Cmdr James wrote:The thing is though, that most religions do state that their deity is the creator, and for many people that is pretty key. If a christian doe not accept that god created everything, they are left with a slightly strange 'reverse-deist' god. A god that exists only to listen to prayers, and not for the real meat of setting up and running the universe.
Not really.
As I said before, the scientific sphere is about the how and when, the hard facts, while the religious sphere (from a theologically responsible, protestant, a little closer to lutheran than to reformed, post-enlightenment and therefore post-mythical/magical christian standpoint that is, which happens to be my standpoint; needless to say that I cannot speak for fundamentalists who haven't understood the difference between the spheres) is about relation. Therefore the statement that "god created everything", to which I subscribe, does not translate into anything that would or could contradict the latest scientific hypothesis about cosmogony (this will only be contradicted—or amended—by tomorrow's newly discovered latest scientific facts). It
does translate into something completely different, namely into the statement "we (as humans) have a responsibility in and for this world and are accountable for what we are doing to this world", which is a statement about
relation, to be precise a
twofold statement, because it talks (a) about the relation between us humans and the rest of the creation, and (b) about the relation between us humans and the one we are accountable to: god. Note furthermore that this second statement cannot be concluded or translated from the scientific facts about cosmogony. It can neither be proven nor disproven by science (like the known facts about cosmogony can neither be proven nor disproven by theology or personal belief). We really have two seperate spheres here.
Poro wrote:When a believer says that their god exists, that becomes a question of science, whether they like it or not. Existence is interaction with our universe, otherwise you get into the flim flam of 'Well, what if he/she/it is outside our universe?"
If something can interact with this level of reality, then at least the interaction can be measured - if not the god (in this case). If even the interaction cannot be proven through science, then the entity is exactly synonymous with something that doesn't exist.
I agree inasmuch as "interaction" has a lot to do with "relation". There are two practical problems, however: First, how do you measure a relation scientifically? You can say that you love your husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend, but how do you measure that scientifically? Perhaps it could be measured that your heartbeat changes, and there are a lot of electrical activities going on in your brain while you are talking about him/her. But would that be an irrefutable scientific proof for your relation? Hardly. It even gets worse if I ask the question vice versa: how would you measure scientifically that you
are loved by somebody? Especially if that somebody is unavailable for putting electrodes on him/her? Scientific method and testing would have a hard time proving anything in this realm.
Second, many of the (alleged) interactions between god and humans have taken place in the past, and are therefore out of the bounds of science. History is no hard science, and will never be. Has Jesus risen from the grave? Not a question which science will ever be able to answer. Or even the more general question: Has Jesus ever existed? The only thing we have are the testimonies of eye-witnesses, which are (as
all eye-witness-testimonies of
all times) notoriously unreliable, and simply not in the same category as scientific facts. Note that Jesus is but one example. You also cannot scientifically prove that Julius Caesar ever existed, or Socrates, or Charlemagne, or Oliver Cromwell, or Abraham Lincoln. Generally, there is no way of
scientifically proving that any person who already died has ever existed.
Poro wrote:A meaningful statement can be made within Oolite fan-fiction, which is internally consistent and logical in every way. The same can be done with science/natural methodology. One would never use that to imply equivalency though.
I wouldn't even know what equivalency would mean in the scenario we are discussing here. Obviously knowing the hard facts about cosmogony is not the same as appreciating your accountability. Is it equivalent? Hardly. I
would say, however, that the acknowledgement of accountability is adding a different
quality to the pure knowledge of scientific facts, and this added quality is basically the difference between the worldview of a believer and a non-believer. (I also assume that the fact that many scientists are in fact religious people has something to do with this added quality.) You are of course free to dismiss this quality. From my personal perspective that wouldn't make you freer, though, but poorer.
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