You wrote:
>To be honest, the idea of having worship services scheduled into a
>scientific conference still feels awkward to me although I'll
>try to be optimistic.
It feels awkward to me, too, in a way -- and I helped plan
the program. ;-)
But in a sense the awkwardness is an artifact of our culture.
One doesn't pray at a scientific meeting. And, at a worship
service, one doesn't ask the minister to go back to his control
sample slide so everyone can check the histogram again.
But I've been to scientific meetings where the Christians
got together to pray and read the Bible because that is the
most natural thing in the world for them (us; me) to do,
whatever the external circumstances. "I will bless the Lord
at all times."
The Biola conference is meant to be a "design guys
trying to make sense of what we're doing" meeting, where,
as it turns out, most of the design guys (and women) happen to
be Christians. But agnostics and members of other
faiths (Eastern religions) will be attending, too, mainly
on the strength of their scientific ideas and curiosity about
alternatives to Darwinian naturalism.
Anyway, your kind and thoughtful post is the sort of
thing that keeps me going, Tim. The scientific world,
even after all the angry words that may fly, is a wonderful
and surprising place in the end.
Paul Nelson
P.S. Darwin attended regular worship services on the Beagle.
Janet Browne has a contemporaneous painting of one of them in her
recent biography, _Darwin: Voyaging_. I think a lot of
us would like nothing more than to restore the richness
of scientific debate that existed before the _Origin of Species_,
which Darwin paradoxically impoverished, even as he made use
of its very richness in building his case for evolution.
A theistic context gave birth to methodological naturalism.
But the child is too forgetful of her parent.