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The Daily Dish - 2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan

Science and Faith

By The Daily Dish
Oct 9 2007, 5:47 AM ET

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What are we believers afraid of? Science, properly conducted, can only reveal greater truths about the world and the universe. And such truths cannot definitionally contradict the divine. They can only help us increase what limited understanding we have of it. Those believers who deny the truths of science are merely revealing their failure to believe, their fear of the truth. I'm with these nuns who agreed to have their brains scanned by researchers looking for the neurological locus of a God-spot:

Although atheists might argue that finding spirituality in the brain implies that religion is nothing more than divine delusion, the nuns were thrilled by their brain scans for precisely the opposite reason: they seemed to provide confirmation of God’s interactions with them. After all, finding a cerebral source for spiritual experiences could serve equally well to identify the medium through which God reaches out to humanity. Thus, the nuns’ forays into the tubular brain scanner did not undermine their faith. On the contrary, the science gave them an even greater reason to believe.

(Photo: Carsten Koall/Getty.)



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