This is a post I wrote in another forum:
Here is another article that I think you should all read. It is, again, a lecture by Michael Crichton. He says a lot of really good things in there that I really like and he said a few things that I did disagree with. Being a very rational, scientific person I liked that he pointed out that science and religion should not be the same but I did not like that he thought that they were mutually exclusive. I did think his analogy of Environmentalism to religion was somewhat fitting.
His article is about Environmentalism and how it is pretty off base. He parallels it with religions belief as it is based in faith and not fact (which is something that I don’t really agree with when it comes to Christianity as I think both fact and faith are extremely crucial, but his parallel still has value.) Here is something he said towards the end of the article:
How will we manage to get environmentalism out of the clutches of religion, and back to a scientific discipline? There’s a simple answer: we must institute far more stringent requirements for what constitutes knowledge in the environmental realm. I am thoroughly sick of politicized so-called facts that simply aren’t true. It isn’t that these “facts” are exaggerations of an underlying truth. Nor is it that certain organizations are spinning their case to present it in the strongest way. Not at all—what more and more groups are doing is putting out is lies, pure and simple. Falsehoods that they know to be false.
Now he is not saying that religion is bad in this article, he is saying the religion of environmentalism is bad.
I know it is another long article, but I think that both of his lectures are quite interesting and have a lot of great things to say and talk about. I like to read so I definitely enjoyed hearing his thoughts. I would love to hear what you all think about his stuff.
Now, I do believe not only that science and religion are not mutually exclusive, but indeed they really are mutually inclusive. Although, while mutually inclusive, they are not the same and cannot be defined in the same terms. One thing that pisses me off so much about secular (and often Christian) writers/scientists/whatevers is that they either completely have Christianity and science at opposing ends of a big fight or they try to equate one with the other. Science supports Christianity (and the other way around) and that is an amazing thing and it seems people always want to either ignore it or not give it enough credit.
Hope you are listening!
Shalom
EDITOR’S NOTE: This post is from a previous blog so the original comments no longer exist.