The Religion-Science Debate

By Elizabeth Curran Warren

The Religion and Science Debate is about a cultural change occurring in the United States and elsewhere. People are wondering why there is a decline in religious affiliation and why many people now say they are not religious any more. This book attempts to show some of the sources of these changes and the direction in which they seem to be going.

The book looks at the questions that have stirred discussion about the subject for some years and presents a review of the thinking of a number of scholars and students. These views run the gamut between writers that suggest religion, such as Christianity, is no longer persuasive and writers, indeed an Anglican priest, that stand firmly with Christianity. The direction religious bodies will likely go is not clear, and social change usually takes a long time to sort things out. It is an exciting time to be learning about the new ideas that may spell our future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Apr 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524603526

Elizabeth Curran Warren

Elizabeth Curran Warren has a doctorate in political science (1970) and also studied religion, primarily Christianity, from 1970 to 2000. The religion classes were taught by two men, one had a PhD in religion, and the other did masters-level work in religion, preparing for the doctorate at the time. The two of them taught at Common Ground, an adult learning center in Deerfield, Illinois. Dr. Warren lived for a number of years in Glencoe, Illinois, where she served as trustee of the village for nine years and then as village president for eight years. Dr. Warren has four daughters. Her husband’s career was at Sears Roebuck in Chicago. She now lives in Wisconsin with her oldest daughter.

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© 2016 Elizabeth Warren. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 04/15/2016

ISBN: 978-1-5246-0353-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-0352-6 (e)

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Contents

Introduction

A Sketch of Religion in Prehistoric Times

Some Non-Believers

The Human Brain

The Neuroplasticity of the Brain

Secularism and Humanism

Human Consciousness

The Spiritual Nature of Human Beings and Animals

Conclusion

Select Bibliography

Introduction

I walked into a packed religious service on a bright cold New Year’s Day and sang the opening hymn with the thrill of discovery. The music was very familiar but the words were entirely different. They were full of optimism, a love of the natural world. Someone had written new words to old hymns that I had sung with choirs in various Episcopal churches for years. The hymnal was full of music like this and I began to attend regularly. Geoff and I had sung with choirs wherever we lived and especially loved the music in our lives. Now he had died ten years ago, and Kathy, my daughter, and I had moved to a beautiful resort area in northern Wisconsin. I was visiting the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Door County that New Year’s Day and I thought what a wonderful way to start the new year.

The U.U. became my spiritual home in the next few years. I gradually came to understand that this was a secular group. It was a much larger congregation than I had seen in the churches I had attended for many years. I realized that this group was what I was looking for, an institution outside the mainstream Christian churches that had been my religious focus for my adult life. This group is a very caring collection of people. They care for each other; they are strong on protection of the environment among other endeavors.

Thus I began to catch up on the changes that were occurring in American religious institutions in recent years. The publication of new studies by reputable research organizations describes the decline in religious commitment of growing numbers of Americans as seen in their attendance at places of worship, their financial support for religious institutions, and their responses to survey questions about their religious beliefs. The PEW Research Center published its findings on religion and public life in 2012 and 2015, and reported that the decline in participation in religious institutions has continued.¹ (nones on the rise, a term meaning ‘no religious affiliation’.) The report supports what other studies have found in recent years, that a significant decline in religious affiliation and participation in religious institutions has been occurring in the United States since the mid-1990s. A longer view substantiates findings of a decline in the mainline Christian denominations since the end of World War II in 1945. According to the 2012 report, the number of people who do not identify with any religion is almost 20% of the adult population.

This suggests that increasing numbers of Americans are not finding their religious institutions meaningful for living in today’s society. The PEW reports say that the reasons people give for being unaffiliated have to do with the way the institutions carry out their functions. Overwhelmingly, they think that religious organizations are too concerned with money and power, too focused on rules and too involved in politics. Nevertheless, while Americans are less inclined to affiliate with a religious institution today than in the past, they are religious or spiritual in some way. They believe in God (68%) or feel a deep connection with nature and the earth (58%) or classify themselves as spiritual (37%). And about one-fifth of the unaffiliated Americans say they pray every day. The number of people who have never doubted the existence of God, however, has decreased over the past 25 years, from 88% of adults in 1987 to 80% in 2012. One further point is that there are marked differences between European and American measures of religious affiliation: the percentages of Americans who say that religion is very important in their lives (58%) is much higher than that in Britain (17%), France (13%), Germany (21%) or Spain (22%).²

Why are these changes occurring in Americans’ commitment to religious institutions? The PEW report gives a few theories about the root causes of the rise of the nones. First is the view that young adults