Here is the subtitle of Karl D. Stephan’s above titled article over at Mercatornet: “Christianity is based on eyewitness accounts of objective physical events.” Stephan is a professor of electrical engineering at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. Here are the opening paragraphs of his post:
If you happened to peruse the New Yorker‘s website recently, you might have come across a piece modestly titled “All Scientists Should Be Militant Atheists” by one Lawrence Krauss. Krauss is a cosmologist—he runs something called the Origins Project at the University of Arizona—and he thinks religion is no excuse for violating the law. It would probably be fair to say that he thinks religion is no excuse for anything.
He seems to think that ridiculing religion is part and parcel of his self-appointed mission to popularize science, because the two are locked in a perpetual zero-sum battle for the public’s attention and dollars.
In his article, he takes exception to the way that Kim Davis, a county clerk in Tennessee, was praised and exonerated for violating the law that instructed her to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, although she did spend a few days in jail. Even more troubling to him was the court case decided in favor of the U. S. retailer Hobby Lobby, which obtained an exemption from paying insurance premiums on medical policies that provide birth control. In Krauss’s view, letting people get away with things like these just panders to the irrational, unscientific elements of society that threaten to drag us kicking and screaming back to the Dark Ages.
Given that religion has stubbornly refused to bow to the inevitable rise of modern scientific thinking and die a graceful death, what should we do with such people? Krauss wants to be fair. His version of fairness to religion is this: “Religious liberty should mean that no set of religious ideals are treated differently from other ideals.” And just what treatment should ideals get? If Krauss gets his way, the treatment all ideals get in science: radical skepticism.
Read more: Mercatornet
Image credit: www.mercatornet.com — Tapestry in the Vatican Museum based on a painting by Raphael of the Resurrection of Jesus.
