And......
Posted on 01/02/2007 8:27:12 PM PST by Mr. Silverback
The late Stephen Jay Gould at Harvard used to describe religion and science as occupying “non-overlapping magisterial authority,” or what he called NOMA. That is, science and religion occupied different “domains,” or areas of life, in which each held “the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution.”
There were many problems with Gould’s approach, but at least a lack of respect for religion and religious people wasn’t one of them. Not so with some of today’s scientists.
The New York Times reported on a conference recently held in Costa Mesa, California, that turned into the secular materialist equivalent of a revival meeting.
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg told attendees that “the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief.” According to Weinberg, “anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.”
Another Nobel laureate, chemist Sir Harold Kroto, suggested that the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion be given to Richard Dawkins for his new book The God Delusion.
Continuing the theme, Carolyn Porco of the Space Science Institute called for teaching “our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty.”
In case you were in doubt about which worldview would inform this “catechesis,” she then added: “It is already so much more glorious and awesome—and even comforting—than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.”
Attempts at a Gould-like détente between religion and science didn’t sit well with this crowd. A presentation by Stanford biologist Joan Roughgarden on how to make evolution more acceptable to Christians was disrupted by Dawkins himself who called it “bad poetry.”
After a while, the rancor and stridency got to be too much for some of the attendees. One scientist called it a “den of vipers” where the only debate is “should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?”
Another, physicist Lawrence Krauss, chided them, saying “science does not make it impossible to believe in God . . . [and] we should recognize that fact . . . and stop being so pompous about it.”
Fat chance. What’s behind all of this animosity? It is a worldview known as “scientism,” the belief that there is no supernatural, only a material world. And it will not countenance any rivals. It is a “jealous god.”
As Weinberg’s comments illustrate, it regards any other belief system other than scientism as irrational and the enemy of progress. Given the chance, as in the former Soviet Union, it wants to eliminate its rivals. It is no respecter of pluralism.
But this really exposes the difference between the worldviews of these scientists and Christians. We welcome science; it’s the healthy exploration of God’s world. The greatest scientists in history have been Christians who believe science was possible only in a world that was orderly and created by God. We don’t rule out any natural phenomenon.
The naturalists, on the other hand, rule out even science that tends to show intelligence, because that might lead to a God. Now, who is narrow-minded?
That's because it's not *reasoning* at all. There is simply no way to support that conclusion.
Not really - your cut'n'paste didn't indicate that they were plotting a theocracy or instituting a ban on scientific inquiry.
I guess he's having a lot of trouble finding the Creationist equivalent of Mein Kampf. To say I'm not surprised would be to engage in MASSIVE understatement.
Touched by HIS Noodley Appendage
But it seems to matter SO much to folks on BOTH sides of the aisle!
But will Nancy Pelosi and her minions be able to restrain their glee enough in the next few days??
(Or the homo fact of being sinful)
Member of the VCWC!
Paul and Luke got that part of the story a little bit mangled.
Sin didn't come into the Earth because of one man, Adam. It came into the earth either because of one woman, Eve, or because of two people, a man and a woman, Adam and Eve. Eve committed the original sin. Adam merely followed her lead and seconded it.
So, we need to read Paul in Romans and Luke in Acts as writing poetically, not literally. Taken literally, they are wrong, because they have mistaken Adam for Eve, or Adam alone for Adam and Eve together. Sin didn't come into the world because of one MAN, unless "man" means "woman", or unless "one" means two.
Genesis literally conflicts with Romans and Acts here on this point, if we are going to be literalists.
We really don't need to be that literal, because it's really not important. We live in a world in which mankind has brought sin down upon us all, with the poison of it working through the generations. We need redemption from it, and mitigation of its effects, and we have Jesus and the Church. The poesy of the Adam and Eve story teach a literal message about the reality of sin, but it doesn't matter a jot whether Adam and Eve were as depicted in the Hebrew creation myth, or if they were autralopithecus. Nor does it matter if they ate a particular piece of fruit or not. Nor does it matter than Paul and Luke both got the sex of the first sinner in Genesis wrong, and should have written "because sin came into the world because of one WOMAN" if they were trying to write a literal blow-by-blow account. Truth is, they were males in an ancient society, and Adam was more important to their view of things than Eve, and it doesn't matter that they transposed the first sin, because the Genesis story is an allegory anyway, and the literal blow-by-blow is really quite irrelevant.
Even Jesus said so when he said that "Love your neighbor as you love yourself, and love God above all" was the point of the law and the prophets (which is a nice ancient Jewish way of saying the Torah and the prophetic books).
Literalism ends up being a death trap of faith, because a bunch of men not focused on details, getting their inspiration from a God trying a tell a PARTICULAR story, and NOT trying to tell another one, ends up having conflicts of fact in it.
Indeed, from those conflicts of fact the better lesson is that God didn't intend for us to take the parts like that where the facts are in direct collision literally.
Sort of like Jesus saying that not a jot nor tittle of the law shall be changed, and then saying that men can't divorce their wives even though Deuteronomy - the law - tells them how to. So, Jesus changed THAT jot and tittle. The real lesson there is that what's written in Dueteronomy that conflicted with Jesus actually was NOT inspired by God, in that particular portion, and was a purely human tradition creeping in. Which is why it's bad news to hold up the Bible and call it God. It's got errors in it. Jesus said so.
You yourself highlighted a transpositon error of Paul and Luke: the first sinner wasn't Adam, after all. Sin came into the world via Eve, the first woman, not the first man. (And redemption came into the world by way of the womb of a woman too, let us not forget. Luke and Paul don't stress that, but it warrants stressing).
The letter kills, the spirit sets free. Don't forget that.
"Oh, it CLAIMS that it doesn't, but there is no other reason we have these C vs E threads; is there? ;^)"
Well, I don't see theology in evolution anyway.
Genetically, there was a final mutation that crossed the line into something we can call man. Genetically, we can assume that this mutation was dominant, because man survived. Also, a single male can father a lot more of its kind than a single primate female. That Adam and Eve may bhave been autstralopithecus, and that the memory of a distant Eden with the world "East" of it (think of "East" not as a Cartesian, but in terms of the direction of the morning sun, and you realize that if you are in southern Africa during the travelling season, the sun rises in the North east and the whole world is East of Eden.
There was certainly a flood that mankind experienced. It's in the racial memory everywhere. There are also cities underwater and the truth that at the end of the last ice age, the seas rose sharply. Everyone in the world experienced that, and it too is a racial memory. That Genesis contains some of the most distant and primitive racial memories of man is almost certainly true.
But what is GOD'S point in the story?
I made everything, including you, and you sinned and are estranged from me. That's the nutshell version of the early part of Genesis. The scientific details aren't scientific, and end up being shoals for the faith of many if taken literally. St. Augustine strongly warned against a silly literalism in that regard, and I think he was right. Want to make faith IMPOSSIBLE, then insist to a biologist that evolution is impossible because of Genesis.
Genesis conflicts with Romans and Acts, one WOMAN, not one man.
Genesis 1 and 2 conflict with each other in order of creation of things.
And it's just not important.
There are more and less important parts of the New Testament. The RATHER more important parts are what Jesus said, considering he was the Son of God. Interpret the rest of the Bible around that, and discard the parts that conflict with Jesus as mere human traditions in error - just like Jesus did with Old Testament divorce - and the Bible is a wonderful guide. Read it without a Rosetta Stone of authority, though, and its a welter of contradictions and even anachronisms and error. How many people's faith has been stunted or killed aborning because the first thing spiritual they ever tried to read was Genesis 1, and tossed the thing away as preposterous when the got to the business about the rib.
"Death entered into the word through the sin of Adam - Romans"
And not Eve?
The biblical texts speak for themselves and in simple terms as to how the world came about, Who sustains it, and why. As such they form a reasonable starting point for science. They present a far more reliable account than the philsophy of history known as evolution (in the wide sense), for they do not propose an indefinite series of events over an indefinite period as a cause for producing arrangments of matter that perform specific functions.
The biblical texts are also pointed in making known that no one can know the mind of God. I take offense at your suggestion that I "apparently" claim to know the same. I merely quoted a small portion of the same texts you claim to hold as true.
No, the doctrine of original sin has to do with Adam eating the fruit. Eve went first, but he is regarded throughout the Bible as the source of the sin that came from it. He was in charge.
Read it without a Rosetta Stone of authority, though, and its a welter of contradictions and even anachronisms and error.
Name some.
The RATHER more important parts are what Jesus said, considering he was the Son of God.
Jesus, the creationist? Ironically, His pronouncement of the Creation comes in the very chapter you're talking about, Matthew 19, verse 4 to be specific. I'd also be willing to bet that the Catechism of your faith says not one bloody thing about Jesus correcting an "error" when he addresses divorce in that chapter. It's called "progressive revelation." If so much of the Law was a human invention, why did Jesus say He had come to fulfill it, rather than to abolish it?
And if the Bible has all those contradictions and other errors, how do you know that any of Jesus' words were faithfully recorded? For all you know, Matthew may have been just as sloppy as Paul or Luke, and Jesus really said "Divorce anybody you want," or never even was asked about it.
One should not take the Bible literally. Some things are lies or misconceptions faithfully recorded, like the nattering on of Job's comforters. But all of it is faithfully recorded under the inspiration of the holy Spirit. And to believe that some of it is faithfully recorded perfect wisdom form the mouth of Christ and much of the rest is a collection of claptrap...that doesn't hold water.
form=from
Can you provide scriptural evidence for this upheaval? All I'm familiar with is the idea of forty days and nights of rain. Which begs the question of where the water came from and where it went.
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