n/t

… there is a secular plot to impurify all of our precious bodily fluids. lol

accept the Bible as inviolate. I personally have no problem being really spiritually alive and passionate about science.

"The Goal of Science is understanding lawful relations among natural phenomena.
Religion is a way of life within a larger framework of meaning."
(Ian Barbour, "Religion and Science," pg. 204)

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." (Albert Einstein) "

Religion is poetry plus, not science minus.&quot Krister Stendahl)

"Religion is the art of the poetic. Science is the art of the provable. Politics is the art of the possible." (Paul H. Carr) "

Science can purify religion from error and superstition;
religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.
Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish....
We need each other to be what we must be, what we are called to be." (-Pope John Paul II)

"There is more RELIGION in men's SCIENCE than there is SCIENCE in their RELIGION"
(David Henry Thoreau, "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.&quot

COMPLEMENTARITY:
Light is both WAVE-LIKE & PARTICLE-LIKE. (Physicist Niels Bohr)
Life is BOTH, AND:
STRUCTURED LOGIC (logos, left brain) and MEANINGFUL STORY (mythos, right brain)
Truth is both OBJECTIVE & SUBJECTIVE
God is both IMMANENT & TRANSCENDENT.
SCIENCE complements RELIGION (Physicist, Paul H. Carr)

The loss of complementarity is the source of evil, according to physicist Max Born:
"For the belief in a single truth is the root cause for all evil in the world."

"Let no one enter here who does not have faith"
Inscription over the door on Max Plank's Laboratory

"The heart has its reason, which the reason can not know."
(Blaise Pascal, 1623-1662, physicist, religious philosopher)

"Credo ut Intelligam" ( I believe in order to understand) St. Augustine
(Immanuel Kant)

"Science and religion are two windows that people look through, trying to understand the big universe outside, trying to understand why we are here. The two windows give different views, but both look out at the same universe. Both views are one-sided, neither is complete. Both leave out essential features of the real world. And both are worthy of respect." ( Physicist Freeman Dyson)

"As a blind man has no idea of colors, so we have no idea of the manner by which
the all-wise God perceives and understands all things." (Isaac Newton) (I personally believe science is one path to that understanding.)

I personally like this one because it sort of follows that our universe is rather a construct that we live in. I find that sort of view interesting:

John O'Keefe (astronomer at NASA): "We are, by astronomical standards, a pampered, cosseted, cherished group of creatures.. .. If the Universe had not been made with the most exacting precision we could never have come into existence. It is my view that these circumstances indicate the universe was created for man to live in." Welcome to the Matrix.

I can't imagine approaching the lore of the text any other way...!

by Prof. Richard W. Pogge, Ohio State University

... The one key fact of the study of Bruno's life is that we do not actually know the exact grounds of his conviction on charges of heresy. The simple reason is that the relevant records have been lost ...

Except for certain particular passages that excite our interest today, much of his work had little to do with astronomy. Indeed, Bruno was not an astronomer and demonstrated a very poor grasp of the subject in what he did write ... Much of his work was theological in nature, and constituted a passionate frontal assault on the philosophical basis of the Church's spiritual teachings ... Copernicanism, where it entered at all, was supporting material not the central thesis. This suggests that the Church's complaint with Bruno was theological not astronomical ...

Further support for the idea that Copernicanism was likely to have played only a minor role if any in his conviction comes from the contemporary record of the discussion of this idea. What many popular accounts seem to miss is that the Church did not formally condemnation Copernicanism until well after Bruno's death ...

Further, Copernicanism was not actually specifically proscribed as heretical in 1616. After Bellarmine's examination, Copernicus' De Revolutionibus and Foscarini's book (among others) were placed on the Index of Forbidden Books, the former to remain on the Index until specific, minor revisions were made (a few words deleted and some passages excised, but on the whole leaving the basic ideas intact). An official response to be sure, but still a long ways from a definitive ban on Copernicanism in general. Indeed, copies of De Revolutionibus were published in Italy after 1616 (with the prescribed revisions, of course), and the situation was sufficiently ambiguous that Galileo felt free to proceed with his work until his trial in 1633 ...

http://www.setileague.org/editor/brunoalt.htm

There are some good works on how religion and Judaism are consistent by some amazing rabbis and Jewish scientists. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-geoffrey-a-mitelman/why-can-judaism-embrace-s_b_880003.html

I recently had a conversation with a neuroscientist, who also happened to be a self-described atheist. He knew I was a rabbi and so, in the middle of the conversation, he very tentatively asked me, "So ... do you believe in evolution?" I think what he was really asking was, "Can you be a religious person who believes in science?" And my answer to that question is, "Of course."

While some people think of science and religion as being inherently in conflict, I think it's because they tend to define "religion" as "blind acceptance and complete certainty about silly, superstitious fantasies." Quite honestly, if that's what religion really was, I wouldn't be religious!....

Instead, when Jews read the Bible today through a rabbinic worldview, we are trying to answer two separate questions: First, what did the text mean in its time, and second, how can we create interpretations that will give us lessons for our time?

Indeed, the Bible shouldn't be taken simply literally today because circumstances, societies, norms and knowledge have all changed.

A great example of that comes from how the rabbis interpret the verse "an eye for an eye." While that is what the Bible says, to the rabbis, that's not what the verse means. Instead, the rabbis argue, "an eye for an eye" actually means financial compensation, and they go on for multiple pages in the Talmud trying to explain their reasoning. They don't read that verse on its simple, literal level, but through the lenses of fairness, of common sense, of other verses in the Torah and of the best legal knowledge they had at that time.

So now we can also see why in Judaism the beginning of Genesis is not in conflict with the big bang theory or natural selection. On the one hand, for its time, the Bible provided an origin story that was a story that worked then, but now, science provides a much better explanation for how we got here.

But the Bible isn't meant to be taken only literally -- it's designed to be a source of study and exploration for the questions of our time. The point of the Creation story is really to challenge us with questions like, "How should we treat people if everyone is created in the image of God? What are our responsibilities to this world if God has called it 'good'?"

In Judaism, there's no concept of "God says it, I believe it, that settles it." Instead, Judaism pushes us to embrace the text for what it was back then, and to create new ways of reading the text for what it can be now.

If you allow yourself enough leeway to interpret/round-off you can find analogies between almost anything.

But what use is that?

To the secularist, the notion that we should flippantly toss aside hundreds of years of scientific investigation unequivocally demonstrating an extremely old universe simply because some ancient tome says it was created less than 6,000 years ago is nothing short of idiocy. What I hope to demonstrate is that Judaism's understanding of this matter (and many others) is significantly more nuanced, complex and surprising than what is currently believed to be the standard religious gloss on the subject. The truth of the matter is that Judaism is frequently (and unfairly) lumped together with other religious systems that actually have vastly different ways of looking at things.

One thousand years ago, the great Jewish philosopher and physician, Moses Maimonides, wrote that there is no contradiction between Torah and science and that if one is perceived, then there was a misapprehension of the science or the Torah. Two centuries later, Rabbi Isaac of Akko, a disciple of the great Moses Ben Nachman (Nachmanides) and one of the foremost Kabbalists of his generation, wrote some surprising commentary regarding the age of the universe. In his work "the Trove of Life," he explains that the Earth was actually 42,000 years old when Adam was created and that these years are "divine" years and should not be thought of as 365 regular days. Rather, a divine year is 1,000 times longer or 365,250 years. He based this on a verse in Psalm 90 that says "1,000 years in your eyes is like a day gone by." Do the math. According to Rabbi Isaac, the universe is 42,000 x 365,250, or 15,340,500,000 years old. This figure is squarely within the ballpark of where modern cosmology places the age of the universe. How did he know this? And how did he posses the temerity to conclude it in the midst of the Dark Ages? Perhaps our fundamentalism is not quite as primitive as is supposed.

whatever I can from the tree onto which we are grafted. Thank you.
...............................................

Make that 'both posts'.