Dawkins suggests that people who believe in the literal truth of the bible (or I suppose of any other religious text) generally lack knowledge of scientific consensus that challenges statements made in the bible.
As any reader of this blog should know, I too feel everyone should know something about what scientists have agreed is true about the social and physical worlds in which we live.
However everyone is ignorant of most things. Even the scientist may be a master of scientific knowledge about ants and termites, and have a good general knowledge of science, but will speak only a few at most of the world's 6,000 living languages, much less understand how religious thought it treated in them all.
In this world, we have to choose what to learn about. What information will we seek out in what depth? So does it make sense for people with strong fundamentalist beliefs to learn much about science, or for that matter for scientists to learn much about religion, or for either to study foreign languages?
Krause poses the question:
Can science enrich faith, or must it always destroy it?I think the answer is yes, and that is a reason that the religious should study science.
I don't think it is possible to believe both that the earth was created 6,000 years ago (as do some people) and that it was created 4.5 billion years ago as scientists generally believe. I think every adult in America must know that there is a fundamental difference on this and some other issues.
I can only guess, but I assume that those who believe in the young earth must know that their belief is not only not generally accepted, but is actually mocked by a considerable number of highly educated and high status people in our society. I would guess that that knowledge must be very uncomfortable.
Note that both estimates of the age of the earth are conclusions based on arguments drawn from different premises. It seems to me to be obvious that since both conclusions can not be simultaneously true, at least one or the other set of premises is faulty or at least one of the two arguments is untrue. (A scientist of course is reasonable willing to live with a situation in which two alternative conclusions are in direct contradiction, assigning different likelihoods to the alternatives of false premises and false arguments.)
The Catholic Church historically judged statements that the sun is the center of the solar system and that evolution explains the diversity of species as heretical, but concluded that those positions were not necessarily derived by infallible arguments from infallible premises. It seems to me that the religion was strengthened in the process of reconciling concepts which seemed to be articles of faith with conclusions based upon the preponderance of scientific evidence, as was the faith of the members of the church who cared about such things. Others may well have similar experiences.
Of course, some people may conclude that the scientific evidence is weak or the scientific analysis is unsatisfactory, choosing to believe that the authority of the bible and its interpretation are much stronger than the science. Would they not also feel confirmed in their faith by the effort>
Festinger in his book, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of A Modern Group that Predicted the Destriction of the World described his observations of a cult, many of whose members continued with the cult even though its major prophecy of the end of the world clearly was in error. In some sense, I suppose being wrong in a big way made those who stayed committed to their cult "enriched in their faith". I think that is a poor form of enrichment. Much better for people to enrich their faith by finding any errors in their interpretation that lead to fallacies in their conclusions about the observable world, and trying to correct those errors.
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