Thinking Can Undermine Religious Faith, Study Finds

I like your post a lot.

My pastor just did a sermon called, “Doubts and Questions.” His proposition was that even the strongest Christian will doubt or question God at some point - this is not a problem unless a person decides to continue to unbelief, using it as an excuse, or trying to trap believers ( i.e. as the Pharisees did with Jesus). Pastor said that questioning is how our minds are designed by God to learn and maturing requires that we ask questions, always on a deeper level than we have before.

“Every year that I live,” he said, “another question gets answered. Even the ‘dark night of the soul’ strips away our false systems of belief and leaves behind a purer faith.”

He mentioned Abraham, Gideon, John the Baptist, Thomas and the other disciples, Ananias, and even Jesus - “If it is possible, let this cup pass from me.”

We really can ask God anything! Believers ought to be very question friendly. (:

Scientists are pretending to have all the answers provided by science, all the time.

In the real world, do you actually know any real, working scientists?

Just curious ... because you've ascribed some base motives and base actions to "science" and "scientists" ... and I'm a bit curious as to your basis for doing so.

...thinking analytically can cause religious belief to wane — for skeptics and true believers alike.

Thus the hypothesis leading to a series of experiments designed from the outset to confirm the hypothesis....

But my own experience disconfirms it. I can think both analytically and analogically — which is evidently something the designer of these experiments cannot do: he is stuck in analysis mode, and does not see that that which he is analyzing belongs to a larger system that these experiments deliberately ignore.

And that system, to me, is the Great Hierarchy of Being — God–Man–World–Society and their universal, dynamical relations. There is no book in the world that addresses and explains this Hierarchy better than the Holy Bible.

Based on that supposition, I see, for example, the Big Bang/inflationary universe model perfectly consistent with what God said in Genesis.

To me, faith and reason are not mutually exclusive; rather they are dynamically related and to a large extent mutually-dependent.

Even an atheist scientist has faith — in reason, not to mention the "scientific method."

So yes, dear YHAOS — this article looks to me like a "phishing expedition."

Thank you ever so much for the ping, dear brother in Christ!

[[Hootowl, you’re right. Science depends way more on faith than most scientific types care to admit.]]

the ‘science’ of evolution depends on faith more than religion does- it depends on blind faith in the scientifically impossible- it makes a god out of nature, equating the creation efforts of nature with htat of a rational, thinking omniscient God- it also invents things liek information out of thin air, apparently giving nature the rationalization powers of God Himself-

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