Towards a quantum theory of religious belief

Kind of a follow up to my post The Cardinal and Darwin’s finches.  Two quotes.

The first is from the book Natural Prayers, by Chet Raymo, a professor of astronomy and physics at Stonehill College.

I was raised in a culture of petition, inculcated from an early age with a repertoire of formulaic prayers addressed to God, his angels, or his saints.  All of the prayers assumed a response: Here I am, Lord, deserving of your attention, favor, healing, forgiveness.  Never did it pass my mind that my prayers were not heard.  My education was hemmed about with a huge body of stories affirming God’s intervention in human affairs.  Had not every religious person experienced first hand the power of prayer—a return to health, a financial difficulty resolved, a lost object found?  Were not the shrines full of abandoned crutches?  Did not every chapel gleam with votive candles lit in thanks?  The evidence of efficacy was overwhelming.

Or rather, the evidence of the efficacy of prayer appeared overwhelming to a mind predisposed to belief.  Later, I trained as a scientist and also studied the history and philosophy of science.  I learned something about controlled experiments, the statistical analysis of data, and the appropriate exercise of educated skepticism.  Most important, I learned how belief can influence judgment—even the judgment of scientists—and how scientists strive to minimize the role of belief in the evaluation of evidence.  No knowledge system can be entirely free of personal and cultural predispositions, which is why scientists place so much emphasis upon peer review, mathematics, diagrams, photographs, specialized language, and the strict exclusion of personal religious, political, and philosophical affiliations from scientific communication.

The other quote is from Cardinal Christoph Schonborn's New York Times op-ed piece:

The Catholic Church, while leaving to science many details about the history of life on earth, proclaims that by the light of reason the human intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and design in the natural world, including the world of living things.

Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.

Consider the real teaching of our beloved John Paul. While his rather vague and unimportant 1996 letter about evolution is always and everywhere cited, we see no one discussing these comments from a 1985 general audience that represents his robust teaching on nature:

"All the observations concerning the development of life lead to a similar conclusion. The evolution of living beings, of which science seeks to determine the stages and to discern the mechanism, presents an internal finality which arouses admiration. This finality which directs beings in a direction for which they are not responsible or in charge, obliges one to suppose a Mind which is its inventor, its creator.”

The italics are mine.  Of course Catholics' beliefs can't influence what they're seeing while they're readily discerning evidence of God's purpose and design everywhere.

Comments

[carla]

I was raised in a Baptist home. Baptists are very big on the Bible. Copious amounts of time are spent poring over Scriptures..memorizing..interpreting...etc.

The Bible, for Baptists, is Life's Little Instruction Book. For me it was always a puzzlement because so many of my questions about life couldn't be answered by a perusal of the Gospels.

Many of my own questions have to do with the "intent" of God. Why would God endow man with logic and reason..only to expect him to suspend it because the King James Version's literal interpretation says so? Why would the Creator give us intellect and talent (for medical healing, for example) and expect us to not use it to save lives because a guy with a leadership position in the church says we have to?

I've been told by my still Baptist parents that these questions aren't mine to know now. That in the "Sweet By and By" God will give us the answers. For now we have to take these things on faith.

I can't.