Science And Religions In America

What is religion? What is science? How do they interact with each other? Science and Religions in America: A New Look offers a cutting-edge overview of the diverse range of religious traditions and their complex and fascinating interaction with science. Pluralistic in scope, the book is different from traditional Christian and/or monotheistic approaches to studying the rich interplay of religion and science in multi-religious American culture. Featuring interviews with specialists in the field, Greg Cootsona draws on their insights to provide a comprehensive, accessible, and engaging introduction to the challenging interrelationship of religion and science. Each chapter focuses on a different religion within the United States, covering Buddhism, Christianity, Nature Religions, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and the Spiritual but Not Religious (SBNR). Global religious traditions and their inextricable relationship with science and technology are examined in an accessible and interactive format. With "lightning round Q&As," contributions from leading thinkers, and suggestions for further reading, this book primes undergraduate students for studying the interchange of science and religions (in the plural) and is an exciting new resource for those interested in these topics in contemporary America.

Do scientists see conflict between science and faith? Which cultural factors shape the attitudes of scientists toward religion? Can scientists help show us a way to build collaboration between scientific and religious communities, if such collaborations are even possible? To answer these questions and more, the authors of Secularity and Science: What Scientists Around the World Really Think About Religion completed the most comprehensive international study of scientists' attitudes toward religion ever undertaken, surveying more than 20,000 scientists and conducting in-depth interviews with over 600 of them. From this wealth of data, the authors extract the real story of the relationship between science and religion in the lives of scientists around the world. The book makes four key claims: there are more religious scientists than we might think; religion and science overlap in scientific work; scientists - even atheist scientists - see spirituality in science; and finally, the idea that religion and science must conflict is primarily an invention of the West. Throughout, the book couples nationally representative survey data with captivating stories of individual scientists, whose experiences highlight these important themes in the data. Secularity and Science leaves inaccurate assumptions about science and religion behind, offering a new, more nuanced understanding of how science and religion interact and how they can be integrated for the common good.

Beyond stereotypes and myths -- Religious people do not like science -- Religious people do not like scientists -- Religious people are not scientists -- Religious people are all young-earth creationists -- Religious people are climate change deniers -- Religious people are against scientific technology -- Beyond myths, toward realities

The New York Times bestselling author explains why any attempt to make religion compatible with science is doomed to fail. What we read in the news today is full of subjectivity, half-truths, and blatant falsehoods; and thus it is more necessary now than ever to safeguard the truth with facts. In his provocative new book, evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne aims to do exactly that in the arena of religion. In clear, dispassionate detail he explains why the toolkit of science, based on reason and empirical study, is reliable, while that of religion—including faith, dogma, and revelation—leads to incorrect, untestable, or conflicting conclusions. Coyne is responding to a national climate in which over half of Americans don’t believe in evolution (and congressmen deny global warming), and warns that religious prejudices and strictures in politics, education, medicine, and social policy are on the rise. Extending the bestselling works of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, he demolishes the claims of religion to provide verifiable “truth” by subjecting those claims to the same tests we use to establish truth in science. Coyne irrefutably demonstrates the grave harm—to individuals and to our planet—in mistaking faith for fact in making the most important decisions about the world we live in.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

By the twentieth century, science had become so important that religious traditions had to respond to it. Emerging religions, still led by a living founder to guide them, responded with a clarity and focus that illuminates other larger, more established religions’ understandings of science. The Hare Krishnas, the Unification Church, and Heaven’s Gate each found distinct ways to incorporate major findings of modern American science, understanding it as central to their wider theological and social agendas. In tracing the development of these new religious movements’ viewpoints on science during each movement’s founding period, we can discern how their views on science were crafted over time. These NRMs shed light on how religious groups—new, old, alternative, or mainstream—could respond to the tremendous growth of power and prestige of science in late twentieth-century America. In this engrossing book, Zeller carefully shows that religious groups had several methods of creatively responding to science, and that the often-assumed conflict-based model of “science vs. religion” must be replaced by a more nuanced understanding of how religions operate in our modern scientific world.

The 19th century produced scientific and cultural revolutions that forever transformed modern European life. Richard Olson provides an integrated account of the history of science and its impact on intellectual and social trends of the day.

Dr Francis S. Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, is one of the world's leading scientists, working at the cutting edge of the study of DNA, the code of life. Yet he is also a man of unshakable faith in God. How does he reconcile the seemingly unreconcilable? In THE LANGUAGE OF GOD he explains his own journey from atheism to faith, and then takes the reader on a stunning tour of modern science to show that physics, chemistry and biology -- indeed, reason itself -- are not incompatible with belief. His book is essential reading for anyone who wonders about the deepest questions of all: why are we here? How did we get here? And what does life mean?