There’s nothing necessarily preventing theology and science from playing nice.
The problem is the volume of theologists already committed to obsolete teachings.
So you have Elihu in Job complaining that God is beyond understanding because “why it rains” or “where snow comes from” is beyond human understanding.
This is falsified. So maybe the premise dependent on it should be reconsidered too.
For example, a responsible theist who believes there’s an intelligent designer described as being light (1 John 1:5) should probably be looking pretty closely at the wild things we’ve discovered about the ‘design’ of light in the past few years.
For example, light’s anti-particle is itself. Puts a bit of a damper on that ‘Satan’ idea.
Light when unobserved can be more than one thing at once. Not particularly conducive to absolutist beliefs in the characteristics or nature of an unobserved god of light who designed that fact, no?
In fact, in just the last five years, we’ve now found that light in this “more than one thing” state when unobserved can be observed as different things by different separate observers. If we each pass on separate from one another, maybe what’s on the other side need not be agreed upon by all.
So in fact science would be quite productive to be considered by theology.
It’s just that antiquated theology is more committed to the details of outdated books than to the presumed design details in the world around them.
That’s not at all true. Theoretical science is a field, and you see a lot of discussion around dark matter/energy or gravitons, even though most of the conceptions for them involve being unable to be directly measured or interacted with.
In fact, we could likely make testable predictions for various configurations of creator inclined theology through a modern lens, as has been the case recently with narrowing the constraints by which simulation theory is feasible or not given inherent limits on calculating or emulating physical phenomena.
And there can be facts underpinning theological notions.
For example, simulation theory is based on a rather extensive set of facts ranging from our own trajectory of technological developments and the similarities therein to nuances in how our own universe behaves at low levels.
And yet as a classification it probably falls more within theology than anything else.
Right so in theory you can have religion as long as it makes no claims and you can have God as long as it has no power and you can have faith in it all as long as there is nothing to have faith in.
Does anyone really want that? I was raised a devout kid. I didn’t pray to no diest god, I was convinced the Bible held the keys to the universe not a bunch of stories that are best metaphors by long dead ignorants, I “knew” that God took an active role in our world, and I also “knew” that my religion alone had the proper moral conduct for humanity.
In order to save religion from science you have to abandon one or the other. Even if you could somehow weaken religion to the point, a god of the gaps if you will, where it can still live what you are left with is not worth thinking about
You can still have all sorts of claims, you can have a creator who has power, you can have faith.
It just needs to make sense within the context of confirmable reality.
And I can’t disagree more in terms of the desirability of a theology that takes a more nuanced consideration of reality.
Quite the opposite in fact.
Why should someone choose a deity that smites with absolute judgement and demands subservience rather than a deity embracing relativism to the point that self-determination may be the entire point of existence? Why have a deity judge their creation at all rather than embrace its self-determined differences?
It reminds me of Solomon’s litmus test to tell a true parent from a false parent.
The false parent only cared about being recognized as the parent and didn’t care if the child died or was harmed to achieve that.
The true parent cared most about the child living as their complete and unadulterated selves even if that meant not being known to the child at all.
Why should we desire a theology that offers a deity fitting the false parent archetype in that scenario? Because a book with clear signs of rewriting by each dynasty passing it through says so?
And why shouldn’t those desiring a divine parent instead be inspired by a universe with non-intuitive rules bending over backwards to embody relativism on scales from supernova to stardust instead take inspiration from confirmable reality to conjure up faith in a parent more aptly fitting the true parent in Solomon’s story, where who they are is loved and accepted whether they know anything of that parent or not because there is no absolute expectations? And where relative truths are embraced rather than rejected in favor of the truths forced upon you by a parasitic priestly class?
So basically you have invented a god that knew that childhood cancer would be a thing but let’s it happen because he thinks helping is worse than that.
I don’t know about you but I am a parent and wouldn’t sit there while my kid is dying for fear that I would corrupt their natural self.
Well, now we’re stepping into more specific considerations.
For a number of reasons, I think the notion of an always existing deity to be less compelling than an eventually developing deity like put forward by the Orphics.
When we look at our own universe, random existence through a process of self-organizing complexity gave rise to intelligence and even the creation of our own rudimentary universes.
Does that process end with us? Should we assume it to be exclusive to us?
And if there were to be a process like that taking place after us, would a creator recreating earlier humans be inherently unethical?
As an example - let’s say someone in the far future wanted to bring back humanity after it went extinct, and did so by creating a universe wherein after death those recreated humans could continue on in their own relative paradise (a configuration the originals might not have even had).
Would it be more ethical in that scenario to recreate only the rich, healthy, and privileged humans to live a life of happiness and then a life of relative paradise thereafter too? Or would it be more fair to recreate humanity as accurately as possible, cancer and all, so that even the humans dealt a crappy hand in life would be represented in its perpetuity and be entitled to the rewards now possible with their recreation by an intelligent entity?
Would you, as a parent, only want your luckiest child to be entitled to the possibility of their own relative paradise, or would you want the less fortunate children to also be entitled to that too?
Ive come to feel lately that the war isn’t two sided. The war is raging between science, religion, and ethics. People will argue against science because of dubious ethics that are unrelated to religion. They will ignore scientific evidence because it goes against their moral compass.
Science is cold and uncaring. It will always be at odds against people who live their lives following their heart.
I used to attend a weekly philosophy group. The athiests were the worst debaters there. Just obtuse, embittered nonsense constantly. The least reason and the biggest chips on their shoulders.
There’s a huge difference between true atheists, who have come to their conclusions out of their own reasoning and philosophical thought process, and those who treat atheism like a “belief system”, basically like “the religion that there is no god”. I have observed that the vast majority of atheists who feel compelled to argue religion on the internet are of the latter category, and therefore, obviously, idiots.
I was trying to use a category that doesn’t reduce it to “US atheists”, because - looking from the outside, it appears that many “atheists” in the united states are literal “non”-believers, as opposed to non-believers. The group you attended didn’t happen to be mostly US americans?
so the dumb atheists phenomenon made it over the pond :/ sadface. Well - I suppose we see the same phenomenon with MAGA stupidity all over western Europe, so why am I surprised?
There is no debate between science and religion. The only religions that are incompatible with science are the insane fundamentalists. 99% of Christians don’t believe that the creation story in the Bible is literally true; they believe in evolution. The 1% fundamentalists invented the debate between creationism and big bang, evolution, etc. because they want to force Christians to believe they can’t believe in science.
I’m an excommunicated Catholic. I was raised Catholic, and went to Catholic school as a kid. The Catholic school taught evolution and a bit of relativity, which are incompatible with creationism.
And that’s despite of the fact that like 20% are non-affiliated. That means that half of religions people believe into creation myths. Much higher than 1% that you think.
Might even be more important for theories to be refutable but unrefuted. Given the vast wealth and personnel resources available to parties interested in proving evolution wrong (or substitute for your choice of decided-except-in-fantasy-land issue and truth value), it’s notable that they have yet to do so. If the evidence or some consistent logic that doesn’t eventually lead back to a version of “God did it” were on their side, we’d know all about it.
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