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buffalo
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Yes it does…Does “we” include me?
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StAnastasia
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As we learned from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, it depends on whether we are speaking about European or African angels.
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StAnastasia
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Inocente, that’s very creative!
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StAnastasia
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Thank you for your detailed exposition of your beliefs - with which I largely agree. My questions are not intended to attack but clarify your position.
I don’t see why that would be necessary, if God has chosen to work through secondary causes. For example, I don’t believe God needed to nudge the Chicxulub asteroid to crash into the Earth, wiping out dinosaurs and opening niches for mammalian development. In any case, divine intervention would by definition lie outside the scope of scientific detection.
Again, there is no way we could detect that. I assume God doesn’t need a scalpel to infuse a soul.
If you accept the inspiration of scripture writers, then no, God’s self-communication radiates outside the immediate circle of the Incarnation. But presumably it’s all of a piece for Christians: the self-communicating God inspiring prophets and evangelists is the God who communicated Godself most fully in the Incarnation.
I see no scientific or theological reason to assume we are the only rational, morally sensitive, and spiritually responsive species in the universe.
StAnastasia
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StAnastasia
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What? You’ve never watched a herd of mule deer burn another mule deer at the stake for holding an incorrect theological opinion? You’ve never seen an elephant call another elephant a heretic for not accepting an opinion written in the Catechism of the Elephant Church, Second Edition?
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rossum
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And rightly so. Only the Catechism of the Church of the One True Elephant (3224 AG Edition) contains the true word of Ganesh. Non-believers will be banished to the land of the Ivory Poachers!
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Lui
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Hey, I’m exactly in the same camp…I agree word for word.
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Lui
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Yawn. Unfortunately you will never witness science saying “hey, we were wrong and Genesis was right after all. Dinosaurs died out in the great flood when Noah built his ship. Gee, how could we have been so wrong all this time?”
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StAnastasia
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Lui, I don’t place the existence of God on a probability footing as you seemed to in the last post. Doing so has interesting consequences for theism, and that could be an interesting discussion for another thread.Yawn. Unfortunately you will never witness science saying “hey, we were wrong and Genesis was right after all. Dinosaurs died out in the great flood when Noah built his ship. Gee, how could we have been so wrong all this time?”
In response to the above, what I’ve found amusing in participating in CAF and in combating YECism around the world, is the tendency of YECs to take every dispute internal to evolutionary biology, or every discovery that challenges an established time line, as license to say, “See, evolutionists can’t agree, so this proves the earth is only 6,000 years old and that Noah’s Flood happened after all!”
StAnastasia
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tonyrey
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tonyrey
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Yes and yes!Yes it does…
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Lui
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I’m not exactly sure why you mean. Can you explain this a bit more detailed?
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StAnastasia
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Those are your words, not mine.
I don’t understand the logic of these two questions being joined.
Not if you think Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the other prophets were inspired.
Intelligence is emerging on this planet, probably because there is survival value to intelligence over and above speed or brute force. It would take millions of years to see whether intelligence was evolutionarily selected in dolphins, or elephants, or dogs, to the extent that it has been in Homo sapiens. So I don’t believe we will see in another terrestrial species – for a long time if ever – the suite of attributes we possess: rationality, moral awareness, spiritual sensitivity, etc.
But I see no reason to assume that some species on some other planets might not have evolved these attributes, including the consciousness of God. Whether we will ever encounter another rational and “ensouled” species is another matter.
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StAnastasia
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I’m sorry, Lui – I quoted from the wrong post. I meant to quote from your post # 16214. “I believe there may be a god but the Christian version seems very unlikely.”
When you place it on the basis of God being likely or unlikely, it seems like you are looking at it probabilistically. I’m just not sure how you would evaluate the likelihood or unlikelihood of God existing.
StAnastasia
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Lui
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I just figure IF there is a God why should the Christian version be the true version? I find a lot of Christianity doesn’t make sense to me. Life exists about 3.5 billion years, the Universe exists about 14 billion years, dinosaurs existed about 165 million years…why did God create all this life and then wait 3.5 billion years just to make humans who have souls and need to obey all these detailed rules or else they will suffer eternal punishment?
I just don’t buy it. Maybe there is a God who treats all beings equally and doesn’t make 99,999999% of soulless creatures and one being that is special…
For me a human is just an advanced primate. Like I mentioned, if the Neanderthal ever comes back again and is able to understand the concept of religion, there will be a lot of explaining whether they have souls or not.
I’m not denying the Christian faith can be true but I find it hard to swallow. I think religion has a lot to do with the fact that humans hope it doesn’t all end after death. Every tribe, culture, society has their own theories and killed each other to try to convince that their theory is right…
Maybe the whole concept of God/Gods is wrong and it is something completely different that designed the Universe.
I can’t say what’s the truth. I think some people have the ability to believe in God more easily than others.
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SGWessells
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If you have scientific evidence demonstrating the existence of a non-material soul that can somehow exert material force on material processes in the brain, kindly post a link. If there are non-material forces, substances, whatevers, that interact with matter in our brains, despite having no material components to do it with, we are thus far unable to detect them, until someone invents a spirit-ometer
. That means their existence is purely conjecture, and I am just as right to doubt them as you are to assert them, because we have different criteria for what establishes the truth in disputed questions. Until that is resolved, I see no point in us sniping about subsidiary matters like the soul.Evidence is the magisterium of science. It is infallible but must be interpreted, just like revelation. Unlike revelation, it can be objectively confirmed by observation and testing, and adjusted to fit new observation. I find that refreshingly free of the subjective and emotion-driven dogmas I used to follow, using reason only to justify what I had already decided to believe on other grounds. Sorry if that isn’t enough for you, but it doesn’t make my life meaningless and empty. I have moments where I miss the comforts of religion, but with time they grow fewer and less intense.
I have investigated the claims of Catholic revelation and find them unconvincing. Unless you can find some reason for me to change my mind, all you will do by your hints, implications, and irrelevant questions obviously designed to bring up a target for you to shoot down, is annoy me. That may be gratifying for you, but it puts me further from what you consider to be my salvation than I was before. Since you believe in a judging God who demands an account of every idle word, that may be of some concern to you. But that’s between you and him.
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SGWessells
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By an amazing coincidence, I have just discovered and translated the Bible of the Ants, which begins “In the beginning, the Queen created the Hill and the Food. And She made Queens in Her own image, who then hatched out the Drones and the Warriors. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
Precisely. Either there is a fundamental demarcation between man and other animals, which allows him, through grace, to transcend his nature by sharing initimately with the divine, or there is not. If man does not signal a quantum leap from the rest of creation, then even his
are not particularly special and are subject to reduction and rationalization by cultural anthropologists as mere socialization tools (reactions) to ensure adjustment for the species group.
All of creation is glorious and awesome. (And in biblical terms, “blessed.”) But only man has the capacity to respond to his creator (not just to the social group) in dynamic, conscious relationship, and thus to magnify throughout all of creation the creator’s original blessing. That’s why man is ontologically apart from the rest of creation, meta-physically separate.
And the Queen said, behold, the ants surpass all other creatures, for that they alone do magnify Me through My creation, in dynamic, conscious relationship. Wherefore I have given them dominion over the grass of the field, and the dirt of the Hill, and every food and sweetness that their servants the two-legged and four-legged shall provide. And they shall be blessed and multiply, for they are distinguished from all other creatures.”
I am currently translating the Bible of the Horses, which says the same thing, only it puts horses on top of the food chain. Who knows what further revelations from the animal kingdom will surface?
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SGWessells
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I have great news for you, then: some people can see further than that. Plus, others have even traveled the whole distance and left reliable records and maps for us to follow. Thus, knowledge can grow beyond our own limited horizon. We can even measure the distance to the stars and know by spectrum analysis what elements they contain, even if we can’t see them with the naked eye.
Horizons can be expanded. But not if you believe a dogma that limits your vision to a hundred yards.
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SGWessells
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Unlike revelation, peer-reviewed papers can be corrected by new discoveries, thus adding to the sum of human knowledge.
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StarSapphire
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May I direct you to Carl Jung on this. He says it far better than I could articulate. He basically said, when asked whether or not God existed, that as he could not prove it, or indeed engage in any study that would give him quantifiable data on the fact, he couldn’t say.
But you do clarify something here - that is just the point. Evidence.
Science demands evidence. Well, actually it demands observable OR measurable evidence. Great. Lovely. That pertains to Proving… I won’t say religion, that’s a social construct, let’s stick to spirituality… Proving Spirituality.
Scientifically, spirituality exists.
The Experience of a feeling, a tangible feeling, of a condition that the modern human society refers to as a spiritual experience exists. Whether or not you choose to believe that the Experience, well, experienced, is DUE to spirituality, or soul, or God, or spirits, sacred cows or LSD, is your choice. But first, all of you, do not confuse the issue with neurons and synaptics, it just gets silly once it gets molecular.
Point one - the human experience that is commonly referred to as a spiritual feeling, exists. Scientifically. People can inform you what the experience feels like. They are feeling something.
Now we have the question of attribution. Whatever happens, and no matter how science advances, human beings persist in believing ostensibly ‘silly’ things. I believe in God. I still believe in unicorns. I am a modern, highly educated, rational woman. In fact, I cannot rationalise the existence of an existential deity. Were I to go with that rationalisation, I would be an atheist.
I am not, For two very good reasons. The first is even if I repeat ‘there is no God’ to myself a thousand times, it’s not what I think. I cannot deny I think God exists. Now I may simply be mad. Or have a deep seated subconscious need to believe. But then if you accept the subconscious you are not a rationalist.
The second reason is that to say ‘there is no God’ is stupid. Even if I didn’t Believe in a God there is absolutely no way on earth I could prove there wasn’t. I could give many reasons why there MIGHT not be, but I couldn’t disprove it. The truth is, rationally, we don’t know. Therefore it is just as dumb to believe there isn’t a God as it is to believe in one. Neither statement can be proved. Much more honest to admit we don’t know. And if we don’t know, I am just as happy sticking to that irrefutable feeling he does exist, as an atheist is happy to cling to the belief he doesn’t.
Point 2 therefore, is, scientifically, we cannot prove there is no God.
Point 3. Silly beliefs in the supernatural, Gods, ghosts, magic and monsters persist. Now, many ‘rationalists’ attribute this to madness, stupidity, gullibility or just lack of intelligence. I do not subscribe to that as any rationalist who firmly believes themselves superior to the people they purport to study must suffer from a severe superiority complex and therefore have a very worrying neurosis that requires psychiatric help.
Therefore, if these people are intelligent, and not stupid, or at least no more or less stupid than the rationalist observing them, then something else is a Fact.
Human beings are capable of belief in something they cannot rationalise.
Why?
To help us understand the world in a primitive state? Probably? But why do we dream in symbolism? Why do we express ourselves in art? Why do we see majesty in a landscape and not just, well, a landscape.
Human beings are not rational machines. We are capable of the irrational. And it is that very capability, imagination, irrationality, the subconscious, that make us creative, inventive, that made us a successful species. try to rationalise and hammer everything down to the science and what do you find when you get there? Particles? Look further yet and what do you find? Smaller and smaller and smaller particles.
Science is there to tell us how something works and why. But it cannot, and should not, ever attempt to tell us what it MEANS.
Science is about how it WORKS. Religion is about what it MEANS. Human beings strive their whole lives for meaning. Meaning matters, almost more than the physical fact itself.
I do not ever conflate the two. There is no war between science and religion, any more than there is a war between mathematics and art.
And the reason you do not miss the comfort of your religion is because you have replaced the certainty of divinity with the certainty of scientific truth. You still are requiring a firm truth to shield you from uncertainty. You just exchanged one form of it for another. In truth, as Jesus himself said, ‘what is truth’. You don’t know it, and I don’t, we just believe.
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