More on Faith and Reason

Weeble had an interesting post on Faith and Reason. It is an endless topic for our generation, but I'll wade in again anyway.

Readers interested in the relationship between intelligent design and science may be interested in my post on refuting irreducible complexity, a cornerstone of the current intelligent design concept.

My wife, a thoughtful woman wishing to find a way of thinking which encompasses spirituality and science, recently suggested that I read The Language of God. Unfortunately, I think upon review that author and scientist Francis Collins violated the useful thumbrule of Occam's razor. William of Occam, himself a Christian friar, said in the 14th Century that "the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory." Collins may also have confused the strong and weak versions of the anthropic principle, but I haven't read enough to confirm that yet. Certainly the strong version is used as an argument for intelligent design and the weak version is a common scientific belief.