Introduction

Welcome to Modern Heterodoxy.

My purpose here is to explore ideas at the intersection of religion and science treating both as serious and worthy subjects of intellectual inquiry.

I decided to write this blog in part out of frustration with other avenues of discourse. Opinion on religion and science form something of a barbell in two interesting ways. First, there is the distribution of adherents, most people identify themselves as primarily religious or scientific, often dismissing the other entirely. And, second, beginning roughly with the Enlightenment, religion and science had come into conflict and one of the most popular resolutions of that conflict was to treat them as separate domains of specialized knowledge, or knowledge systems.

Thus, today, scientists are loathe to involve themselves in religious matters and clerics generally steer clear of scientific debates. Even when scientists acknowledge a religious faith, they tend to compartmentalize their views.

This division can be expressed in many other ways: faith vs. reason, revelation vs. observation, morality vs. ethics, salvation vs. survival and happiness, divine knowledge vs. worldly wisdom.

Of course, there are, and have always been, dissenters from this truce.

Count me among them.

It's worth noting that the division is not only between science and religion. Religion, itself, is a broad subject encompassing many competing faiths. The very fact that competition in faith is so different from competition in science is, itself, revealing.

For the sake of simplicity, I will primarily explore this intersection of science and religion with reference to Roman Catholicism, the religion on which I was raised, though I will freely make reference both to Judaism and Protestantism.

As the title of this blog implies, however, I will not be hewing to orthodoxy. Most topics will entail heterodoxy, opinions or doctrines at variance with an official or orthodox position. And, arguably, many will be heretical, directly conflicting. My main concern is the pursuit of truth, wherever it leads.

I invite your comments and will do my best to address them either in reply or in future posts. If you post an article on a related subject, or in reply to mine, do link to it in the comments.