Opinion Today May 18, 2009 Think Again: Stanley Fish
Stanley Fish is a law professor and author
God Talk, Part 2
According to recent surveys, somewhere between 79 and 92 percent of Americans believe in God. But if the responses to my column on Terry Eagleton’s “Faith, Reason and Revolution” constitute a representative sample, 95 percent of Times readers don’t. What they do believe, apparently, is that religion is a fairy tale, hogwash, balderdash, nonsense and a device for rationalizing horrible deeds. Of course, there is more than name-calling to their antitheism; there are arguments, and the one most often made insists on a sharp distinction between religion and science, or, alternatively, between faith and reason. . . .
Read full post » Stanley Fish is a law professor and author
God Talk, Part 2
According to recent surveys, somewhere between 79 and 92 percent of Americans believe in God. But if the responses to my column on Terry Eagleton’s “Faith, Reason and Revolution” constitute a representative sample, 95 percent of Times readers don’t. What they do believe, apparently, is that religion is a fairy tale, hogwash, balderdash, nonsense and a device for rationalizing horrible deeds. Of course, there is more than name-calling to their antitheism; there are arguments, and the one most often made insists on a sharp distinction between religion and science, or, alternatively, between faith and reason. . . .
Reader Comment
"Science rests on this particular article of faith: the universe contains regularities, and human beings, through sense experience and reason, are capable of finding candidates for these regularities, and then testing them to see how they mesh with experience. I have no quarrel with religion, but I have a quarrel with particular adherents of some religions, who deny that there are regularities, or that the tests of such regularities give meaningful results. . . ." - Posted by mathprof, May 18, 12:25 a.m.
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