I believe @Ashwin_s is using the term “clubbing [together]” in the sense of the Roman ‘fasces’. Tie a handful of thin sticks together and you have a 'club.
He is literally challenging the very notion that you pursue a scenario where God uses BOTH Special Creation to make Adam/Eve… AND uses Evolution to make a non-Adamite human population.
I dunno. He seems to say the opposite.
I think the issue is that I do not want to mix science and theology, however I want the two to engage in dialogue. I want the two in the same room and in conversation, but distinct and separate. So together and separate.
2 posts were split to a new topic: George and Ashwin
No Freeman Dyson is a ‘cultural Christian’ and not a believing one. No personal God, no soul, no afterlife, no bodily resurrection. Some where else he said that “The problem with religion is that when you kick it out the door it climbs back in through the window and it is better to keep it with you where it can do less harm”. He envisions a time when all places of worship will become centres to promote science and justice with the religious part just dressing or subjective taste.
The official policy of the Faraday centre in Cambridge is that religion does not make truth claims or they are ignored. As Denis Alexander the former Director pointed out to Larry Moran in their discussion “There is no contradiction between science and religion as we at Faraday and the whole science/religion field ignore truth claims of religion”. Yep that would certainly do the trick but it reduces religion to its literature, hymns and history.
Philip Clayton says that God is an emergent property, the latest of a emergent sequence starting from physics to biology to culture and now God. God is the mystery of the universe and nothing else this is where religion resides. God in the gaps indeed.
Edit link to Clayton Is Stephen Hawking Right About God? | HuffPost Religion. Notice he is not ENGAGING with the book at all and just stepping aside and letting Hawking dictate to him. Compare that to this The Grand Design - Truth Or Fiction? | Popular Writings | Reasonable Faith. Which does engage with the contents of the book and find them wanting. As the philosopher/physicist Quintin Smith points out “Stephen Hawking has been responsible for some of the worst arguments for atheism in the West”.
It reminds me of the theologian Nicolas Lash who states “I believe in God, but God does not exist”
I think the same. The vast majority of atheists support the freedom of religious belief, and are quite proud of the diversity of belief within the ranks of their fellow scientists. Yes, there are the occasional (insert expletive here), but that is true of any group of humans.
I have only talked to a few christian scientists about this, but I get the feeling that the vast majority of christian scientists only rarely have their religious beliefs criticized by other scientists.