Science and Religion
* After reading Gregg Easterbrook’s excellent article on the interfacing of science and religion (Opinion, March 14), I thought a better approach would be science and spirituality. “Spirituality” is a very universal term that deals with our relations to a higher power and this power’s relations with the natural and human worlds. Spirituality touches on the universal issues that all of humanity is ultimately concerned with; it does not focus primarily on how this dialogue is packaged.
Religion brings in specific dogmas and creeds, and it is vulnerable to conflicts over which approach to God/Goddess is the “only right” one. Spirituality recognizes a connection between the human and divine worlds and makes no value or validity distinctions among these connections, be they Judaic, Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Native American, Wiccan, etc. Religion not only stresses the importance of God in the scientific sphere, it may also emphasize that God be seen only through one way.
J. ALAN ROSENSTEIN
Santa Monica
* I liked Easterbrook’s essay until he couldn’t resist climbing on an anti-postmodern hobby horse. Postmodernism running out of gas? His article affirmed the rise of one of postmodernism’s major assumptions.
It was the modern assumption that religion and science are separate categories of inquiry and truth. It was the moderns who assumed that to affirm the scientific method one must deny religion and to affirm a religious sensibility one must contradict science.
The postmodernists raised the issue of their intersection. It was the postmodernists who began talking about “The Reenchantment of Science,” as leading process theologian and postmodern philosopher David Griffin put it. Postmodern thinkers are the pioneers who have explored the edges where science and religion relate.
THE REV. JAMES CONN
United Methodist Church
Santa Monica
* Easterbrook’s column is filled with inaccuracies. First, that science was expected to disprove God but didn’t. No scientist ever set out to disprove God; the very idea is laughable. Second, that evolutionary scientists don’t have a clue as to how life begins. Scientists definitely have some “clues” about the origins of life and those “clues” amount to a pretty comprehensive understanding of just how life began. Third, that Carl Sagan advocated science and religion studies because Sagan began to see evidence of a creator in the big bang. Not true--just read his last book, “The Demon-Haunted World.”
The difference between religion and science is quite simple and yet huge. Religion, like Easterbrook himself, says whatever its creators want to; science requires proof.
JENNIFER HORSMAN
Laguna Beach
