Books are a part of life and can be sources of useful information. A wise man once told me that the bible is a gold mine but first you have to get rid of the overburden to get to the nuggets. That would be true of any book. But an author cannot help but insert his/her own bias into the information so, I think, it is that bias that produces the overburden. Once the nuggets have been found, it is useless to you unless you put them to use.
Peaceful coexistence between scientists and theologians
- Thread starter kowalskil
- Start date
Um... not contradicting it is not the same as backing it up, but that doesn't matter, science does contradict it. Virgin birth, resurrection of the dead, bodily ascent into heaven, walking on water, turning water into wine, feeding a multitude and having more left over than you started with, disembodied intelligences... science says those things don't happen and there is no reliably attested instance of any of them.
You're right in the sense of normal circumstances, BUT these were fairly unsophisticated people making the observances. We've all seen "water" on shimmering hot pavement in the summer. Perhaps "virgin" in those days meant not having sex outside the marriage (otherwise I'm wondering about Joe) :lol:
Luckily for us being small does not equate to being unimportant.
Isa:40:15:
Behold,
the nations are as a drop of a bucket,
and are counted as the small dust of the balance:
behold,
he taketh up the isles as a very little thing.
While science and religion can (and does) result in a conversation that is argumentative when members of those two groups are together the topic can have more than one POV even though the 'truth' is singular for just about any (reasonable) question that either camp can come up with. Reasonable being some papers already break the 'concept barrier'.
Evolution is the first conflict. I don't think either camp is even close, one promotes species jumps and the other is crowded for time. Just the closeness of 'fowl' and 'whales' would be God's (intelligent and leaves little bread-crumbs of facts here and there). A bird falling into water and being able to survive for 400M years (or whatever) would adapt their form to suit the local environments. A concept that is foreign to both but is based on a certain amount of Scripture would seem to be ......... the correct one IMHO.
The list Dex gave all have 'answers' that were apparent to me as soon as I read them. The water part also includes being on the water during a storm. Jesus would have been water-skiing for all intensive purposes. He was giving them a preview of what they will also be able to do once they have a 'little faith'. That is not available until after a physical return and then 'the rewards' are passed out to a whole group at the very same time. That applies to punishments also.
Your definition of virgin works for me. I might even take it further and say that Mary may not have been a virgin because she was below marrying age. If Elizabeth was her cousin and she was very old when she gave birth to John the Baptist then Mary might have been about 30 and still unmarried. That would make her about 70 at the cross and she would have passed away shortly after that. The last we hear of Joseph is when Jesus is 12 so if men also lived to about 70 then he would have been in his late 50's when they got married, both still being virgins. The difference is the father, one was human (dust) the other was spirit (2nd birth) That is a fail-safe device that only the one and only Son of God has as he was alos 'born' before creation and the flesh of Jesus was the 1st birth (name in the Book of Life).
Perhaps if the false science crowd and the false christian crowd got together we could ...... wait for two wrongs to make a right. lol
The first widely known conflict was over Giordano Bruno's cosmological ideas. He was burned at the stake in 1600 after the Inquisition found him guilty of heresy, a capital crime in those days. That's what happens when you give secular power to religion, and there are places around the world where it still happens.
Evolution is only the most widely known current conflict, and it's a conflict only in the minds of creationists. There are legitimate scientific disputes about many of evolution's details, but the basic fact of it is as well established as the fact that the earth orbits the sun. And it does NOT promote species jumps, that's a grotesque misrepresentation of what evolutionary theory says about speciation, and you know it, I've explained that to you before.
Like a moth to the flame. lol I'm not sure if the OP wanted to solve the 'crisis' so I'll twiddle my thumbs and just observe for a few pages before we get into the start of life, The Bible promotes 3 starts, one in the water, one on the (moist) earth and one in the air (where they spend most of their time) Whales have more in common with birds than they do fish ...... just sayin ....
But the big bang is different. Even the science that falsifies it cannot shake your faith.
Perhaps in discussion face to face, not on forums but at work, home, dinner etc the term and use of respect and disagreement have lost there flavor of good manners, respect for another's religious beliefs or non beliefs - My attitude is simple - I care not a whit what a person religious beliefs are or are not. It is the person that is important, not what he/she does, but who they are, their character, parts of a person that are very important in my mind.
But then again, i am just a simple minded Dumb Down Homer ( DDH) My term, I rather like it, as a person should be able to laugh about how dumb they can be and also criticize their own actions as well as take satisfaction from doing what is right.
My abacus beads seem to be rolling about so the ramifications of the last two black holes developing tidal locked mutual orbit rather than the expected collision of two objects moving away fro each other at more than twice the speed of light. It is comforting (or not) to know that gravity not only travels more than 2x light speed but is also stronger than the combined gravitational pull of two very massive black hole that hold the combined matter of the whole universe. What are the odds that they would even ever come to be on a collision course in the first place.
I could wait till morning to get the thing put back together. Last time I left one off it threw the grocery bill wayyy out of whack.
An odd thing to say since you are who was being referenced as the moth. As for being the dung it is only 'dangerous' if it is wet. When dry it can be used to bake bread, what will you be doing ...... fly??
I already know you think my brain shoved up a gnat's ass is the same as being a BB in a boxcar. Think how much bigger I will be with a mustard seed of faith inside. Walk on water, 15mph with size 12xxx sandals, the wake of a empty dingy with a big sail would be relatively calm water. lol
Send it to the myth-busters and have a chopper provide the thunderstorm speed winds. God 1 Dex 0
Quite benign and a trait that should be more common in all walks of life. Is that enough to swing the world in that direction without somebody going to jail? I would be thrilled to see it be enough, history doesn't point to that being the case. The last offer may have been pretty close, they got the place right, they missed some of the crowd. Instead of giving 3 million the land they have Madagascar was also offered. This time it should be a forced vacation to all them and their finances worldwide till you have about 30 million that make up the upper part of the world's elite banking and religious and political cream and take them for permanent move. Their families and friends might number another 100 - 200M or so more
To get a ticket for littering while others can literally kill men women and kids with almost impunity is pretty equal to Alice's Restaurant, back when the realities of war were more widely known. Company profits compared to the rights of the consumer. It is like the sheep applying for health-care against wolf attacks and the wolves are expected to pay the premiums.
I think Dexter is right in pointing out that while science mostly deals with the material and religion/spirituality with the immaterial, it's clear that both have something to say about the other. One who believes that water can become holy and that bread and wine can become the body and blood of Christ clearly have certain beliefs about the material world and its interaction with the immaterial. Similarly, science can very quickly fall in the realm of ethics and morality such as in genetics. I would argue that morality and ethics are mostly spiritual issues in the sense that we are dealing with judgments of the spirit or mind if you prefer.
Cliffy also mentioned how important it is to distinguish religion from spirituality. I'll second that.
While science is older than the scientific revolution (think of some Greeks who managed to predict eclipses and properly estimate the diameter of a spherical Earth), let's say for clarity's sake that science really started with the scientific revolution.
In the pre-scientific world, religion ruled the global zeitgeist. Acts of God were everywhere. If one nation's army conquered another, it was because God was on the side of the winner. Sickness was interpreted as godly punishment or testing. Lighting in the sky was caused by Zeus. One was considered untouchable because of one's supposedly bad actions in a former life etc. etc. etc.(Unfortunately, some of what I mention still happens today).
The point I want to make here is that those who are caught in the net of dogmatic religion fail to properly differentiate objective (exterior) from subjective (inner) reality. Depictions of God as a bearded white guy sitting on a throne are a clear example of this confusion. A father who kills his daughter because she has fallen in love with a man of different religion is another. There are countless examples. The recurring pattern is the failure to see how one's subjective conceptions about reality are literally projected on the screen of ''objective'' reality. One confuses his worldview with the world itself. In other words, it's a failure to understand that the outside world is relatively independent from whatever happens in our human minds.
Science helped to change all that. We now know that lightning isn't caused by Zeus or God. It has no ''intention''. Science helped us in drawing a line between ourselves and the outside world. It helped us understand that the outside world has its own mechanisms and that while our inner world is still very real as a subjective phenomenon, it must be differentiated from the outside world.
With that in mind, it is my view that science is superior to dogmatic religion in the sense that it represents a more mature relationship between our minds and the world.
That being said, we all need a spiritual assessment of what is happening to us. While it's important to differentiate between subjective and objective reality, that doesn't mean that both aren't connected. And it certainly doesn't mean that subjective reality is any less real than objective reality. Dreams and nightmares clearly demonstrate this. The fact that a nightmare can wake you from sleep, with your body full of sweat and a feeling of overwhelming terror is testament to the reality of our inner life. There was no real shark biting my legs off, but my experience of it was real enough for it to have awoken me. The hallucinations of a schizophrenic might not correspond to what is happening out there in the objective world, but the hallucination itself is as real as anything else. The point being that whatever our worldview is, we all have one and it's impossible not to.
We are all spiritual beings. Not in the esoteric sense of us having spirits that survive physical death but in the sense that we all experience the inner reality of spirit which can not be described in terms of velocity, mass and space.
To sum it up, spirituality and science are compatible. They need one another. But it's important to differentiate the two. Science is a tool and in the end, it is our spirituality that will determine what we decide to do with it.
Cliffy also mentioned how important it is to distinguish religion from spirituality. I'll second that.
While science is older than the scientific revolution (think of some Greeks who managed to predict eclipses and properly estimate the diameter of a spherical Earth), let's say for clarity's sake that science really started with the scientific revolution.
In the pre-scientific world, religion ruled the global zeitgeist. Acts of God were everywhere. If one nation's army conquered another, it was because God was on the side of the winner. Sickness was interpreted as godly punishment or testing. Lighting in the sky was caused by Zeus. One was considered untouchable because of one's supposedly bad actions in a former life etc. etc. etc.(Unfortunately, some of what I mention still happens today).
The point I want to make here is that those who are caught in the net of dogmatic religion fail to properly differentiate objective (exterior) from subjective (inner) reality. Depictions of God as a bearded white guy sitting on a throne are a clear example of this confusion. A father who kills his daughter because she has fallen in love with a man of different religion is another. There are countless examples. The recurring pattern is the failure to see how one's subjective conceptions about reality are literally projected on the screen of ''objective'' reality. One confuses his worldview with the world itself. In other words, it's a failure to understand that the outside world is relatively independent from whatever happens in our human minds.
Science helped to change all that. We now know that lightning isn't caused by Zeus or God. It has no ''intention''. Science helped us in drawing a line between ourselves and the outside world. It helped us understand that the outside world has its own mechanisms and that while our inner world is still very real as a subjective phenomenon, it must be differentiated from the outside world.
With that in mind, it is my view that science is superior to dogmatic religion in the sense that it represents a more mature relationship between our minds and the world.
That being said, we all need a spiritual assessment of what is happening to us. While it's important to differentiate between subjective and objective reality, that doesn't mean that both aren't connected. And it certainly doesn't mean that subjective reality is any less real than objective reality. Dreams and nightmares clearly demonstrate this. The fact that a nightmare can wake you from sleep, with your body full of sweat and a feeling of overwhelming terror is testament to the reality of our inner life. There was no real shark biting my legs off, but my experience of it was real enough for it to have awoken me. The hallucinations of a schizophrenic might not correspond to what is happening out there in the objective world, but the hallucination itself is as real as anything else. The point being that whatever our worldview is, we all have one and it's impossible not to.
We are all spiritual beings. Not in the esoteric sense of us having spirits that survive physical death but in the sense that we all experience the inner reality of spirit which can not be described in terms of velocity, mass and space.
To sum it up, spirituality and science are compatible. They need one another. But it's important to differentiate the two. Science is a tool and in the end, it is our spirituality that will determine what we decide to do with it.
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You have that same answer to anything the Bible say, starting with the first line and ending with the last one.
Promoting any possibility of who/why something was done would be counter productive, at least an Atheist can view it as a work of fiction. (in theory) Even they don't have a reasonable answer to God giving us an example of powers of 10 on the 1st page, and a few more.
The reasonable answer is that the book was written by men to control men. It has nothing to do with god and everything to do with the imagination of men. The god of the bible is no more valid than any other god dreamed up by men. The bible is a work of fiction based on older myths, so how can any claims made by it as to its divine origins be taken seriously? You are the one who continues to ignore the historical facts of who, when, where and why the book was put together.
There is a very good case for the idea that the science the public is force fed deals with first and foremost the shielding and maintenance of corporate profit. That is not to say that there is anything out of the ordinary with that scenario for it has become the norm for every human institution to serve and protect their corporate masters. So while the tool of scientific method remains the supreme human screwdriver, above suspicion, same for hammers and slide rules, it is in practice where we see it's total failure to provide for hope and clean adventure of unbiased discovery. There simply is no escape from its guilt in the present defilement of academia and as such scientific heads should certainly roll. Off with their heads, god will judge, right or wrong.
Science comes up with new weapons all the time, they also come up with things that can be unhealthy to people an either ignore it or only find out way to late to be of any use to the ones harmed.
So the bustling arms industry says what about who is in control from the Christian perspective? When is the last time you saw a headline exposing what the false Christians have been up to. Science has shown that it moves forward only while fighting it tooth and nail and at the same time calls itself progressive.(not saying that is a bad thing by itself but killing the opponents was used as a solution even when Christians weren't involved. Today, I would say false Christians is pushing false science on the people for the most part and the people are not the better off for it. The Bible is transparent, all you have to do is open it and you have all the source material there is.
Science involves having a great deal of faith that having many say the same thing is the solution to weeding out lies from scientific facts. Science might not even be ready to accept the current views on how all those ancient structures that use huge stones were made. Even the ones that promote they had 'advanced methods' for doing that are going to resist the theory all of them were made by one being who was about the age of 6 in our years if we had a lifespan of 120 years. If 10 Gentile kingdoms will exist for the 1,000 years there should be 10 such 'ruins'. Jerusalem (and area) would be the exception but the house of prayer that is said to exist in that time would be built by that very same being who is now at the 120 mark and ready to enter eternity, starting with a tabernacle meant to last for 1,000 years.
That would seem to put us in the realm of acting like God. Truth be know God is going to claim both is being under His care. Theory and practice, we are having trouble understanding all the scientic rules in place, God claims the right to erase and rewrite almost ... at will.
1Co:4:20:
For the kingdom of God is not in word,
but in power.