Michael Gazzaniga: Not really.
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Yes and no, happily.
Aref Ali Nayed: No, it does not!
Alfred Mele: Only if we’re free.
Stanley Fish: It depends …
Christine Korsgaard: Yes, if …
Joshua Greene: Less than it should.
Jonathan Sacks: Reason isn’t enough.
John Kihlstrom: Yes, within limits.
Jonah Lehrer: Not so much.
Jean Bethke Elshtain: Not entirely.
Antonio Damasio: Yes and no.
Robert George: Yes, by nature.

We already know that not all scientists are atheists, but I found that almost 50 percent identify with a religious label and about one in five is actively involved in a house of worship, attending services more than once a month. While many scientists are completely secular, my survey results show that top scientists are also sitting in the pews of our nation’s churches, temples, and mosques.

Indeed, only five (!) of the atheist or agnostic scientists I had in-depth conversations with were actively working against religion. I discovered many atheist or agnostic scientists who think that key mysteries about the world can be best understood spiritually. Others attend places of worship, completely comfortable with religion as moral training for their children and an alternative form of community.

Ecklund’s book has already gotten praise from Ron Numbers, the Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne, and Francisco Ayala.

Harris proposes that answers to questions of human value can be visualized on a “moral landscape”—a space of real and potential outcomes whose peaks and valleys correspond to states of greater or lesser well being in conscious creatures like ourselves. Different ways of thinking and behaving—different cultural practices, ethical codes, modes of government, etc.—translate into movements across this landscape. Such changes can be analyzed objectively on many levels—ranging from biochemistry to economics—but they have their crucial realization as states and capacities of the human brain.

I wanted people to reflect on the nature of language, and particularly on fundamentalism, and the notion of ‘the Bible said it, I believe it, that settles it,’ which seems to preclude most concepts in a modern worldview. I also thought it would be pretty funny to actually see what it would look like if you could visually remove all those modern concepts.

Since our online dialogue a couple of years ago, Sam and I have become good friends, and we are planning to turn our conversation into a little print on demand book, with some contributions from other atheists and believers. If you’d like to get on an email list so that when we manage to put this all together, we can notify you and tell you how you can get a copy—for your own or, we hope, teaching use or a basis for discussion groups—send an email to samandandrewdialogue@gmail.com. I’m a bit swamped right now but we hope to get this done soon.
We are going to donate all proceeds to St Jude’s Children Research Center.
This is about trying to restore a civil conversation between serious people of faith and sincere non-believers, to try and defuse and depolarize this debate some more.

The idea is WHY are we so obsessed with animals, HOW did that come about in evolutionary and religious contexts, and WHAT does it all mean for the ethics of our relating with animals?

Meyer asserts that the theory of intelligent design has religious implications. “Those who believe in a transcendent God may, therefore, find support for their belief from the biological evidence that supports the theory of intelligent design” (p. 444). I do think that people of faith may find in the world many reasons that support their belief in God. But I don’t think that intelligent design is one of them. Quite the contrary. Indeed, there are good reasons to reject ID on religious grounds, in addition to scientific grounds. The biological information encased in the genome determines the traits that the developing organism will have, in humans as well as in other organisms. But humans are chock-full of design defects. We have a jaw that is not sufficiently large to accommodate all of our teeth, so that wisdom teeth have to be removed and other teeth straightened by an orthodontist. Our backbone is less than well designed for our bipedal gait, resulting in back pain and other problems in late life. The birth canal is too narrow for the head of the newborn to pass easily through it, so that millions of innocent babies—and their mothers—have died in childbirth throughout human history.
I could go on about human features that betray a design that certainly is not intelligent.