Keith Lofstrom's Science and Religion Page

Okay, so you hate science, or hate religion. Shoo, go away!

Both science and religion are ways of coming to grips with the world. With due respect to Richard Dawkins, religion is not "nonsense", though admittedly scads of nonsense have been accumulated under the mantle of religion. With due respect to Stephen J. Gould, religion and science are not "non-overlapping magisteria". And with almost no respect to various breeds of creationist, the physical world is what it is, and if your personal God did not create a 15 billion year old universe made of atoms, evolved life, and reducable naturalism, your personal God is bogus.

The thing is, for most people, cultures, and times, religion works better than no religion. Ultimately, religion is about evolved values, and things don't work very well without them. If the symbology of religion involves a lot of nonsense and unquestioned assumptions, well, much of what the average person considers "science" does as well.

That said, these are both ways of dealing with the world, and each tool has areas of application. Gould to the contrary, they overlap in some ways. A universe with inherent "God-given" values behaves differently than a universe without, though not in the ways some religious zealots would have us believe. The axiom that the universe is lawful, uniform, observable, and consilient underlies all scientific effort, yet that axiom is taken as a matter of faith, and is inherently unprovable for many interesting cases. No thought process protects perfectly from delusion, and properly formulated religion and science provide a wide parallax on important problems.

This will be an index page for various essays on the subject of science, religion, or both.

Mostly abandoned page, for new stuff see wiki.keithl.com

last significant revision July 1, 2003