Here is one:
I am grateful for Charles M. Blow’s summary of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey on religious affiliation (“Defecting to Faith,” column, May 2). But I was surprised when he claimed that “science, logic and reason are on the side of the nonreligious.”
As one raised by atheist parents with college and graduate study in physics, plus a doctorate in the philosophy of religion from Columbia, I believe I know a thing or two about these items.
First, if you follow John Dewey in his assertion that “whatever introduces genuine perspective is religious,” then there is no such animal as the nonreligious. Furthermore, historians of science now know that biblical religion was a major factor in the rise of the empirical side of modern science.Finally, since following Dewey and many others, if everyone has a worldview, whether implicit or explicit, and none can be proved to anyone else who does not share it, then we all “walk by faith, and not by sight,” as Paul put it.
Owen C. Thomas
Berkeley, Calif., May 2, 2009The writer is professor emeritus of theology at the Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, Mass.
Will the sixties ever end? Our sad “landscape” all begins and ends with the religious and cultural silliness of that period.
#1, not until all the boomers are dead at the earliest, I’m afraid.