reflections on religion (from the IUS forum)

The IUS Honors Program arranged the forum on world religions and their insights on science. Five people with at least masters-level degrees-- Protestant, Atheist, Hindu, Muslim, and Catholic-- answered questions and debated each other a bit. It was a wonderfully appropriate program for a college campus.

A few observations:

-The Protestant and the Muslim relied heavily on the authoritative text from their religion. The Hindu and the Catholic relied much more on tradition and appeals to authority. (I know that each of the latter two can rely moreso on texts, but that was not the case here.) As a result, for better but mostly for worse, the Hindu seemed "far-out" and the Catholic seemed wishy-washy.

-The Atheist was sharp and mostly effective, but too clever by half. He had a number of lines and jokes, but after awhile it was too much of a good thing. After a point, coinciding with the decline of his answers into less coherence and more contradiction, it became evident that the barbs and jokes were flippant-- (purposefully or inadvertently) making serious reflection more challenging for the panel and especially the audience.

-The Atheist was initially quite effective, but as the evening wore on, it became obvious that his claims were selective, convenient, and inconsistent. For example, he encouraged the audience to be more comfortable with uncertainty-- rather than leaping into faith-laced supernatural stories. He had a lot of fun in poking at the idea of a Creator God who used "dirt and magic" to create humans. But on Evolution and evolution, he was too uncomfortable with uncertainty or certainty, expressing very little knowledge while seeming perfectly content to buy Evolution's magic as a story. He was content to repeatedly mention the young-earth strawman, but unwilling to live with the uncertainty of an old-earth interpretation of Scripture. Finally, he expressed a negative certainty about people's theistic views-- in tandem with a faithful contention that "we" can competently decide "what is human?"

I'm glad all of the participants were capable and comfortable to participate. The compare and contrast served Truth well.