Saturday Chat: Science, religion not warring beliefs
Roger Snodgrass | For The New Mexican
December 06, 2010
http://www.santafenewmexican.com/local%20news/saturday-chat-Science--religion-not-warring-beliefsThere are people who believe in God but don't belong to a particular church, and there are people who are
church members who do not necessarily believe in a transcendent or supernatural being.
Carl Newton, a retired physicist from Los Alamos National Laboratory, is among the latter. With a doctorate in geophysics from Penn State University, he has served as former president of his church in Los Alamos and remains deeply involved in the religious, political and cultural life of his community.
For Newton,
the great divide between faith and reason has been a life-long educational mission, made much easier, he says, by sharing fellowship in a church that celebrates diversity and is open to a wide spectrum of beliefs.
Question: You are a member of the congregation of the
Unitarian Church of Los Alamos, which is a Unitarian Universalist Association church. What do "Unitarian" and "Universalist" mean?
Answer: "Unitarianism" goes back hundreds of years to the Reformation. It is taken to mean that God is one, that there is no Holy Spirit and Christ is not a deity. Eventually, Unitarians dropped the idea of theism — of God as the creator and ruler of the universe — as an essential belief. So agnostics, atheists and humanists are all part of the mix, along with theists. Today there are very few theists. Universalist means that all souls shall receive grace. You don't have to be good to be eligible for grace.
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"Thanks to my parents, I received a valuable first religion, as a Presbyterian. Then, after years of calling myself a devout atheist, I've settled into my second and third religions — humanism and religious naturalism."
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Alex's comment:
"...the great divide between faith and reason has been a life-long educational mission, made much easier...by sharing fellowship in a church that celebrates diversity and is open to a wide spectrum of beliefs."
處理信仰與理性之間的張力是一生的教育使命，在一間包容多元信仰的教會中更能有效地進行。
This remark explains very well the role of a pluralistic church in dealing with the conflict between science and religion. This article shows a person's journey from Christianity to Atheism to Humanism and Religious Naturalism. His explanation of Unitarianism is concise and clear too. Great!
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