From: lydick@SOL1.GPS.CALTECH.EDU (Speaker-to-Minerals)
Newsgroups: alt.callahans
Subject: Re: God and Science:  The Ramblings of The Nightstalker
Date: 10 Nov 1992 07:05:20 GMT
Organization: HST Wide Field/Planetary Camera
Distribution: world
Reply-To: lydick@SOL1.GPS.CALTECH.EDU
NNTP-Posting-Host: sol1.gps.caltech.edu

In article <1992Nov10.030145.9961@ucc.su.OZ.AU>, pope@physics.su.OZ.AU (The Nightstalker) writes:
=The Nightstalker appears from under a pile of papers on colliding galaxies
=that lies in a corner of the bar, and hands Mike the following......

Well, he's at it again.  I *DO* wish he wouldn't come in here and immediately
start preaching.

=One is that a view held by the church may not always
=reflect the God which it represents, for does the Bible say that the earth is
=flat or that it is at the centre of the universe.  Even the poorest scholar
=can see that it does not, yet these are views that the church has held in
=the past and persecuted physicists for rightly showing these views to be wrong.

Please, then, tell me:  Where are the four corners on a sphere?  How does one
erect a tent over a sphere?  And don't start with the bullshit line about "only
parts of the Bible are literally true" unless you can give an operational
technique for figuring out which are literally true and which are metaphorical.

=Then there is the case more to do with genetics and so on, where the moral
=issues become greater.  Does the scientist have the right to make decisions
=over the genetic makeup of the human species, or is that purely the ground of
=a God that created?  

Seems to me that any time two people choose to have a child, they're "making
decisions over the genetic makeup of the human race."  So your question is
really, "Do we have the right to make *INFORMED* decisions about such things."
Well, the Bible's a bit ambiguous about that one.  According to Genesis, it was
the decision of Adam and Eve to be able to make such decisions that caused the
fall.  According to the doctrine of "original sin," we're already doing time
for that decision.  So does that mean we now have the right to use our
intelligence?

=There is a new view these days called ``scientism", which seems to think that
=science is the panacea for all woes and that ``how" and ``why" questions are
=now blurred because since science has relieved the need to seek some great
=cosmic purpose, there is no ``why".  Thus science claiming through its'
=understanding of the way the universe works that there is no God, then the
=questions of every day are just ``how" questions, and science can deal with any
=of the moral issues that we face.  Thus, by understanding all of the ''how's, we can then formulate a ''why" which encapsulates all of these.  This is the new religion of science.  To 
=them, ``cosmic purpose" is an invention of the theologian, and thus is
=something that holds science back.  In the words of Peter Atkins in his New
=Scientist article (8 Aug 1992) ``Religion claims total understanding, but fails
=to deliver anything but sweet words; science claims cautious progress, and is
=able to deliver success at every stage."  There are three things wrong with
=this.

=The Christian faith is one where some of the answers must simply be taken
=on faith or admitted to not being known.  It explains the human situation as
=a rebellion against God and that God reveals Himself through history, but
=leaves some of the great questions of ``why" unanswered.

Of course, there are other, conflicting religions that make similar claims.
What makes Christianity so special that it should believed instead of one of
the other superstitions?
=
=Secondly, on a simple level, what relevance are the great discoveries of
=science on a day to day personal level.  When a woman is being pack raped,
=does it matter that elctrons repel one another?

Does it matter that some father figure in the sky said that it's bad?  For that
matter, where in the Bible does it say that rape is bad?  Isn't it just as good
to take a little bit of responsibility for your own actions and declare that
it's bad without having to invoke a mythological figure to butress your claim?

=Does the starving Somalian
=really care that black holes may be the power source for quasars?  If science
=can prove that God does not exist, then mankind is liberated from something,
=but to what?  Indeed science has not proven such a thing.

Nor has Christianity proven the existence of such a god?

=Where is the comfort of science to the needy and poor?

In improved crop yields, in better medicine?

Where was the comfort of Christianity to the Albigensians as they were being
slaughtered by the Church?

=Thirdly, what is the success of science?
=It either looks for something that it supposes is already there and thus has
=achieved nothing, or it looks blindly until it finds something.  It tells
=us ``how", but can we really convolute all our ``why" questions into ``how"
=questions?  Science does not tell us ``why", nor can it.  If there is a God
=then surely that God must reveal his nature himself, and science is incapable
=of understanding him but only what has been done by him.  If we can throw
=away God, then there is no ``why", only ``how".  The question then remains,
=does science do away with God?

The question remains, "Why should we choose *YOUR* God instead of one of the
myriads of others, some of whom have been around in our cultures for far longer
than your Johnny-come-lately?"
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