[Avodah] Science and Religion -- from the director of the NIH

[Micha Berger via Avodah]

Dr Francis Collins director of the US's National Institutes of Health,
made a video on why he thinks conflict between science and religion
is impossible.

> ... To him, each seeks to answer a different type of question: Science
> asks how and religion asks why.

> It's when these boundaries are crossed, he suggests, that trouble happens
> it's when extremists negate the value of either type of question that
> the fighting begins. To this man in charge of America's federal medical
> research agency, they're two sides of the same coin....

Hint: He sounds a lot like Stephen Jay Gould's position of Non-Overlapping
Magisteria <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-overlapping_magisteria>
a/k/a NOMA (1997).

I would instead propose BONA -- barely overlapping. Yes, both touch on
the question of origins. But since that question isn't really the core
topic of either discipline, no question a resulting conflict would raise
can touch on the our confidence in the basic theory. Any question of
origins isn't important enough to disprove a religion or a science; they
are worth shelving until an answer emerges.

My usual mashal at this point is quantum gravity -- where quantum
mechanics and relativity overlap at the edges and give conflicting
answers is this extreme case. Each is so well proven in their core
expertese that we know they're 99-44/100% correct. And we continue
to use both - even to use QM to design chips to perform relativistic
equations in our GPS devices.

In cases of BONA, living with unanswered question is the norm, and works.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             If you're going through hell
micha at aishdas.org        keep going.
http://www.aishdas.org                   - Winston Churchill
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