Word: religion
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...strongest tastes were negative," writes Waugh of Pinfold. "He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing and jazz-everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime. The tiny kindling of charity which came to him through his religion sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom. There was a phrase in the thirties: It is later than you think,' which was designed to cause un easiness. It was never later than Mr. Pin fold thought...
...magazines and dailies. Islam and its prescriptions proved most difficult for editors to swallow. Particularly during the fall, press reports in this country regularly juxtaposed the image of a progressive, modernizing Shah with intransigent religious fanatics whose opposition to the Shah was based on medieval social concepts. The Islamic religion is so clearly alien as to arouse the fear of press writer and reader alike. References to the veils worn by women and Ayetollah Khomeini's orthodox beliefs reinforce this vision of difference, and hence, subtly, inferiority. Newsweek, for example, noted that Khomeini appeared to be a "xenophobic, anti-American...
...small and curious book called God and the Astronomers, in which he suggests that the Bible was right after all, and that people of his own kind, scientists and agnostics, by his description, now find themselves confounded. Jastrow blows phantom kisses like neutrinos across the chasm between science and religion, seeming almost wistful to make a connection. Biblical fundamentalists may be happier with Jastrow's books than are his fellow scientists. He writes operatically: "For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled...
Isaac Asimov, the prodigious popularizer of science, reacts hotly to the Jastrow book. "Science and religion proceed by different methods," he says. "Science works by persuasive reason. Outside of science, the method is intuitional, which is not very persuasive. In science, it is possible to say we were wrong, based on data." Science is provisional; it progresses from one hypothesis to another, always testing, rejecting the ideas that do not work, that are contradicted by new evidence. "Faith," said St. Augustine, "is to believe, on the word of God, what we do not see." Faith defies proof; science demands...
...short of God, at which all computers have no data either. With the Big Bang theory, says Jastrow, "science has proved that the world came into being as a result of forces that seem forever beyond the power of scientific description. This bothers science because it clashes with scientific religion-the religion of cause and effect, the belief that every effect has a cause. Now we find that the biggest effect of all, the birth of the universe, violates this article of faith...