Sheldrake-Shermer, Materialism in Science, Responses

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Quote:

Materialism in Science This May thru July 2015, TheBestSchools.org is hosting an intensive dialogue on the nature of science between Michael Shermer and Rupert Sheldrake. For details about this dialogue, along with a complete guide to other portions of it, click here. To give our readers context for this dialogue, Drs. Sheldrake and Shermer graciously provided the following interviews: Quote: Rupert Sheldrake I was born on June 28, 1942, in Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire, in the English Midlands, and was brought up there. My family were devout Methodists. I went to a high church Anglican boarding school. I was for a while torn between these two very different traditions—one Protestant and the other Anglo-Catholic with incense and all the trappings of Catholicism. From a very early age I was interested in plants and animals. My father was an amateur naturalist, microscopist, and pharmacist and he encouraged this interest. My mother put up with it. I kept lots of animals at home. I knew from quite an early age that I wanted to do biology, and I specialized in science at school. Then I went to Cambridge where I studied biology and biochemistry. However, as I proceeded in my studies, a great gulf opened between my original inspiration—namely an interest in actual living organisms—and the kind of biology I was taught: orthodox, mechanistic biology which essentially denies the life of organisms, but instead treats them as machines. Quote: Michael Shermer I was born and raised in Southern California, specifically the La Canada area in the foothills surrounding Los Angeles. My parents were not religious and none of them went to college. I had both bio and step parents, and toggled between homes week days and weekends while growing up — a real boon at Christmas time! I have three sisters and two brothers and am an only child. Figure that one out — the quintessential American blended family of two half-sisters (same father, different mother), a step-sister, and two step-brothers. No one in the family was particularly religious, and yet somehow we grew up learning moral principles and how to be good. Imagine that! TheBestSchools Today, you are one of the most recognizable atheists/agnostics in the United States as well as across the world. Yet, you were once an evangelical Christian. That’s quite a journey! Could you describe the circumstances that led you to become an evangelical Christian as well as give some snapshots of what your life during that time was like? Is there anything you miss about that phase of your life? http://ift.tt/1HfDTdS

via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/1IAjYJG