Robert Rowthorn, an economics professor at Cambridge University, said studies showed that more religious people tended to have more children.

Scientists and religious practitioners can learn a lot from each other and should work together to find a productive balance between spirituality and secular research, the Dalai Lama said Sunday.

The exiled Tibetan spiritual leader’s comments came at a news conference kicking off his three-day visit to Emory University in Atlanta. During his visit, he plans to teach, lecture and receive an update on the development of the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative.

The Dalai Lama is a presidential distinguished professor at Emory — the only university appointment he has accepted.

The Dalai Lama said he has long been interested in scientific knowledge — particularly in the areas of cosmology, neurobiology, physics and psychology, which he says are mentioned in Buddhist texts.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has dismissed the conclusion by Stephen Hawking, the retired Cambridge scientist, that the Big Bang was the result of the inevitable laws of physics and did not need God to create the Universe.

In his latest book, The Grand Design, Prof Hawking claimed that no divine force was needed to explain why the Universe was formed.

“Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing,” he wrote.

“Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist.”

But in an extract of an article in Eureka magazine, which is published in The Times, a series of a religious leaders fight back against the claims.

By the way, while his leap of faith may sell some books, Mr. Hawking fails to answer an important question: “Who created the law of gravity?”

In 1925, the so-called “Monkey Trial” ended in Dayton, Tenn., with John T. Scopes convicted of violating state law for teaching Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, says the Associated Press in its Today in History report. The conviction was later overturned on a technicality.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden caused a furor when he revealed that President Obama had directed him “to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science . . . and math and engineering,” Rich Lowry writes in today’s New York Post.

This shouldn’t be hard to do, he says, so long as Bolden is well-versed in accomplishments rising out of the Middle East many centuries ago. It gave us what we know as Arabic numerals, although they originated in India. It gave us algebra and the rudiments of trigonometry. It gave us medical pioneers in the 10th and 11th centuries. (A significant proportion of these scientists and physicians were Christians and Jews, Lewis notes — a fact Bolden had best keep to himself.)

The Muslim world would be better served by a frank discussion of how so much of it came to be sunk in backwardness and ignorance, although NASA’s administrator is not the natural person to lead it…

A federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit by a creationism think tank and school that attempted to force the state of Texas to allow it to offer master’s degrees in science education.

In 2008, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board rejected the Dallas-based Institute for Creation Research‘s application to offer master’s degrees, which taught science from a biblical perspective.

The institute’s graduate school sued in 2009, claiming the board violated its constitutional right to free speech and religion.

U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks found no merit in the ICR’s claims and criticized its legal documents as “overly verbose, disjointed, incoherent, maundering and full of irrelevant information.”

For believers, religion acts as an emotional buffer, making it less likely one will feel anxious after making a mistake.

Lord May, the president of the British Science Association, said religion may have helped protect human society from itself in the past and it may be needed again.

Speaking on the eve of the association’s annual conference, the committed atheist said he was worried the world was on a “calamitous trajectory” brought on by its failure to co-ordinate measures against global warming.

He said that no country was prepared to take the lead and a “punisher” was needed to make sure the rules of co-operation were not broken.

The former Government chief scientific advisor said in the past that was God and it might be time again for religion to fill the gap.

A West Virginia mother says it would be sacrilege and a health risk to immunize her daughter against childhood diseases, and she wants a federal judge to order public school officials to admit her without the required shots.

“I sincerely believe that (it) is wrong to immunize and that it is a sacrilege,” Workman said in her lawsuit filed in the Southern District of U.S. District Court.

The revelation that everything in the Bible may not have happened exactly as written can be startling. And when the discovery comes along with scientific evidence of evolution and the actual age of planet Earth, it can prompt a full-blown spiritual crisis.

That’s where Francis Collins would like to step in. A renowned geneticist and former director of the Human Genome Project, Collins is also an evangelical Christian, and he has spent years establishing the compatibility between science and religious belief. [video]

The day after the Church of England issued an “apology” for having “misunderstood” the work of Charles Darwin, the Vatican has announced that it will organise a debate on the thorny question of Christian belief and the theory of evolution.

Michael Reiss, a biologist and ordained Church of England clergyman, agreed to step down from his position with the national academy of science after its officers decided that his comments had damaged its reputation.

His resignation comes after a campaign by senior Royal Society Fellows who were angered by Professor Reiss’s suggestion that science teachers should treat creationist beliefs “not as a misconception but as a world view”.

Opposition to evolutionary theories is still “a litmus test of faithfulness” for some Christian movements, the Church will admit. It will say that such attitudes owe much to a fear of perceived threats to Christianity.

The comments are included on a Church of England website promoting the views of Charles Darwin to be launched on Monday.

Professor Michael Reiss, director of education for the Royal Society, said banning creationism from the classroom could backfire at a time of growing religious fundamentalism.

Professor Reiss, a Church of England minister and former biology teacher, said he strongly believed in teaching the theory of evolution to children.

But rather than dismiss creationism as wrong or stupid, teachers should be prepared to discuss it as another ‘worldview’.

Richard Dawkins, the Oxford professor and evolutionary scientist, has criticised Muslim parents for “importing creationism” into British schools.

Prof Dawkins, a well-known atheist, also blamed the Government for accommodating religious views and allowing creationism to be taught in schools.