Science, Religion, and Atheism in the NYT

Image via WikipediaThere's an op-ed piece in today's NYT (click here) editorial page that I found pretty interesting. David Brooks, a regular writer for the NYT, is writing about atheism, materialism, science, and religion/spirituality. Here is a short excerpt:

Lo and behold, over the past decade, a new group of assertive atheists has done battle with defenders of faith. The two sides have argued about whether it is reasonable to conceive of a soul that survives the death of the body and about whether understanding the brain explains away or merely adds to our appreciation of the entity that created it.

[M]y guess is that the atheism debate is going to be a sideshow. The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going end up challenging faith in the Bible.

Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.

I read (and also write, some) about this area all the time... but for some reason I find it a bit surprising (and also encouraging!) to see a big mainstream newspaper with an editorial about these questions.

Mr. Brooks did a pretty good job, I think. He is taking what I would consider a measured, intelligent, middle-ground approach that is suitable for our current state of knowledge and understanding. I am sure he will get a TON of letters, many of them outraged, from folks on either extreme (religious fundamentalists, vs. hard-core materialist atheists) who will find all kinds of ways to point out statements in his article that are very much open to question (the statement about the Bible is really going to ignite some people, and in some ways I can understand why... "faith in the Bible" is not necessarily a literal faith, and the content of the Bible is not necessarily concretely understood); and the fact that "love" is vital for human development does not necessarily mean that it cannot, eventually, be fully explained in materialistic terms... But, in a way, that's what (I think) he's saying. This is not a good time to be really dogmatic; this is a good time to be watching the data unfold, to be open, awake, and questioning, and to be compassionate with whoever our opponents might be.