Skip to main content

"Peace through God" - Be skeptical of naturalists bearing gifts...

This is a busy night - so many articles, so little time!

Take a look at this one - my skepticism tells me that he "damns me with faint praise" with his ill-disguised attempt to segregate scientists and believer as if they are mutually exclusive. Sorry, that's not the way it works...

Science can declare the approximate limits of its territorial ambitions and be stronger for it. My dearly missed old friend Stephen Jay Gould framed this possibility beautifully with his proposal for “nonoverlapping magisteria.” I’ll go further and suggest that scientists should not only refrain from ridiculing people who find hope on the other side of the border but should also actively delight in a cacophonous, multicultural colonization of that far frontier so that it can’t be monopolized by fundamentalists. A workable definition of spirituality is “one’s emotional relationship with unanswerable questions.” It’s possible to find joy in them.

Of course, it’s not always easy to do this in practice. Where I live, in the Bay Area, you’re as likely to run into New Age superstition as Christian fundamentalism. In either case, the believer will often take the uncertainty of a big, genuinely mysterious question like consciousness as license to believe in something smaller like astrology, which can be disproved by experiment. Then I end up on the spot, once again telling someone else what not to believe.

Comments

  1. I don't suppose Mr. Lanier would appreciate me telling him that science is a small subset of the things of faith, having no magisteria outside of faith.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Eckhart Tolle - Christian Response

Unbelievable! ...The extent man not founded upon Christ will go and follow in their quest and pursuit of self and attempts to explain away reality and sin. Here's Oprah's spiritual sage... Response: 1. He resurrects errors of the past which deny reality by seeking to replace it with forms. 2. By reducing the past to forms (or photo albums) he not only denies the reality of the past but the extent of it's connectedness and relationship to the present. This error he also translates in regard to the future. 3. He establishes a false premise that one can separate the reality of the present ("now") from reality itself, which he vests in onesself (though he inconsistently goes on to suggest that life is found in abandoning oneself) 4. He has no grounds or basis for assuming reality is found in self (and apart from everything else, or only what one want's to allow) 5. By denying the truth of God, he falsely asserts that the future is no longer problematic...

Eckhart Tolle Christianity (Understanding Eckhart Tolle - Comparison / Difference with Christianity)

I believe it important that both believers and unbelievers understand the difference between the teaching of Eckhart Tolle and Christianity. Here's a brief post to introduce you to a few of the significant differences. (Note, I've just been exposed to Tolle, but it doesn't seem to take long to discern the differences) Context (the problem)Taken from here .: Despite Oprah and Eckhart's reduction of Christianity to but one "way" amongst many other equally legitimate ways to God, and their calling Christ a "revolutionary" who has been misunderstood by the Church, and who simply came to manifest "Christ-consciousness", a quick search through the internet reveals that many Christians are following Oprah in attempting to fuse together the teachings of Eckhart, and the doctrines of the historical Christian church. Great website to gain quick summary of Eckhart's beliefs/teachings: Ripples on the Surface of Being Key Responses by Eckhart To...

Global Blasphemy Laws

One of the interesting things about discussions surrounding blasphemy laws (whether by the UN or others)is they cannot be conducted without coming back to the central question: What is Truth? Seems this was the question in Jesus' day, it's the question which comes us today, and it's a question which cannot be avoided. ... suppose God intended it to be this way?

Search This Blog