Virgin birth, religion and science

I’m busy managing a household move these next few days, plus I’m heading off to Florida on Thursday to celebrate my dad’s 90th and my youngest brother’s 50th birthdays, but here are links to two online articles I recommend you set aside a few minutes to read as soon as you get the chance.

The first is a post from Martin Rundkvist, a Swedish archaeologist:

Sacred Parthenogenesis

Virginia Hughes — that bright, lovely and suddenly quite aptly named minion of our Seed Overlords — has asked me to write something about parthenogenesis. (That’s virgin birth, for you non-Greeks.) Now, I don’t know anything about biological parthenogenesis. I just suspect that my wife may have that capability, since our daughter looks like a small copy of her with Rundkvist hair. But I can tell you the story behind the Dogma of Virgin Birth.

To a scientifically minded atheist like myself, the whole idea of religious dogmata appears absurd. I have various factual beliefs about the world, not all of them well-founded, some of them almost certainly incorrect. But none of these beliefs has come to me as a dogma: something I must believe, something I cannot question, in order to be accepted by other people and count myself as a good person. All of my factual beliefs are open to revision if better evidence comes along. (My values, that’s something else. My idea that I should treat people with empathy and solidarity doesn’t say anything about how the world actually is, and no evidence can prove to me in the logical sense that this value judgement is wrong.)

So dogmata are strange things. And one of the strangest I’ve come across is the Dogma of the Virgin Birth of Christ, central to Catholic Christianity. Sacred parthenogenesis! Explains the Catholic Encyclopedia:

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The second is an article in The New York Times from earlier this year authored by Dennis Overbye. (Overbye is the deputy science editor of the NYT and author of Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos and Einstein in Love.)

A Familiar and Prescient Voice, Brought to Life, is a review by Overbye of a book I just purchased to read on my flight to Florida. Edited by his widow, Ann Druyan, and published last year, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God is based on a series of lectures that Carl Sagan gave in Glasgow in 1985 that explores the relationship between science and religion.

In a spot-on blurb on the jacket of The Varieties of Scientific Experience, here’s what Richard Dawkins had to say about Carl Sagan:

Was Carl Sagan a religious man? He was so much more. He left behind the petty, parochial, medieval world of the conventionally religious, left the theologians, priests and mullahs wallowing in their small-minded spiritual poverty. He left them behind, because he had so much more to be religious about. They have their Bronze-Age myths, medieval superstitions and childish wishful thinking. He had the universe.

Carl Sagan is one of my heroes and I can’t wait to start reading this book.

This will be my last post until I return from Florida on Monday, December 10. Hope you enjoy these two pieces.