Comments on: Papas fritas

By: swong

swong — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 21:13:35 +0000

I’m wary of simplifying the religious into a collection of simple minded cultists who attack anything they don’t understand. Isaac Newton was a deeply religious man, too.

You might note that the loudest creationists don’t follow the Catholic church.

It’s the idea of accidental creation that the serious creationists object to. Their world view requires a deliberate, divine will behind every object and event. The idea that things can happen on their own, even if set into motion by divine influence, removes the absolute and immediate presence of the divine from the field. This is unacceptable to them.

Think about it: Evolutionary theory speculates that the Earth floated around for a bit over 4 billion years after forming before humans arose. Literal creationism states that the Earth was specifically created for humans in around 6 days. Evolutionary theory speculates that the universe was around for something like 5 or 6 billion years before the Earth even formed, long enough for generations of stars to burn out and create the heavier elements we depend on for life. Literal creationism states that everything has pretty much always been as it is now. Mountains, rivers, coastlines, the stars, the moon, all placed by divine will. Science has it all sort of coming together by accident.

If you’re a person who needs deep, deliberate meaning in every object and event in your world, would you accept a compromise?

By: pushmedia1

pushmedia1 — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 20:57:00 +0000

My remark, and the Pope’s, aren’t defenses of religion. They’re simply statements of the obvious fact that religion and science aren’t conflicted… one talks about mechanisms and the other talks about origins.

By: Gabriel

Gabriel — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 11:08:21 +0000

It gives room for ANY cosmological account, including but not limited to, the world being defecated into existence by a cosmic monkey king. There are a practical infinity of alternative, mutually exclusive, conjectures about eras previous to our furthest scientific investigations. And we have no reason to discriminate between them, by assumption (we don’t know, so we really don’t know).

“You don’t know, so I must be right.” is fallacious.

Using current ignorance as a hiding place for theological notions has been inefficient in the past. The boundary of human knowledge expanded, religion retreated. — But the funny thing about a boundary is that if you’re talking about one, there are always two sides. This side, what we know, and beyond the boundary, ignorance. So by this strategy, religion can avoid conflict with science ad infinitum.

But, ignoring all this, I thought that praying and so on are good ideas because you believe, not because you don’t know. — If religion concerns itself with what’s beyond the boundary of science, wherever that is, then science can’t confirm nor infirm it. But that doesn’t make it respectable or believable or true in any sense.