Aug 22, 2022 06:49 PM
(This post was last modified: Aug 23, 2022 06:46 PM by C C.)
The people with ostrich foot syndrome
https://historyofyesterday.com/the-peopl...9536027307
VIDEO: https://youtu.be/ET__9RPVYVQ
Scientists can hold on to their faith
https://medium.com/the-infinite-universe...f7512ae10e
EXCERPTS (Tim Anderson): I am both a physicist and a Christian, and I hold in tension systems of belief that this age sees as being in conflict. Not every age has held this to be true... (List of Christians in science and technology)
[...] The popular myth that scientists are all atheists and agnostics comes from a few well-known science popularizers such as Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, Steven Hawking, and even Neil deGrasse Tyson. I don’t have any data to back this up, but it seems to me that atheist scientists may simply be more evangelical about their religion than Christian ones.
[...] to be a Christian, you have to believe in what we now call “the supernatural”. In particular you have to believe in at least one supernatural occurrence, the resurrection.
[...] So, how can one reconcile a belief in the supernatural with a belief in science? Doesn’t science, and physics in particular, disprove events like the resurrection and therefore Christianity as a whole?
[...] The first faulty belief is that if any phenomenon follows a known rule, it cannot be caused by or influenced by God. In other words, the existence of a law of nature removes God from the picture. Consider that if we were to investigate a supposed “miracle” and find that it has a natural explanation, we would trust the natural explanation of course but moreover conclude that God had nothing to do with the miracle. This is completely wrong!
An alternative point of view is that God has, among His many qualities, the quality of law and order. A God who sets down over 600 rules for the Israelites to follow surely has this quality. It seems that God loves rules almost as much as He loves his creation and that is no accident. For it is by rules that God made his creation possible. This is why physics at its best seeks to know the mind of God.
[...] In our world, physics is the pursuit of the Deep Magic embedded in our universe, but that only goes back to the dawn of time. Beyond that is a deeper magic still, a magic which comes from God alone, and this is why miracles can occur. They are neither random occurrences nor the result of God’s capriciousness, but flow from a set of rules that is deeper than the laws of the universe itself.
Thus, God established the laws of the universe, and, when we discover them, we know something of what He intended for creation. Knowing those rules does not disprove or remove God from the equation any more than knowing the Federal law code disproves Congress.
[...] Inerrancy is not the same as taking everything in the Bible literally. Rather it simply means that the Bible contains no errors. We are not free to excise parts because we think they are wrong. We are called, however, to interpret which parts are to be taken literally and which are metaphorical. For example, the entire Creation story was likely intended to be taken metaphorically even when it was first written down, and there are certain clues and patterns in the text that tell us that it was not intended to be a literal recounting of creation. The account of Jesus’s death and resurrection, however, was intended to be taken literally, as if it were an account in a newspaper. Again, clues in the text tell us that. Not all areas of the Bible are so clear of course, and some are really hard to swallow.
Some Christians, mostly American evangelicals, have taken inerrancy to absurd levels and tried to argue that the Earth is 6000 years old and that the story of Noah’s ark happened exactly as described or even that the ark itself has been discovered (it has not). Literal interpretations are hard to accept since there are contradictory accounts of creation in books 1 and 2 of Genesis and the story of the ark contradicts itself factually in places. While it is entirely possible that, to avoid a devastating flood, a man built a boat and put a lot of animals on it thousands of years ago at the behest of God, the story is not intended to be a recounting of a literal event. Rather it is a story about how a man’s faith can save him even when the whole world drowns.
Most modern Christians accept that when a part of the Bible contradicts known facts it is because it is intended to be metaphorical. That doesn’t mean that the supernatural events in the Bible never happened since we do not have facts that tell us they didn’t. But we do have facts that tell us that the Earth is billions of years old and that people evolved from animals. And basic common sense tells us that no single person could fit all the worlds’ animals on one boat. The story doesn’t seem concerned about this, however, and neither should we because, if we focus on its making literal sense, we lose the point... (MORE - missing details)
https://historyofyesterday.com/the-peopl...9536027307
VIDEO: https://youtu.be/ET__9RPVYVQ
Scientists can hold on to their faith
https://medium.com/the-infinite-universe...f7512ae10e
EXCERPTS (Tim Anderson): I am both a physicist and a Christian, and I hold in tension systems of belief that this age sees as being in conflict. Not every age has held this to be true... (List of Christians in science and technology)
[...] The popular myth that scientists are all atheists and agnostics comes from a few well-known science popularizers such as Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, Steven Hawking, and even Neil deGrasse Tyson. I don’t have any data to back this up, but it seems to me that atheist scientists may simply be more evangelical about their religion than Christian ones.
[...] to be a Christian, you have to believe in what we now call “the supernatural”. In particular you have to believe in at least one supernatural occurrence, the resurrection.
[...] So, how can one reconcile a belief in the supernatural with a belief in science? Doesn’t science, and physics in particular, disprove events like the resurrection and therefore Christianity as a whole?
[...] The first faulty belief is that if any phenomenon follows a known rule, it cannot be caused by or influenced by God. In other words, the existence of a law of nature removes God from the picture. Consider that if we were to investigate a supposed “miracle” and find that it has a natural explanation, we would trust the natural explanation of course but moreover conclude that God had nothing to do with the miracle. This is completely wrong!
An alternative point of view is that God has, among His many qualities, the quality of law and order. A God who sets down over 600 rules for the Israelites to follow surely has this quality. It seems that God loves rules almost as much as He loves his creation and that is no accident. For it is by rules that God made his creation possible. This is why physics at its best seeks to know the mind of God.
[...] In our world, physics is the pursuit of the Deep Magic embedded in our universe, but that only goes back to the dawn of time. Beyond that is a deeper magic still, a magic which comes from God alone, and this is why miracles can occur. They are neither random occurrences nor the result of God’s capriciousness, but flow from a set of rules that is deeper than the laws of the universe itself.
Thus, God established the laws of the universe, and, when we discover them, we know something of what He intended for creation. Knowing those rules does not disprove or remove God from the equation any more than knowing the Federal law code disproves Congress.
[...] Inerrancy is not the same as taking everything in the Bible literally. Rather it simply means that the Bible contains no errors. We are not free to excise parts because we think they are wrong. We are called, however, to interpret which parts are to be taken literally and which are metaphorical. For example, the entire Creation story was likely intended to be taken metaphorically even when it was first written down, and there are certain clues and patterns in the text that tell us that it was not intended to be a literal recounting of creation. The account of Jesus’s death and resurrection, however, was intended to be taken literally, as if it were an account in a newspaper. Again, clues in the text tell us that. Not all areas of the Bible are so clear of course, and some are really hard to swallow.
Some Christians, mostly American evangelicals, have taken inerrancy to absurd levels and tried to argue that the Earth is 6000 years old and that the story of Noah’s ark happened exactly as described or even that the ark itself has been discovered (it has not). Literal interpretations are hard to accept since there are contradictory accounts of creation in books 1 and 2 of Genesis and the story of the ark contradicts itself factually in places. While it is entirely possible that, to avoid a devastating flood, a man built a boat and put a lot of animals on it thousands of years ago at the behest of God, the story is not intended to be a recounting of a literal event. Rather it is a story about how a man’s faith can save him even when the whole world drowns.
Most modern Christians accept that when a part of the Bible contradicts known facts it is because it is intended to be metaphorical. That doesn’t mean that the supernatural events in the Bible never happened since we do not have facts that tell us they didn’t. But we do have facts that tell us that the Earth is billions of years old and that people evolved from animals. And basic common sense tells us that no single person could fit all the worlds’ animals on one boat. The story doesn’t seem concerned about this, however, and neither should we because, if we focus on its making literal sense, we lose the point... (MORE - missing details)