed understanding of the relevant science. It is possible, of course, to contribute to our understanding of these beloved phenomena without paying any heed to the questions scientists raise about them; but when an unscientific perspective drifts into an anti-scientific perspective (as it frequently does), the result tends to be either obscurantism or mythmaking. Each of the topics I just mentioned has bulwarks apparently designed to deflect the probes of science: qualia and ‘intrinsic intentionality’; agent causation and other forms of frankly mysterious indeterminism; the systematic incomprehensibility of religious doctrines and practice (only those with ‘faith’ are qualified to investigate); and the ‘ineffability’ of artistic meaning and genius. Some philosophers brandish these doctrines like crucifixes in the face of a vampire, but those who reject such dodges are making genuine advances in understanding, typically by clarifying, refining, extending, and when it is called for, rebutting the analyses and theories of other scientists who now dare to approach these hallowed precincts."