How do you see this as different from from relativism? What are your thoughts on natural law, which in the hands of Richard Neuhaus and Robert George has become the key vehicle for a lot of religious conservative interventions in public life?

Science is not a proper natural theology but a witness to Natural Revelation – that is, a measure of the Word of God, a counterpart to the meaning of the Word of God. Through the efforts of Scientists we have discovered that the Universe is a single, logical, comprehensive whole whose properties point to an origin (natural or supernatural) before the beginning of time.
One Can Know God By the Natural Light of Human Reason
Pope John Paul II, March 20, 1985
In the Old Testament, the Book of Wisdom proclaims the same doctrine as the Apostle. It speaks about the possibility of arriving at a knowledge of the existence of God from created things … We find the main thought of this passage also in St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans (1:18-21). God can be known through creation – the visible world constitutes for the human intellect the basis for affirming the existence of the invisible Creator …
For now, let us too ask: how is it possible that the immense progress in the knowledge of the universe (the macrocosm and the microcosm), its laws and its happenings, its structures and its energies, does not lead everyone to recognize the First Principle, without whom the world cannot be explained? We will have to examine the difficulties which many people today stumble into. Yet we joyfully note that even today, many true scientists find precisely in scientific knowledge a stimulus to believe, or at least to bow before the mystery.
Following Tradition, which has its roots in Sacred Scripture of the Old and New Testaments, the Church, in the nineteenth century during the First Vatican Council, recalled and confirmed the doctrine on the possibility with which the human intellect is endowed to know God through creation. In our century, the Second Vatican Council recalled this doctrine anew in the context of the Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei Verbum).

I try hard to avoid tooting my own horn, but in this topic I can’t find a better way to put this:
In my belief, a tenet of faith that defines my spiritual path, my world is me, and I am my world. Whether contemplating my connections to others — mundane or profound — or experiencing our planet as an organism of which I am a part, I use science as a tool to better understand the parts that science cannot cover.
Think of it as a study in contrasts. I see paradox as a way to learn, not as a dead-end of confusion. I turn the light-dark dichotomy on its head. In the dark I am blind, but that pushes my other senses to be better and more discerning. In a bright enough light I am also blind, but too distracted to pay attention to what my other senses are telling me. With science, those things that it can describe, define and determine are like the blindness of the dark, leaving my faith to focus better and be more discerning. Too much faith is like the blindness of the light, distracting me from what my other senses are telling me.

It’s interesting to note the similarities between Kuhn’s “gestalt switch” and the beliefs and practices of Zen Buddhism. Both would seem to recognize that the acquisition of faith is not something to be acquired through dint of hard intellectual work or years of study but rather through a simple openness to the idea of an instantaneous conversion process (an openness that may take years to cultivate).
This begs the question, what of children born within a certain faith? Assuming they remain within it through their entire lives, can they actually experience this gestalt? Or does living one’s life within a single set of values lead to a certain diminution of the religious experience?
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I rather like R Hampton’s post, primarily because it respects the idea that the acquisition of knowledge and our understanding of the universe is an endless process that constantly adjusts and refines our conception of the nature of “how things are.”
Yet how many religious people are utterly closed to the very idea that our understanding of many questions, both large and small, is utterly beyond question and completely perfect.
Science, correctly understood and practiced, is essentially humble, focusing on what we don’t know or on where our beliefs are flat-out wrong. All too often, at least from this outsider’s perspective, organized religion is the exact opposite, pridefully declaring a particular human experience of the divine to be definitive for all time.

Anselm: I believe so that I might understand.
good one!
so a person should believe everything, including all Religions,
in order to better understand reality.
it makes no sense to limit belief to, as an example, just Christianity.
that severely limits understanding.
oh my!

But of course in Kuhn, ‘normal science’ works until it doesn’t. Until the paradigm gets so overburdened, so complicated — the classical example is the epicycles of Ptolemaic astronomy — that is simply fails under its own weight, and something must replace it. The implication, of course, is that there is a meta-paradigm, by which we can judge when a paradigm is overburdened.

You’re usually a lot better than this, Rod. A lot of the quotes you include here are incredibly weak. Or are you including them because you disapprove of them and their obvious weakness?
I mean, Brown says “only values determine which facts exist”: no, it would be SANITY that determines which facts exist. People can go through life in delusional denial for all sorts of reasons. This capacity implies nothing vis-a-vis the accuracy or value of any of their claims. As the popular conservative slogan goes, “you can’t get an ought from an is.”
As for Storm, the idea that “you can examine water or you can swim in it” is one of the most ridiculously facile and meaningless false-dilemma arguments I have ever seen, even by Internet standards. Scientists can’t swim? Examining the substance of water precludes you from entering it? I think I’ve already wasted too much time trying to grasp that strained metaphor.
Religious “mix-and-matchers” are really going to have to try harder to grasp just who really can use empirical scientific arguments, and how the arguments are used. Right now my impression of these sorts of symposia are of a bunch of blind men feeling up an elephant. I will not soon forget Fish’s bold assertion that there is no reason for an atheist or secular person to hold a funeral.

Would somebody be kind enough to show me where this has anything to do with Stephan Gould? When I think of Gould, I think of things like contingency and punctuated equilibrium.
Gould is well known for his theories challenging the steady state model of evolution and that random chance and chaos are as big (or bigger)a factor as “survival of the fittest”.

celticdragonchick, back in the 90′s Gould wrote a book called “Rock of Ages” where he outlined the concept of non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) for how science and religion should interact.
Essentially science should be pragmatic and deal with the facts on the ground, while religion should ask loftier questions of values and meaning. He viewed that conflict occurred between the two when one entered the magisteria of the other.

Gould was more or less correct about that, insofar as the Bible is not a biology textbook, and science cannot, on its own terms, prove or disprove the existence of a transcendent, omnipotent, being, who extends outside of space and time.
One the other hand, Gould wrote as an atheist, benevolently tolerating religion as not a conflict with his understanding of science. From another viewpoint, I find evolutionary biology entirely congruent with Genesis (not proved by, not perfectly consistent with, but they overlap in ways which tend to be, in my seldom humble opinion, mutually supportive). Then there is the question, how did Moses know that the universe began with a gigantic burst of electro-magnetic energy, unless someone told him who was there to see it all happen?