FROM RICHARD SWINBURNE, EMERITUS NOLLOTH PROFESSOR OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION AT THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD: For at least 3,000 years, thinkers have argued that the orderliness of the universe shows that it was made and sustained by a creator God—in other words, it was designed. Here is my modern version of this argument.
Our world is a very orderly place. It is governed almost entirely by “laws of nature.” But “laws of nature” are simply statements about the powers and liabilities of things. Newton’s law of gravity, for example, states that every material body has the power to attract each and every other material body with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of their distance apart—and the liability always to exercise that power on every other material body in the universe. There is enormous uniformity in the behavior of material objects. In certain respects (such as those described by Newton’s law), they all behave in the same way, and then they fall into a few distinct kinds (electrons, protons, neutrons, etc.), all the members of which behave in the same way as each other in further respects.
Yet our universe is not just any simple orderly universe. Its laws and initial conditions (the distribution of matter-energy at the time of the big bang and the velocity of the bang) led to the evolution of humans. In almost any possible universe, each material object would behave in a very complicated way different from that of every other material object—and almost any other universe in which material objects behaved in simple ways would not have been able to lead to the evolution of humans. How can we explain the enormous human-producing coincidence?
An explanatory hypothesis is probably true insofar as it is simple and leads us to expect otherwise unexpected data. The hypothesis of theism is that there is a God that is an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly free being. An omniscient being will know what things are good, and if this being is also perfectly free, will not be deterred by irrational desires from pursuing the good. Humans have a kind of goodness that even God does not possess: the power to choose between good and evil. So it is to be expected that a God will bring about humans, and so the necessary conditions for their existence. But we’ll only be able to choose to bring about good or evil if there are simple laws of nature that cause our actions to have predictable effects, and only if those laws are human-producing will we exist at all.
Therefore, the otherwise unexpected orderliness of the universe is to be expected if there is a God. Of course, we could not observe anything except an orderly universe (for if the universe were not orderly, we would not exist). But that doesn’t mean the order does not need explaining—just as the mere fact that fetuses develop into humans still needs explaining, even though if they did not develop into humans, humans would not be around to observe and explain things. It may be, as some physicists believe, that our universe is only one of many universes, which together form a “multiverse.” But the only reason they can have for believing in other universes is that the most general laws of our universe are such as to produce other universes, and that means that the multiverse itself—our multiverse (unlike most possible multiverses)—is governed by laws such as to produce, at some time, a human-evolving universe. So the argument takes off from the orderliness of our multiverse rather than just the orderliness of our universe. And my “argument from design” remains an enormously powerful argument for the existence of God.

Richard Swinburne appears with Bede Rundle, Steven Weinberg, William Dembski, Francisco Ayala, Michael Shermer, and Freeman Dyson in "Arguing God From Design" the ninth 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.

"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.