Creating a Community to Explore the Harmony of Science and Faith

Dear Dr. Collins,

Thank you for this post, not only for its sentiment but as a tribute to your mother's character. I was especially blessed by the last paragraph with the thoughts from your mother's journal.

Yours,
Lee

As a fan of the Faraday Institute's resources, I'm very excited to hear about the creation of this kind of community here in North America. I'm eager to hear more.

Dr. Collins, thank you so much for your efforts to bring together the magisterias of faith and science. I have very inquisitive 6-year old triplets who are asking about how God actually created humans. I'm challenged to explain to them the difference between "literal" and "true" in the context of Genesis. Without your work in The Language of God and on Biologos.org, I wouldn't have so strong a starting point. Your efforts are very much appreciated.

Greg

A more effective approach would be formulate and conduct a decisive, rigorous, empirical scientific experiment which conclusively falsifies Materialism. The root of fundamentalist scientific dogma, Materialism is fatally flawed by its logical absolutism; it requires that *Nothing* exist outside of 4-D spacetime. To disprove it does not require a sophisticated and complex defense of 'God', merely One Element of Irrefutable Evidence that *Something* else is 'out there'.

The proposition that Consciousness, at least at the subconscious level, is a Quantum phenomenon is gaining ground because it is supported by a variety of empirical findings. Such diverse spiritual aspects as ESP, EVP, Telepathy, Clairvoyance, Precognition, Psychokinesis, Near Death Experience, Life After Death, After Death Communication, Mediumship, Ghosts, and Reincarnation are all the subjects of ongoing research, and each have hard laboratory data suggesting they are real. The dynamics of each of these are consistent with phenomenology enabled by Quantum Consciousness. If a transcendental human Soul exists - and we know it does - it functions through principles of quantum mechanics, period. This is the why and how that the 'spiritual' is as firmly 'real' as anything envisioned by science.

*ANY* of the above aspects of the Spiritual, if concretely established by an irrefutable and replicable experiment, would falsify Materialism in its entirety. Richard Dawkins isnt the British Biologist colleague of yours whose contribution matters on the subject; Rupert Sheldrake IS. Dawkins is committed to the atheist ideal that we live a 'meat bag' existence, out of dogma alone, whereas Sheldrake actively generates experimental data that such is not the case. His data establishing the Morphogenic Field form one of the best arguments for a 'fact-based Spirituality', able to win over the majority of those in science who reject 'faith' as mere superstition, but who are open to empirical evidence of a more inclusive "Greater Reality".

The front lines in the battle do not include the dogmatic fundamentalists of either Science or Religion. Those "Faitheists" arent the ones driving the immediate future of human evolution. The trenches are filled with the Technologists, who seek to create transcendence electronically through neuroscience and cybernetics where they believe none yet exists, and the Spiritualists who deal with the reality of our transcendental nature and its post-mortem existence on a practical basis. Between them - and only them - is a collaborative synthesis possible, or even useful.

Right now, Man is about to become 'road kill' on the evolutionary highway from "Animal" to "Machine". As we approach the technological Singularity, it is crucial to the survival of organic humanity that the trajectory of Artificial [General] Intelligence and Brain/Computer Interface technologies be guided by certain knowledge of the spiritual. 'Faith' alone does not equip the Religionists to conduct an adequate battle on behalf of spirituality, since an appeal to faith is lost on the scientific Materialists, by definition.

But Materialism is a falsifiable proposition, and its logical rejection as a result of the scientific discovery of the Soul - or even concrete clues as to its nature - would be the one development which can bring the schism between Science and Religion to a desireable conclusion.

I recently attended a talk by Fr. Robert Spitzer (president of Gonzaga University) in which he said that we live in a very exciting era because science will prove the existence of God. It was inspiring.

Thank you for your effort to shed light on alternative explanations for life, God and the intricacies of belief and doubt. Clearly you came by this drive naturally given your post about your mother. I and I think others are hungry for hope that God does have us in the palm of his hand and that we are not simply dead at the end of our existence here. That thoughts of faithfulness to God can be reconciled with what is simply fact, evolution. I know exactly how your mother felt, I am sure that I have traveled some of the same lonely roads as she ( and still do). Each time I wander too far I look to the skies for a celestial navagation sign to bring me home. That sign is seemingly of God since it brings me back to that place between faith and doubt where I apparently must remain until I meet the living God face to face and he calls my name.