Tag: Science

People in every culture believe in an afterlife of some kind or, at the very least, are unsure about what happens to the mind at death. My psychological research has led me to believe that these irrational beliefs, rather than resulting from religion or serving to protect us from the terror of inexistence, are an inevitable by-product of self-consciousness. Because we have never experienced a lack of consciousness, we cannot imagine what it will feel like to be dead. In fact, it won’t feel like anything—and therein lies the problem.

Belief in God encourages people to be helpful, honest and generous, but only under certain psychological conditions, according to University of British Columbia researchers who analyzed the past three decades of social science research.

ABC News reports that a genetic analysis of two old strains have pushed back the estimated date of origin of HIV to 1908.

Storytelling is one of the few human traits that are truly universal across culture and through all of known history. Anthropologists find evidence of folktales everywhere in ancient cultures, written in Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Chinese, Egyptian and Sumerian. People in societies of all types weave narratives, from oral storytellers in hunter-gatherer tribes to the millions of writers churning out books, television shows and movies. And when a characteristic behavior shows up in so many different societies, researchers pay attention: its roots may tell us something about our evolutionary past.

Let’s grant that science and religion are not incompatible—there are after all some (though not many) excellent scientists, like Charles Townes and Francis Collins, who have strong religious beliefs. Still, I think that between science and religion there is, if not an incompatibility, at least what the philosopher Susan Haack has called a tension, that has been gradually weakening serious religious belief, especially in the West, where science has been most advanced.

Will American-style science curriculum wars commence in Great Britain? Not so fast, says Dr. Michael Reiss.

As the bicentennial of the birth of Charles Darwin in 1809 and the 150th year since the publication of On the Origin of Species approaches, the Church of England has added a section to its web site commemorating Charles Darwin, naturalist and deacon.

The Israel Antiquities Authority is digitally photographing every one of the Dead Sea Scrolls so that they may be available on the internet.

Christianity and Judaism are not alone in discovering how science and religion intersect. Islam depends on astronomers to determine exactly when Ramadan begins.

He scanned the faces of the sophomores in his Biology I class. Many of them, he knew from years of teaching high school in this Jacksonville suburb, had been raised to take the biblical creation story as fact. His gaze rested for a moment on Bryce Haas, a football player who attended the 6 a.m. prayer meetings of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in the school gymnasium. “If I do this wrong,” Mr. Campbell remembers thinking on that humid spring morning, “I’ll lose him.”