| Volume 7, Number 1, January 2010 |
The Church and the Dialogue with Science
by John Moffatt 约翰·莫法特 |
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
by Nicholas Carr 尼古拉斯·卡尔
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IT is only fair to make clear from the beginning that I am not actually an expert on anything. However, I have been lucky enough to talk to some scientists and at least on that basis hope to be able to offer some useful reflections on the state of the dialogue between religion and science. I should like to look at four different areas: the challenge to religious thinking presented by modern science; the current areas of compatibility where dialogue can take place; the wider history of the tensions between the two; and finally a theological perspective centring on the ancient Christian teaching of the Logos, the Word of God.
The challenge of science
One of the biggest imaginative challenges to Christianity in the last five hundred years has been the shift from thinking of the universe as centred around the earth to coping with an effectively infinite universe, in which we are one tiny planet circling one tiny sun in the middle of one tiny galaxy amongst billions...
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“Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL(1) pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.(2) Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I have had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind is not going—so far as I can tell—but it is changing. I am not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I am reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative...
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| Issue 7.1 |
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India’s Peaceful Rise
in World Politics
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