As Above, So Below - the religion thread (formerly: People of California, beware)

Curiously, I've always pictured you as a Cthulhu worshipper.

Peter

Cool, I'm also a Christian.

An Atheist Meets God

Possibly... unless that title is reserved solely for you.

That's better

Saw this cartoon once...

"God is dead" signed Nietzsche

a thunderbolt zaps from the clouds obliterating Nietzsche

"Nietzsche is dead" signed God

Clearly God believes in cheaper fuel prices. I think I might give it a try next time I need to use the car!

!

The ultimate irony that would indeed be.

If at one day science has all the answers, humankind will cease to exist.
After all, what else does science do but strive for answers? Propel the human spirit to reach beyond itself? To inquire, investigate, strive, search and develop?
At the end of the road, I would think, there will be more questions, on levels of physics and metaphysics we can't even begin to dream of now!
If not, we are doomed to an existence of mere...existing. A fate horrible to contemplate.

I tend to agree with Martijn's points.

Regarding the second question, I don't think so. Formal logic is formal logic and Middle Ages showed that you can apply formal logic as seen by Aristotle to theological reflection, not that it made sense often (scholatics, as the Polish saying goes, ate its own tail, when it started to consider problems that have absolutely NO significance, like whether Christ would be the Savior if he was born a donkey). It's all in the ASSUMPTIONS we take.

The thing is that religion, for the sake of its own authority, MUST take the role of being the Ultimate Truth. With all due respect (I am religious myself, mind you), religion quite often can work as "philosophy for dummies", answering all the basic questions in very authoritary forms.

Luckily, though it took ALL the churches literally ages to accept it, there is more and more acceptance for scientific discoveries, unless, of course, it is in tune with the value system of a religion (Catholic church for example recognized evolution after a LONG while). I can give an example of a priest, who is also a physicist and, interestingly, precisely a cosmologist. He recently got a theological award for his discoveries and I know that he had a lecture about relations between science and religion. So it doesn't really reject anything. Heller proves that nothing has to contradict itself. He takes the assumption that God created the Universe, but that doesn't prevent him from contemplating Big Bang theory.

Physicists also try to look for a Theory of Everything. I might be wrong, but I think Stephen Hawking is looking for something like that. Goedel's theorem of "incompleteness", which generally says (I haven't read more into it yet) that any attempt at creating a TOE is bound to fail was recently under heavy criticism.

Yes, we have to differ science and faith. What is probably unacceptable to some atheists, is that faith is in its very definition kind of DEFYING the discovery of science, ie. you take unproven facts (though not disproven, mind you, nobody disproved God's existence yet) as GRANTED. Have you read the Kierkegaard I told you about, Steven?

But it isn't thanks to theology that you were able to type those words and post them on the internet.

OOps, sorry for the first smiley...

No, been far too busy reading about geology in all honesty.

Depending on how you define God, then there are probably many versions of "God" that I would happily accept. But then why name it God in the first place? The term 'God' has such an archaic presumption behind it that, still, thousands of years later is hard to shake off. I'd be fine with using the word if it did not carry the slightest image of an old man in the sky (or whatever modern day version we have today).

Certainly not you Pawel, I have a huge respect for the things you say, but there are so many people who get the wrong end of the stick with my arguments. They see me as a fundamental, atheist apologist who's just as single-minded as the very people and philosophies I argue against. If one were to read everything I've said in this topic, they'd soon find that is not the case. I guess I'm just getting tired of repeating myself just to explain where I stand.

It's exactly this what I have problems with: people who say they know what's true and the others just don't understand. Have you considered the possibility that I don't agree with what you just said? Let the true / false thing go. I don't agree that science is not made-up in a way, it's created by humans, by our understanding and imagination and things like that. It's not like the rules of science just one day fell out of the sky!


I should have quoted your first post more carefully perhaps. I asked this question because you wrote: "I would add that scientific knowledge as it is today is limiting, not science itself." It was the word today that made me wonder if you think science will be revealing more (or everything?) in the future.


This question was about truth really and I'm not sure you get what I'm trying to say. Science is just one way to look at things and at one point it can't go further because it's a human thing. Science can explain many things, how certain things work, but it does not answer the questions about life. Also, we all know how scientific proof and statistics can tell truths that are way from the truth in fact because many things are not studied.


I don't remember saying I'm a spiritual person... I am only saying I will never claim to know the truth and basically I'm saying I know nothing. Of course I have values and everything that guide me in my life (would be rather meaningless without that) but I will never say that what I believe is the right thing to believe and others are wrong. Unfortunately that's what happens a lot, with any view on life.

Anyway, it may seem like I'm spititual and have no faith in science or something, but that was not the point I was trying to make. All I want to say is I keep my mind open for all possibilities and I wish people would be more careful when they speak about the truth and everything. OK, saying 'the truth and everything' is stupid because if there's a truth that will be everything of course.