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Allan H's avatar

As someone who works for a government science agency (at least for now), good for Biologos for being willing to say this.

It has been disappointing (but, after the last 9 years, not surprising) to see how much of the church is either silent or actively cheering the destruction of US science, including science that saves numerous lives.

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Michael Dickson's avatar

I hope you can convince people to see what is so interesting and valuable about (much) science.

Alas, the task is daunting. What many theistically-minded and intellectually curious people see most prominently of science are things like arrogant astrophysicists making silly (and yet almost comically aggressive) anti-theist arguments that a reasonably intelligent undergraduate in philosophy could easily pick apart.

More serious arguments *could* be made, but making them would require actually studying the long history of thoughtful consideration of these questions. Given the juvenile nature of the arguments that many prominent scientists actually make (not to mention their rhetoric), it seems implausible that such study has been undertaken by them; they thus appear to be interested only in browbeating, not dialogue, and it is easy to see why people react negatively to them.

I think that's one of the more significant hurdles, for many theistically-minded people, to accepting the value and wonder of scientific investigation. It is a mistake, of course, to associate an entire area of human inquiry with a few loud-mouths, but the mistake is very understandable, and, I suspect, psychologically very difficult to overcome.

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