'There is something in humility

which strangely exalts the heart.' -St. Augustine

Just to bring humility, tolerance, and the common limits of our human understanding more fully into this rant about arrogance, bigotry, and factionalism, here is a quote about science and religion from turn-of-the(other)-century Muslim scholar Mustafa al-Maraghi. I want to use a Muslim because about as many Christians as atheists consider them unschooled and indelicate of thought, and also because the Muslim's relationship to the Qur'an as revealed rather than written, unchanging, untranslatable, and truly as the Word Inlibrate, is of a quite different order from other traditions' belief in and veneration for their own holy books. (In other words, I guess I conceive of this as the strong form of the argument to which other traditions could likewise accede in moderated form ?)

'True religion cannot conflict with truth, and when we are positively convinced of the truth of any scientific remark which seems to be incompatible with Islam, this is only because we do not understand correctly the Qur'an and the traditions. In our religion, we possess a universal teaching which declares that, when an apodeictic truth contradicts a revealed text, we have to interpret the text allegorically.'

Such a stance wisely refuses to conflate a holy book with a science text, to demand from one what it can never give and what, moreover, the other was explicitly designed to provide. It also places what might be an unsettling responsibility on the reader to read his book as well as the natural world carefully -- but this should be unsettling only if you find using rationality in your pursuit of wisdom and truth ignoble. For me, it points again to the need to recognize our limitations: there is much that each of us will never understand in this lifetime. Even if you don't believe there is one who is omniscient, it is pretty clear that humans are not. And a stinky-type atheist might do well to recognize that he is as limited in his understand as both the stinky and the thinky believers.