One feature that seems odd to me that there are a fair number of articles attempting to disparage the varieties of religious belief on the general principal that they are "unscientific".
Of course they are.
There are also articles debating/attacking authors who have written books that try to prove some fundamental religious belief using science, or disprove science using some religious belief system (either of which are a waste of time). I can see why it would be tempting to take potshots at this shoddy thinking - but why bother?
Religious belief systems were not arrived at by scientific means and any attempt to prove those systems using scientific methods is bound to failure.
Religion is based on faith. A faith in the unknown, unknowable, and ultimately unexpressible mysteries that surround us.
I'm not sure why smart scientific/technical types would spend the time and energy to disprove some misguided religious person's attempt to show that some fundamentalist religious beliefs can be scientifically proven. For example - attempts to prove scientifically that the Biblical stories of Genesis, Adam and Eve and the Fall, are literally "true" is bad science and bad theology.
Can't we just leave it at that? Why waste our time reading, discussing or writing books filled with bad science or bad theology?
Some technological/scientific types get upset with spirituality, faith and religion and may even turn science into a God, or atheism into a fundamentalist religion - because they don't like the idea that some things are beyond our ability to know or express - that there will always be mystery....and as we continue on that slippery slope we might find that the study of science becomes a dead end.
The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkagaard had it right - we approach our faith in fear and trembling - because we've done all we can logically, scientifically, mathematically, biologically, and spiritually - get to the edge and look into the abyss...and still we don't know. We reach that point where we finally take a leap of faith, and that's that. We don't have to explain why and couldn't if we tried.
Ludwig Wittgenstein picks up on that theme with the idea that anything truly important cannot be expressed - language fails us at some point.
"When a person says something what he or she means depends not only on what is said but also on the context in which it is said. Importance, point, meaning are given by the surroundings. Words, gestures, expressions come alive, as it were, only within a language game, a culture, a form of life. If a picture, say, means something then it means so to somebody. Its meaning is not an objective property of the picture in the way that its size and shape are. The same goes of any mental picture. Hence Wittgenstein's remark that "If God had looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of.""Zen of course points us in the direction of not-knowing, using Koans to free us from our logical thought-processes.
Source - Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
I like the idea that there are mysteries we don't understand because that leads us to potentialities beyond what we can imagine. It leads us to joy, humor, humility, care for our fragile planet and the life on it.
