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tonyrey
Guest
Reason without revelation is derived from unreasoning processes…
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oldcelt
Guest
Why would you say that? Nothing about what I wrote had anything to do with Christianity.
Is it not true that television would be a much more efficient way to reach mankind than a single person from anyplace in the world? That is all I’m saying. In the days before TV there has always been a prevailing technology that could have used rather than a single person.
Deists are rightfully suspicious of something coming out of the blue to supposedly enlighten the human race, Of all the revelations how many has the RC Church determined to be real? Very, very few. Deists simply go to zero.
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oldcelt
Guest
That is simply false. Reason functions very nicely without revelation which, supposedly, offers new information,
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JamesTheJust
Guest
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belorg
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JamesTheJust
Guest
There is no such thing as “it should be” when discussing truth, only “it is” or “it isn’t”.
Did you read a summarization of it, or the actual text as faithfully translated?
The Unmoved Mover is an aspect of the Judeo-Christian God as well.
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Charlemagne_III
Guest
Why wouldn’t intervening change occur here on Earth without God changing? You seem to want God to submit to the law of causality which God created. But if God transcends that law, why would he have to submit to it?
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Charlemagne_III
Guest
Reason functions well in its own realm. So does revelation. They needn’t be considered contradictory, or one be considered irrelvant to the other.
In Genesis we are given an account of Creation in which God says, “Let there be light.” This is said on the first day, not on a later day when the sun and the moon were created. This is a revelation. Now along comes the atheist Carl Sagan reasoning three thousand years later.
Carl Sagan in Cosmos, 1980 A.D.
“Ten or twenty billion years ago, something happened – the Big Bang, the event that began our universe…. In that titanic cosmic explosion, the universe began an expansion which has never ceased…. As space stretched, the matter and energy in the universe expanded with it and rapidly cooled. The radiation of the cosmic fireball, which, then as now, filled the universe, moved through the spectrum – from gamma rays to X-rays to ultraviolet light; through the rainbow colors of the visible spectrum; into the infrared and radio regions. The remnants of that fireball, the cosmic background radiation, emanating from all parts of the sky can be detected by radio telescopes today. In the early universe, space was brilliantly illuminated.”
As astronomer Robert Jastrow pointed out in God and the Astronomers.
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
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belorg
Guest
I read the actual text as faithfully translated. And the Judeo-Christian God is an Unmoved Mover who moves.
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belorg
Guest
Because if it did, we’d have a deist God. It would mean that whatever changes here on Earth is in fact the result of one timeless decision by an immutable God.
God did not create the law of causality, since creating presupposes the law of causality in the first place.You seem to want God to submit to the law of causality which God created. But if God transcends that law, why would he have to submit to it?
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belorg
Guest
We are not discussing truth, we are discussing philosophy and theology.
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Charlemagne_III
Guest
Probably not so. Causality is an unbroken endless chain of cause and effect.
Creating from nothing is not a chain. It is the creation of a chain. God is not a chain.
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Aloysium
Guest
I would think that revelation is essential to the proper application of reason.
If I am to arrive at the Pythagorian Theorem, I need to know that triangles exist in the realm of ideas. How do we know them other that in some fashion they have been revealed to us?
Similarly, what is Divine in nature needs to be revealed to me before I can understand it.
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tonyrey
Guest
Creating* ex nihilo* doesn’t presuppose the law of** physical **causality.
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oldcelt
Guest
I. Sagan did a pop-culture book and TV series that made astronomy accessible to non-scientists. I believe that he was an atheist.
Jastrow is acknowledged as doing similar work and had this to say; "When a scientist writes about God, his colleagues assume he is either over the hill or going bonkers. In my case it should be understood from the start that I am an agnostic in religious matters. My views on this question are close to those of Darwin, who wrote,
- If these theologians had all this knowledge, why didn’t they share it? It took until the mid 1960s to demonstrate how the universe really began, and it sure wasn’t theologians who found it.
- What is the actual definition of revelation? If it involves communication with a deity, deists reject it. If, on the other hand, the revelation is a matter of human effort (Science, etc.) and can be checked, it is acceptable.
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JamesTheJust
Guest
In post #65, you responded “it should be” to my statement that something is untrue.
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oldcelt
Guest
I think we are talking about divine revelation. Pythagoras did yell out something like “there it is” when he had finished the proof of the theorem. No divine revelation. Just hard , methodical work by a human being with an idea. I think you will find the same with all the great writers, scientists.
I spent nearly five years in nature as a crew leader on a team of archaeologists. We discovered many thing natural and man-made, but not once did we require a divine intervention of any type. Just a lot of hard, dirty hours, and reason.
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tonyrey
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tonyrey
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Sorry, Charlie! I hadn’t seen your post when I sent mine…
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Charlemagne_III
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