Romans 1:20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
So you believe a zealous Jew from the first century was channelling your god. You work so painstakingly to demonstrate how careful and critical thinking is needed to understand how the natural world works, then you post this in front of the masses? Whence rigour??
This is why belief is near-universal in humanity. In spite of extraordinary oppression and educational efforts, Marxist regimes have had very little success in destroying that urge to connect with God.
And with Putin in charge of Russia, they have both the original Eastern orthodox god and the later god Stalin, who is now making a comeback. There was never a desire to destroy a 'connection with god', just an attempt to divert the attention towards a different 'god' in the form of a cult of personality. Just goes to show, whether you are Stalin or Jesus or Kim Jong-Il, being dead isn't much of a disadvantage.
But anyway, if not Marxism, then what is killing christianity?
But it's not entirely so. Summa Theologica is a good start, if you really want to know. Being Catholic, I know you aren't necessarily damned just for being an atheist, but it would be good for you to at least take a look.
Unbelief is the worst sin, I think it says. Worse than murder, presumably. Not that murder seemed to be much of a problem for the Inquisition. But in Summa Theologica we also have the impressive (for the 13th Century) five 'proofs of god'. Three that involve regressions of causes that are stopped from spiralling out of control to infinity by the assertion of a god with the apparently lone job of stopping regression. A fourth says a god must exist because a perfect version of everything must exist. That includes, in the words of Richard Dawkins, the smelliest of the smelly. Then there is the argument from design, which you yourself argue against here on ToL. It's a document of five fails plus the usual immorality of Catholicism.
I don't give Francis Collins any more credence about biology than I give Stephen Gould. As Gould wrote, all that really matters in science is ability.
Well yes, the only credence should be given to unambiguous empirical evidence.
There is no religious test for science.
I don't know a religion with the guts to go into the business of testing. Religions try to claim they live within a magisterium that is exempt from being subjected to testing. That claim is never justified, except by special pleading and magical claims.
If it's a religious thing for you, perhaps you shouldn't.
It's not about me. I don't keep a pantheon of imaginary friends who tell me what they want.
Here, you're confusing categories of causes. The efficient cause of the diversity of life on Earth is random mutation and natural selection. The final cause is a Creator who made the universe so that thinks like life would appear and evolve.
But your creator always intended to make humans, right? So, you don't believe natural selection is the cause of the appearance of our species, because natural selection doesn't have the foresight required by that dogma.
You're closer to the truth than you might think. If by "magic" you mean "supernatural", then you're right. The "magic" isn't in God forever stepping in and tinkering with creation; it's in the moment of creation; it was (as some creationists say) "front-loaded" to produce what we see.
Right, so random genetic mutation has barely got anything to do with it. Maybe whenever you mention mutation you should write '(magical preloading)' after it.
And no, that's not a sign that there is no free will or chance in creation. As St. Thomas Aquinas noted,God can use contingency just as easily as He can use necessity in Divine Providence.
Wow, different kinds of magic.
I don't know what a surgeon does to repair brains, either.
Catholicism sounds like a celebration of ignorance.
It would require a miracle, um? Parthenogeneis, as unlikely as it is, still wouldn't work in this case. If you thought about it, you'd realize why.
I thought that's what I said.
The "image" of God, is not a physical one. We are like Him in being able to know good and evil. God doesn't have legs or a nose, or eyes. He's a spirit, and as Jesus says, a spirit has no body.
And, presumably, no testes either.
Stuu: Tell me you don't believe all this impossible magic or else tell me how you can be trusted on science.
How can we believe the findings of the Human Genome Project, if Francis Collins is an evangelical Christian? It's precisely because biology does not require faith in the least. Hence people of all faiths, or even no faith at all can do biology.
But we aren't talking about Francis Collins, we are talking about you upholding biology against a tide of zombie-like creationism here on ToL. You are an authority in the sense that the people with whom you communicate are in many ways ignorant, and you are probably going to be the one access point they have for real science. How can you be trusted on science? You don't believe in Darwinian evolution by natural selection from natural genetic variation, you believe in providence or contingency working on or through front-loaded mechanisms. Maybe there is someone else here who can be trusted on real biology, not fantasy Catholic biology.
Science, by it's very methodology has to be methodologically materialistic. It can neither support nor reject the supernatural. But it can't be ontologically naturalistic;just won't work. The magisteria idea doesn't resonate with me, but it's not far from the truth.
That's just special pleading using impressive words. There is no principle in science that puts anything off-limits. Empirical evidence is the key: that is anything you can glean by your senses or extensions of them, like telescopes and electron microscopes.
If divine action can't be detected by senses, then how can we know it exists, or indeed what the god wants? If it
can be detected then the empirical evidence from observations should be scrutinised intensely. Well, of course this 'empirical evidence' does get scrutinised. Meta-analysis of studies of intercessory prayer show that it makes no difference. The rates of spontaneous remission from cancer are higher in the general population than in the population of cancer sufferers who visited Lourdes. The human brain is demonstrably very poor at distinguishing situations where agency is at work from those where it is not.
Which is like saying that if the question of existence of something as fundamental to the behavior of fluid dynamics as a universal creator is off-limits to plumbing, then plumbing means nothing.
I never thought of plumbing as an epistemological method. But well, each to their own.
It's good for making your plumbing work properly. Likewise, science is good for understanding how the physical universe works. As comprehensive philosophies of all things, neither plumbing nor science work very well.
What is a comprehensive philosophy of all things? Why should anyone want whatever that is? Why are you so keen to deny the applicability of the scientific method to investigating 'the supernatural'? Because someone told you that it rejects that specifically? That would be convenient. What actually IS the supernatural? Can you define it? If you can't define what it is, how will you know when to tell science to step aside?
On this point, I'll have to respectfully disagree.
Don't get me wrong on Steven Gould. Obviously there are very few things on which he and I would have disagreed! But I think it is likely that he knew the religious will fiercely and irrationally protect the nonsense they believe, but that was not a political fight he wanted to take on in the country of the most extreme in right wing fascist Catholicism, ingrained fundamentalism, and all the other wacky variants of god alleles imported to the US mainland over the past few centuries.
Stuart
