C
Contarini
Guest
Oh, so you really think that the ancient Hebrews read Genesis mostly to find out just how the universe was made? Bunk. The correct way of putting it is that before the rise of modern, experimental science people didn’t distinguish between the “how” questions and the “why.” Modern science brackets out the “why” in order to get more precise answers to the “how.” And that’s all to the good, if we can then reintegrate the two in our overall belief and practice. But when science stops being a methodological approach and becomes an ideology, it’s deadly.
I always find it funny how obsessed secularist folks seem to be with wasting time. I guess it’s the dark side of that much-touted “we live fully now because we don’t believe in an afterlife,” but one might think you could learn a few things from Zen. To me an obsession with “wasting time” is one of the biggest obstacles to living fully and joyfully. You have to be willing to waste a bit of time if you want to be happy. Sure, we could all spend every waking moment trying to make new scientific discoveries (or doing menial labor for the favored few who can make such discoveries), but what’s the point. It’s an endless cycle that just feeds on itself. We discover more about how the universe works so we can produce better technology so we can live longer and have more time to discover more about how the universe works so we can produce better technology so. .
Some of us want to get off the bus. We want to be and to rejoice in being. We think that the only things that really matter are the things that are accessible to all human beings at all times and places, even if they don’t have lots of modern gadgets and even if they think the world rests on the back of a turtle and even if they only have a fraction of our life expectancy.
And I say this with due consideration, as someone who would probably have died at 25 without modern medicine.
What you call “unfounded speculation” is, along with art and music and poetry, one of the ways human beings express their humanity. Science is too, but apologists for scientism like you put the rest of us off it by telling us that science has All the Answers that Matter and we should stop wasting our time with other stuff.
If there are gods, they are part of nature. If there is God, he/she is not.
Again, if you can’t be bothered to learn our language, you can’t make a good case against what we believe.
Or rather a philosophy of mystery. Which to you may be the same thing. Your loss. You can live in a room without windows if you want to.
You continue to think that I’m positing God as some kind of pseudo-scientific explanation for the mechanisms of how things came to be. The classical view of God is beyond that. You could have a complete scientific explanation for every phenomenon of nature and it wouldn’t affect the question of God.
If you really think that I’m just saying this because modern science has “routed” God, then how do you explain the fact that St. Thomas Aquinas said the same thing in the 13th century? (Article 3, Objection 2 and the reply to the objection at the end of the article.) The difference is that in his day the supposed “complete explanation” was Aristotelian philosophy.
Edwin
evolution isnt mutation by fairy magic, dna replication is a mechanical process, if something puts a wrench in the works of that machine, theres a mutation. most mutations are benign, and do nothing to help or hurt a creature make more babies. of those that do have some effect, most severely harm a creatures ability to make more babies, but a few will actually help a creature survive where others cant, hunt better, run faster- all to make more babies.
And here is something I got from 