A psychological test

[LOCO]

No one has said "Genesis 1:1 and the curvature of space indicates that Quantum blah blah blah..."

Please don't lump all Christians into the one basket.

Catholics are free to believe in an evolutionary process or the Genesis story.

Believing in either does not determine hell/heaven for Catholics.

What we aren't allowed to believe is that the soul evolved. It was specially created by God, we did not inherit from our parents like our bodies.

There is debate over whether the Genesis story means a literal 6 day period or a much longer period. What is a day to God? Additionally, Jewish scribes have never intepreted it literally.

 

[sandwiches]

You can't prove that the discovery had nothing to do with God, just as I can't prove to your satisfaction that it did.

What it does provide evidence of is that rational, intelligent and ingenius people believed and continue to believe in the existence of God. Their discoveries did not come into conflict with their faith because they saw the hand of God in all scientific discoveries and creation.

Again, not the point. Whether their faith motivated them to follow a certain path in life or science is irrelevant. The fact remains that they have only made discoveries through science not trough prayer, meditation, introspection, or whatever else. Science. As in formulating hypotheses and testing them against reality.

 

[sandwiches]

Please don't lump all Christians into the one basket.

Catholics are free to believe in an evolutionary process or the Genesis story.

Believing in either does not determine hell/heaven for Catholics.

What we aren't allowed to believe is that the soul evolved. It was specially created by God, we did not inherit from our parents like our bodies.

There is debate over whether the Genesis story means a literal 6 day period or a much longer period. What is a day to God? Additionally, Jewish scribes have never intepreted it literally.

You're reading way too much into what I'm writing. I said nothing of a literal reading of anything, of heaven or hell, evolution, or souls. Read my post above.

 

[LOCO]

Again, not the point. Whether their faith motivated them to follow a certain path in life or science is irrelevant. The fact remains that they have only made discoveries through science not trough prayer, meditation, introspection, or whatever else. Science. As in formulating hypotheses and testing them against reality.

What I am saying is that the tired old arguments that people of faith are irrational, stupid, foolish and uneducated do not hold water.

Neither does the argument that faith and science are naturally at odds with each other. That Christians fear science, this not so, at least not within the Catholic Church.

For many, scientific materialism is not a bloodless philosophy but a passionately held ideology. Indeed, it is the ideology of a great part of the scientific world. Its adherents see science as having a mission that goes beyond the mere investigation of nature or the discovery of physical laws. That mission is to free mankind from superstition in all its forms, and especially in the form of religious belief.

It was in the heavens that the orderliness of nature was most evident to ancient man. It was this celestial order, perhaps, that first inspired in him feelings of religious awe. And it was the study of this order that gave birth to modern science in the seventeenth century. It is not altogether accidental, then, that it was an argument over the motions of the heavenly bodies that occasioned the fateful collision between science and religious authority that will forever be evoked by the name of Galileo. The case of Galileo raises another important historical point about supernaturalism and biblical religion.

The Galileo affair was most certainly not a debate about the supernatural. The geocentric theory that the Church in effect endorsed was no more supernatural than the heliocentric theory that it condemned. This was a clash between two perfectly naturalistic theories of astronomy. It was the veracity of Scripture that the Church authorities (mistakenly) saw themselves as upholding, not supernatural explanations of planetary motion over natural ones. (It is true that the inspiration of Scripture is supernatural, and that Galileo’s opponents thus thought they had supernatural warrant for believing what they did. But one may believe a natural fact on supernatural authority.

Christianity had already embraced naturalism in science five hundred years earlier, when Western Christians first encountered Greek science (or as it was called, natural philosophy) through translations from Greek and Arabic texts. Under the aegis of the Church, natural philosophy became a staple of medieval university education and was even a prerequisite for the study of theology. So comfortable were Christians with a naturalistic conception of the cosmos that it was a cliché already in the twelfth century for theologians and other writers to refer to the cosmos as a “machine.”

 

[Lillen]

I must agree with the catholic here, All we need to do is trust in Jesus. I believe that the truth will with that faith, be revealed to you at some point in life...

I used to think God created man through evolution... these days I read the bible litteraly, because i had faith in Jesus..

 

[Non sequitur]

So there are no objections! According to creation God created the world!

Of course according to creation God created the world.

If you can adress to the bible without believeing it, Why do you see us Christians as ignorant and unenlightened even though we can adress to evolution without believing it?

I can easily address your god, without believing in it. Point?

 

[Maxwell511]

The fact remains that they have only made discoveries through science not trough prayer, meditation, introspection, or whatever else. Science. As in formulating hypotheses and testing them against reality.

Science does not care how hypotheses are formulated. Hypothesizes can be formed through the use of prayer, meditation, introspection or taking LSD. Any of these methods have more than likely been successfully used. The only thing that matters is how it tests against reality.

Feynman called hypothesis forming "guessing". Science is basically based on the principle of the irrationality and inability of a single human mind to judge reality, and that reality itself is the only arbiter of truth. It works because it is unfortunately true that everyone is actually almost always wrong and irrational, however wisdom of the crowds (read peer review and secondary testing against reality) tends to work.

Prayer can easily work in these situation because prayer focuses the mind on a particular problem, which may lead that mind eventually to a possible answer. Science does not care if the scientist attributes that revelation to God, in the same manner that Hollywood executives do not care if the actor in their blockbuster attributes their Oscar to God.

 

[Lillen]

You mean superhäxa!?

 

[Tim the Plumber]

So there are no objections! According to creation God created the world! If you can adress to the bible without believeing it, Why do you see us Christians as ignorant and unenlightened even though we can adress to evolution without believing it?

We, science types, (I'm being a bit presumptive) think that we understand the idea of God/Creation. We can for instance use this idea to predict how the geology of the earth would look if the theory of creation in the bible was correct.

We consider it wrong and silly because the rocks show a completly different story of the natual history of the earth which is also consistant with the story of nature in the stars and in our DNA and in the reord of our languages and the archeology of humanity.

The religious folk who argue against evolution do so either by misunderstanding it (often deliberatly) or by closing their minds to the blindingly obvious.

 

[knowledgeIsPower]

According to Darwin, all species evolve, according to reality, 99% of the species are extinct, according to some evolutionists... making it apparant that not all species carried on their genes to the next generation, or?

Moreover there are species that fit in perfectly in their homeenviorment, making it unnecessary to fit in further!

I love it!

The dude keeps telling everyone in this thread that creationists do understand evolution then he goes ahead and demonstrates that he doesn't understand it. Oh the irony!

 

[SithDoughnut]

these days I read the bible litteraly, because i had faith in Jesus..

How do you know that Jesus read the Bible literally? He used metaphor all the time, and evidently thought it was a good way to spread his message. That's not to mention the... interesting... messages that you get from the Bible if you take it literally (have you removed any of your limbs that caused you to sin recently?).

 

[Non sequitur]

How do you know that Jesus read the Bible literally?

Unshackle the chains of sorrow and lift up the curtains of blindness from your inner eye

 

[LOCO]

How do you know that Jesus read the Bible literally? He used metaphor all the time, and evidently thought it was a good way to spread his message. That's not to mention the... interesting... messages that you get from the Bible if you take it literally (have you removed any of your limbs that caused you to sin recently?).

Some Christians read the Bible literally, the majority don't.

No Bible existed during Jesus life on earth. He never wrote anything down. He had access to Jewish scriptures and studied these as all Jewish boys did at a young age. Whether he took it literally is not something we know or have any historical or scriptural evidence of.


He did teach in parables and metaphors regularly to convey his message as theological and philosophical issues are easier to understand in this format.


The Bible does not self-interpret and unfortunately many interpret it in a vacuum devoid of any or limited knowledge of the cultural, linguistic, social, political or religious norms of the day.