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Sabbath School for a New Generation

Among Seventh Day Adventists, Sabbath School is a time for discussion and learning. It is the belief of this site that Sabbath School should be an exciting venue for the discussion of new ideas, instead of rehashing old arguments. So welcome to a virtual Sabbath School, a Sabbath School for a new generation.

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I am an Electrical Engineer, working at Intel in the Portland area. I received my undergraduate degree from Walla Walla College and graduate degrees from the University of Southern California. The views expressed on this website are my own and do not reflect the viewpoints of anybody else. I reserve the right to change my mind at any point in time.

Friday, June 24, 2005

Book Review: When Science Meets Religion

I just finished reading this book by Ian Barbour and I must say it wasn't exactly what I wanted or expected. It is a very dense summary of the work done at the intersection of Science and Religion. The author intends to answer questions about what the latest scientific discoveries mean to religious faith. He does this by dividing the responses into four groups. The first group is conflict and this group believes that you must either accept science or religion, but you can't have both. This group includes atheists like Richard Dawkins or Carl Sagan as well as creation scientists and those who believe in Intelligent Design. The second group believes that science and religion are independant and look at the world in two complementary ways. This means that science has nothing to say about religion and religion has nothing to say about science. The last two groups incorporate dialogue and integration between the two fields.

Because of the large amount of work in this field, the author was unable to really give justice to all the ideas. Sometimes he cut out some more explanation that would be helpful to the lay person. On the positive side he has a large bibliography, so if a particular idea interests you, you can read more about it.