In Reply to: Long-Awaited Medical Study Questions the Power of Prayer posted by moonshiner on March 31, 2006 at 22:03:28:
This is a good article, inasmuch as it highlights the problem of trying to study religious experience using scientific methods. I couldn't agree more with the following statement:
"The problem with studying religion scientifically is that you do violence to the phenomenon by reducing it to basic elements that can be quantified, and that makes for bad science and bad religion," said Dr. Richard Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia.
It makes for bad science because belief in the supernatural is beyond the range of knowledge that scientific methods can produce. It makes for bad religion because you cannot reduce something that is by definition an infinite mystery (i.e., God) to an equation.
I don't believe science and religion are mutually exclusive categories of knowledge, but they are fundamentally different ways of knowing and making sense of reality.
Which brings up the Intelligent Design versus Evolutionary Theory debate. I support teaching Intelligent Design. It should be taught in public high schools in a philosophy class, because that is what it is--philosophy. There's nothing in Evolutionary Theory that rules out the truth in the philosophy of Intelligent Design. There are things in Evolutionary Theory that rule out evidence of a six-day creation, but it doesn't disprove the possibility of a Creator. Where science leaves off, philosophy begins.