Simon -- there's an h missing from the http in the link to the Howse article

Thanks, proves I shouldn't blog before coffee...
S.

Thank you, Giles Fraser, and not for the first time.

There is something very sad about about literal Creationists (or other faith leaders) trying to puport that they have the "truth" and all other knowledge is hyperbole or evil or untrue.

For a start, it simply forgets that most of the most brilliant breakthroughs across all the disciplines come from souls who have a well-grounded faith in God.

It is often those with the greatest faith who are able to make the greatest breakthroughs. Their faith in God and God's authority to hold the universe together that enables them to let go of existing paradigms and see the world anew. They know on the other side of the paradigm shift, God is still God and the universe is still the universe, it's just that they understand how better than they did before.

The ABC had ample opportunity to worship in a wide variety of Episcopal churches while he was holed up with the Jesuits, writing his book.

He could have gone to St. Stephen and the Incarnation, with its diverse congregation and wildly liberal liturgy, or St. Paul's, K Street, which is so nosebleed high chruch that the Pope would get dizzy, or he could have gone to one of the predominantly Black churches, whose high church litrugy is spiced by a Gospel choir, or he could have gone to National Cathedral,or he could have ventured into the 'burbs to see ordinary, middle of the road Episcopalians worshiping and doing ministry.

But no. That would have given flesh and bones to TEC. Better to sneer at an abstraction than to be confronted with reality in all its diverse messiness.

"There must be many who would agree that the attempts to make worship more modern and contemporary have left it banal and vacuous."

And that's being kind! If he seriously thinks:

"the dreaded ASB, unrhythmic, babyish"

then he should come to Canada. The Book of Abysmal Services makes the ASB shine. I happen to like the ASB, actually, but maybe that's after thirty years of the Canadian BAS. Well conceived, but so poorly executed as to be a disgrace. That the prefaces actually seeks to excuse the linguistic and poetic ineptitude of the compilers is even more disgusting.

"most of the most brilliant breakthroughs across all the disciplines come from souls who have a well-grounded faith in God"

Oh?
Citation, please.

LPR

http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/sciencefaith.html

This list includes:
Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543)
Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1627)
Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
Rene Descartes (1596-1650)
Isaac Newton (1642-1727)
Robert Boyle (1791-1867)
Michael Faraday (1791-1867)
Gregor Mendel (1822-1884)
William Thomson Kelvin (1824-1907)

http://www.rateitall.com/t-2270-famous-people-who-believe-in-god.aspx, which has 54 pages of famous people who believe in God

http://www.talkjesus.com/lounge/22490-bible-quotes-famous-people.html which includes these examples:

“It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.” George Washington

“If we will not be governed by God, then we will be ruled by tyrants.” William Penn

“A single line in the Bible has consoled me more than all the books I ever read besides.” Immanuel Kant

“I have known ninety-five of the world's great men in my time, and of these eighty-seven were followers of the Bible.” W. E. Gladstone

Er, "anecdote" is not the plural of data. That list couldn't begin to fill a small department at a small research university.

I think it's nice that some productive and famous scientists have also been members of faith communities. But I think it is unnecessary to posit a correlation (ie, that being a person of faith tends to co-exist with scientific productivity) and certainly unfounded to suppose that their is anything causal, in either or both directions.

Science looks for things unseen: the laws that appear to govern events in the real world. Faith, too, is about what is unseen. But science can be wrong.

Thanks be to God.

LPR

"Science looks for things unseen: the laws that appear to govern events in the real world. Faith, too, is about what is unseen. But science can be wrong."

So can faith, when it is misplaced.