1

One of my favorite sermons by John Piper is "How to drink orange juice to the glory of God". Christians should seek to glorify God not only in their vocation but even in the tasks that seem mundane and trivial.

2

If you allow me to set aside the real point of this post, that the philosophical foundations of logical constructs.

On the 1+1=2 issue, John Conway has a fascinating derivation of numbers from sets which was coined "surreal numbers". There is a fairly readable account of this by Donald Knuth entitled "Surreal Numbers". This account besides being interesting in that it provides a way to derive 1+1=2 (and the rest of the numbers + a few more) from more basic principles it also provides a glimpse at how Mathemeticians work and why they find it a worthwhile endeavor.

"Surreal Numbers" is written dialog between a recently married couple stranded in a island paradise. After some months they find themselves wishing for intellectual stimulation. The find an old tablet with an inscription ... "In the beginning ..." and it goes from there.

3

If 1+1=2 is too complex, you can fall back to Peano arithmetic. It initially defines 0 and the successor function S(x) and builds up from there. For example you can define the symbol + using the two sub-definitions x + 0 = x and x + S(y) = S(x + y). Then define 1 as S(0) and 2 as S(S(0)). Thus S(0) + S(0) = S(S(0)), or 1+1=2.

The only self-defined objects are 0 and S(x).

4

"Divine" according to the materialist appears to be yet another straw man; it's hard to read stuff written like that when confronted with such a thing right out of the gate...

Dewey's and Russell's views are hardly considered radical today, and no more are based on a notion of the "divine" than a computer (which exploits the linguistic convetionalism of logic an nubmer theory).

I cannot read a statement like:

This is why the Christian view on math, science, and everything else must ultimately differ from theories predicated on other religious beliefs.

without thinking it's just like:

This is why the Marxist-Lenninst view on math, science, and everything else must ultimately differ from theories predicated on other religious beliefs.

Science is only science, and math is only math, and to make claims and advocate a "Christian" science and math, I suspect must imply, like a "Marxist" view science and math, or a "PoMO" science and math, to simply advocate ignorance.

5

Joe, your post reminds me of an interview I read years ago (before I realized the importance of retaining source information) with one of the originators of Outcomes Based Education. The grab quote: OBE would not insist that one plus one equals two "if the student doesn't feel good about that answer."

At that moment I realized that anything can be "true" if there is no Truth.

6

Mumon, there is a difference between advocating a Christian "view" of science and math, as Joe has done, and advocating a Christian science and math. Why parse his words?

At least you confessed in your first paragraph: "It's hard to read stuff written like that..."

7

This is why the Christian view on math, science, and everything else must ultimately differ from theories predicated on other religious beliefs.

With the obvious exception of course of the observance of certain holidays...

8

Interestingly when non-Euclidian geometry is applied at higher dimensional levels 1+1=2 is truly irrelevant, if not absurd on its face.

Non-Euclidian geometry is the bane of Einstein's relativity and the primary reason that he, and Hawking after him, have been unable to arrive at a grand unified field theory.

God is big.

9

All Truth is God's Truth.
All Truth leads to God.
No Truth leads away from God.

10

Ah, drinking orange juice to the glory of God. I notice that no one ever brings up other less glorious aspects of God's glorious creation--flatulence, defecation, and the like. If Christians were truly to adopt an attitude that everything, even passing this kidney stone, is for God's glory, that would be supremely weird.

11

Why? Healthy bodily functions obviously glorify God, and pain and ill health certainly should be offered up.

Incidentally, Orthodox Jews have a blessing that must be recited after using the toilet. According to a quick Goodle, it says something like "Blessed are You, Lord our God, Sovereign of the universe, Who formed Adam with wisdom and created within him many openings and many cavities. It is obvious and known before Your Throne of Glory that if one of them were to be blocked or one one of them were to be ruptured it would be impossible to survive and stand before You. Blessed are You, Lord, Who heals all flesh and acts wondrously."

12

Joe writes: Unless we posit an infinite regress of dependent existences, we must ultimately arrive at an entity that fits the criteria for the divine.

Wait a second. You seem to assume that there is something wrong with "an infinite regress of dependent existences." I see no need for infinite regression bigotry. ;-)

Joe writes: A theist, for instance, will say that the divine is God while a materialist will claim that matter is what fills the category of divine.

Not true. Materialist will say matter (and energy) are good enough to explain all we know about science, and you must admit that's quite a lot. When it comes to the divine – whatever is “just there" to use your definition – materialists will say the jury's still out. Think of how our understanding has changed over the millenia. Used to be "the firmament" held the stars up and Apollo pulled the Sun across the sky. More recently, scientists postulated an "ether" through which light traveled — the notion of the vacuum of space being unacceptable at the time. We materialists have gotten used to learning more and changing/refining our views as necessary to more accurately describe our world.

Today dark matter and dark energy are all the rage with some proposing that those things account for as much of 95% of all that is. But we don't know what dark matter and energy are, they currently have the status of hyphothesis. Would you call them divine?

13

I posit two Biblical equations in which one plus one does not equal two. Marriage and the Church.

One plus one equals one flesh in marriage, and it also equals (in most cases) numerous children. So one plus one equals one, and it equals more than one.

The Church is the Body of Christ, in which one and one should be one in Christ, and much more than one and one should be one in Christ, similar to the Trinity, in which Three are One.

14

God's manifold wisdom is so far beyond our meager comprehension that it is impossible to even address with our words.

You can count the number of seeds in an apple, but who can count the number of apples in a seed?

Ponder it.

15

Mathematics belongs to the academy. Philosophy belongs to the academy. Religion ought not to concern itself with the physical world. When it does, bad things tend to happen.

This is not to say that religious people should not approach the academy - far from it. Like anyone else, they can profit from study and potentially contribute to the body of knowledge we accept as being fundamental to an understanding of how things actually are. Bishop Lowth, f'rinstance, assembled the first authoritative grammar of the English language. We're fortunate that he got the ball rolling when he did.

But when it comes to "religious stuff," or what Bertrand Russell termed "God-talk," that really should be kept in the church. Not the academy. Because in church, each member is free to imagine whatever he likes and believe whatever comes to mind and it doesn't hurt anybody. The academy doesn't work that way. From a very basic standpoint, the hallmark of the Enlightenment is that knowledge is transferable freely, or in modern parlance, "information wants to be free." Religion doesn't work that way because of the burden of dogma. As we saw in the previous entry's comments, "no Christian would argue that Jesus is not the son of God."

That sort of thinking is fine for church, and that's where it belongs. But at a university, everything remains open to question and inquiry. To give a standard instance, we might ask "What does Huckleberry Finn mean?" That is, do we have an accepted interpretation of the work? Short answer: No. But we're free to work at it and suggest possibilities, some of which are more compelling than others, but none of which are granted the imprimatur of correctness.

In the religious sphere - Christian in this case - it seems problematic to even inquire as to what the word "God" means. It nudges the border of heresy to ask what the phrase "Christ died for our sins" means. These things are supposed to be accepted, without question, without reflection, and no discussion of them is, or ever will be, tolerated. Yet among yourselves, there is obviously a range of interpretation and gut-felt meaning, and proponents react defensively to rational inquiry on these points because they are not explainable in rational terms. Which is why the church is a great place to keep such material and the academy is most assuredly the wrong venue.

Same with law, politics, medicine, etc.

16

Religion doesn't work that way because of the burden of dogma.
Posted by The Raven at November 3, 2005 01:28 PM

Please tell me you're not asserting that acedemia is free from "dogma". Such a claim is demonstrably absurd on its face.

One need only scratch the surface of evolutionary theory to catch a glimpse of the dark underbelly of scientific dogma.

17

Please tell me you're not asserting that acedemia is free from "dogma". Such a claim is demonstrably absurd on its face.

No it clearly isn't but that is not a good thing. There's always work to be done and science as a discipline is only as good as those who are members.

One need only scratch the surface of evolutionary theory to catch a glimpse of the dark underbelly of scientific dogma.

Scratched? We've hacked it over and over again on this blog & that's one area where science remains remarkably unblemished...

18

Hopefully Joe will have something interesting tomorrow but I'll note that this threat began with him lamenting religion being supposedly banished from academia. He called for putting 'Christian thought' into research programs. I asked what he meant by that, if he could give us some examples and he cited several philosophers.

Now this, of course, argues against the original idea that religion had been banished. Certainly while the philsophers he cited may not be the most popular they certainly are considered respectable members of a rather difficult and exclusive academic club. So is this really just a call for more aggressive exploration of Christian ideas in philosophy? If so that's all well and good but kind of trivial compared to the big rhetoric this all began with.

This particular post opens with mathematics but it becomes pretty clear early on that it is really just philosophy again. Not something that would be applied by a typical mathematician during his typical day. Not even something explored in the more philsophical introductions and final chapters of most text books.

19

Jim Gilbert :

Does a "Christian" view of math and science presuppose the existence of non-Christian straw men against whom demonstrably false straw-men are constructed?

That's what Carter did; he didn't actually explicate, just what "Christian view" of math or science might be.

But would a "Christian view" of math or science give signifanctly diferent results from a non-Christian view?

But that's actually besides the point. The point actually is: there's no such thing as a "Christian" view of math or science, except historically to suppress it or to murder its adherents (the martyrdom of Hypatia comes to mind, but of course her murderers weren't "true" Christians, right?).

To suggest otherwise, that is, that there is a "Christian" view of science and mathematics, beyond what in fact is mathematics and science is iniquitous to the very spirit of mathematics and science- that is, a spirit of open inquiry, the nature of the observation of phenomena and so forth.

20

Your discussion of the differing philosophies of math is perfectly reasonable, but it's only by a bizarre twist of terminology that you can call it "religious".

By defining "religious concepts" as concepts about "the divine", and "divine" as "whatever is just there", "religious concepts" then become almost any fundamental ontological concept. But this is not what we usually mean by a "religious concept". We already have concepts for things with fundamental ontological reality, but many of them have nothing to do with supernatural beings, with suspensions of natural law, or with non-natural powers accessible through transcendent mental states - the usual trappings of religion.

(Note also that at least some of your math examples still do not fall under this too-broad conception of religion. Mill's sensation-dependent mathematics is surely contingent; the sensations are not "just there" but depend on who is having them and what kind of creature they are.)

This is just an attempt to erase the distinction between religion and science by claiming that everything that treats of reality is really "religious" - and thus equally epistemologically reliable. It is the same ludicrous nonsense that Michael Behe pulled on the stand in the Kansas creationism trial last week - when he offered this claim as a definition of science and then blithely admitted that his definition of science includes astrology.

There are certainly religious claims about fundamental reality (distinguished, notably, by being wrong), but not every such claim is religious.

21

I note again with amusement the bigoted assumption that many have made over the centuries that christianity is anti-science. For a modern investigation of that old canard, read here: http://www.pearceyreport.com/archives/2005/09/post_4.php

Science is based on a set of assumptions, which include at a minimum the idea that nature will continue acting in the same way. This seems so obvious to us that it doesn't even rise to the level of awareness. But pagan polytheistic societies often believe the underlying structure of the world is chaotic and based on the whims of multiple small deities. It would not even occur to them to TRY experiments--what would be the point? If you believe spirits determine the outcome of the experiment, then there is no reason to assume that even if it comes out the same way ten times, it will work the eleventh. The soil that grew our science included the assumption of a loving, consistent God that was not whimsical and that loved matter (he created so much of it.)

Another assumption, useful in science, is Occam's razor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_Razor
In short, one should minimize the number of assumptions made. It is a useful concept and can help make investigations more efficient. But I've seen people really take it to heart, and basically say, "Well, I think I can explain the entire universe without invoking God. Therefore, God does not exist." That strikes me as an enormous leap of, dare I say it, faith. My ability to convince myself that I can explain all natural processes with material explanations says NOTHING about the existence or nonexistence of a conscious Creator, despite the sweeping claims of Evangelical Atheists who desperately want there to be no God.

We humans have to make assumptions. Recall your ninth grade geometry. It starts with three undefined items: point, line, plane. Then you make definitions in terms of these. Then you make postulates: unproven, assumed to be true without proof. Finally you can start to deduce theorems.

If something as clean and logical as geometry makes assumptions, be sure that all of the rest of your thinking does, too. Those of us with PhD's in microbiology can become pretty arrogant when we forget to occasionally reevaluate our assumptions.

22

This is just an attempt to erase the distinction between religion and science by claiming that everything that treats of reality is really "religious" - and thus equally epistemologically reliable.

I'm starting to suspect this as well. I can imagine a science textbook being written from this perspective. Simply take a regular textbook and insert 'as God wants it' after every few paragraphs. Want to expand our market? Just use Word's find and replace feature to swap out God for Allah to tap the Muslim market for 'Islamic Science'....and of course 'Goddess' can be swapped in for the Wiccans.

But have we actually done anything useful?

23

Interesting, but I’m not really seeing it yet. I see differing descriptions about what math and science are philosophically, but no difference in the practice and observations. While each of those philosophers argued 1+1=2 could mean different things, or even could be different in theory, no one actually argued that 1+1 equals anything other than 2. It’s an objective fact, testable by anybody who takes one thing, takes another, and then counts how many they have acquired.

It’s like looking at history. We can argue about the causes of the American Revolution, about the motivations of the people, and about the effects of it, but we don’t dispute the fact that it happened. Math and science describe objective facts about a universe that is real and has a particular nature whether we acknowledge it or not. I don’t see how differing worldviews can provide differing answers on subjects like this without someone being wrong, hence I fail to see how there can be a separate Christian form of math and science from that which is practiced by humanity at large.

Anyhow, hopefully tomorrow’s post will make the point more clear.

24

This seems so obvious to us that it doesn't even rise to the level of awareness. But pagan polytheistic societies often believe the underlying structure of the world is chaotic and based on the whims of multiple small deities. It would not even occur to them to TRY experiments--what would be the point? If you believe spirits determine the outcome of the experiment, then there is no reason to assume that even if it comes out the same way ten times, it will work the eleventh. The soil that grew our science included the assumption of a loving, consistent God that was not whimsical and that loved matter (he created so much of it.)

This depends where you look. Every day the sun and moon rise and set. The seasons change. These are quite consistent and pagan societies, being mostlly agricultural, would have noticed it quite well. Likewise science knows that choatic events erupt all the time. Even something as predictable as sun rise and sun set is not constant.

Anyway, while many scientists were and are Christians the assumption of a loving and consistent God was not necessary nor was it the foundation of modern science. There's a difference between scientists holding this belief and actually using it to do science. As for consistency, that comes not from assumptions but observations. When hydrogen and oxygen are burned water is observed forming. This is done over and over again and the result is always the same. If nature was different and the result would change every time then science would still exist except its description of what would happen when hydrogen and oxygen burn would have to include random outcomes.

Another assumption, useful in science, is Occam's razor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_Razor
In short, one should minimize the number of assumptions made. It is a useful concept and can help make investigations more efficient. But I've seen people really take it to heart,...

I agree with you there, Occams razor is a rule of thumb. There is no law that says the universe cannot be more complicated than the simplest model of it.

If something as clean and logical as geometry makes assumptions, be sure that all of the rest of your thinking does, too. Those of us with PhD's in microbiology can become pretty arrogant when we forget to occasionally reevaluate our assumptions.

If someone proposed 'God does not exist' as an assumption I'd happily join you in calling that arrogant and unneeded (esp. in light of Occam's razor).

25

So says the Lord:

Everything is hopeless.
The cause of hopelessness is hope.
Hope can be eliminated.
Faith is the elimination of hope.

God abides in mysteries. He can't be attained by reason, but you must reason to attain Him.

If you have to hope, hope to surpass yourself.

Stasis is death; the pursuit of death is sin.

Faith is self-destructive.

Faith is self-destroying.

Annihilate yourselves, optimists.

26

Mumon,

The point actually is: there's no such thing as a "Christian" view of math or science, except historically to suppress it or to murder its adherents (the martyrdom of Hypatia comes to mind, but of course her murderers weren't "true" Christians, right?).

That's right, they weren't, as the Scriptures make clear of all murderers. "Christian" is not a cultural or ethnic term, but a term first applied in Antioch to the followers of Jesus, whose spiritual regeneration and heartfelt dedication to Him warranted the appellation.

Raven, your post needs to be read from pulpits all over America, seeing as you've singlehandedly set the record straight for all of us Jethro Bodine types trying to grajiate the fourth grade. Thanks to you and Mumon, who has informed us that there is no such thing as a Christian view of anything heady, we'll just go back to eatin' and sleepin' and makin' more ignorant little babies, whom we ought to abort since the world has no room for them. Gosh, if I only had a brain!

My goodness, man, take a cursory reading of Colossians and see exactly Who Christians believe created the physical world. Then tell us why we can't be in the very club for which, in Western Civilization, we laid the foundation.

Your post was so stereotypical I was tempted to think it was just Joe pranking us.

27

First Raven, then Amy! C'mon...is this someone's revenge for the Jack Chick article?

28

Darrell,
Joe didn't cover this in his post but there are various schools of mathematics that do use different methods and do come to different results. They have disagreements about the proper methodology of mathematics, about what constitutes proof, and a number of other things. And when you don't agree about what constitutes a proper mathematical proof, you end up with groups of people who come to different results in mathematics.

29

Jim Gilbert:

Ah, yes, Peter wasn't a murder because he struck dead some poor sap who wasn't coughing up the dough to support the church.

But seriously, that's the "no true Scotsman" fallacy, which also allows the Christian god to violate his own alleged morality (?!?!)and engage in genocide.

And uh, you didn't "lay the foundation" of the "Western world."

The pagan Greeks and Romans did.

You guys were worrying about stuff like what how many angels danced on the head of a pin while the Huns were ravaging the Roman empire.

Ya ever thumb through Mein Kampf? Hitler makes the same kind of anachronisms. Not that I'm saying conservative Christians are Nazis. I wouldn't do that. But the similarity of the fallacies interests me.

30

'I speak to you of worldly things and you do not understand. Still less will you understand when I speak of heavenly things....'

Salvation wasn't meant for the damned, you lovers of rigidity and seekers of death. Your hearts have been hardened by God.

31

Please tell me you're not asserting that acedemia is free from "dogma". Such a claim is demonstrably absurd on its face.

I'd never make such a claim - for you are entirely correct. The distinction to bear in mind is that the academy is a self-correcting system. The concept of "phlogistan" is an excellent example; it explained a great deal of observable phenomena, as did the idea of the "aether," and both ideas were held in a fairly dogmatic fashion until they were superceded by what appear to be ideas that are more demonstrably correct.

Natural selection is not, as some of you are claiming, an item of religious faith for the atheist (at least not this one). I'm more than willing to consider alternate explanations for the existence of species and the variety of lifeforms if such explanations are better. So far, nothing more persuasive has come along, but that doesn't mean that something won't. A philosophy based on pure reason must be an open epistomology, and its adherents should be critical of any suppositions that are colored with the patina of dogma. And yes, the academy is rife with such nonsense, particularly the humanities.

The difference is that we do not stagnate. Unlike the Bible, the books of science are never "complete," they are always revised and they continue to parse our assumptions. The problem with a "Christian science" as Joe seems to be forwarding it is that such a view would by definition be a very closed one. A received wisdom that is untestable, unprovable, and unquestionable. As I said, fine for church, death for the university.

J. Gilbert: No offense meant. I'm just pointing out that "God" does not explain anything if "God" is not understandable or definable. I'm positing that "God" isn't something that you can explain to me in the way that you could, say, explain a principle of physics. Ergo, anything to do with God is a matter best left to the church, in the church. If you choose to teach physics, great. But your lesson plans should be secular in their content.

Nowhere did I suggest that Christians are mentally deficient or backward in some way. I confess to carelessness in expression if you read me that way.

32

Read more carefully Mumon.

33

Not that I'm saying conservative Christians are Nazis. I wouldn't do that. But the similarity of the fallacies interests me.

Posted by: Mumon at November 3, 2005 03:42 PM

Bravo on your ability to recognize that conservative Christians aren't Nazis. Were you to posit such an inane absurdity you'd surely be summarily dissected with the truth and rightly exposed to withering criticism.

Conservative Christians are the primary bulwark against big government intrusion into individual liberties, while the left is consistently on record championing legislation (usually from the unaccountable judiciary) on everything from race quotas to "hate crimes" protection based on sexual orientation. Talk about an Orwellian worldview!

Hitler was about as far removed from a "wing nut" extremist conservative as you can possibly imagine:

1) The central fact of Hitler's Nazi ideology was government control of society.
2) There were a number of social policy actions which the Nazi party wished to and did enact.
3) Most of those policy actions were very similar to those supported by the Communist party and the Democratic party.
4) These policy actions, as well as the fundamental left-wing notion of a collective right to control society, are antithetical to everything for which I, and the most of the much ballyhooed "Christian conservatives", stand. I am a right-wing extremist opposed to every plank of the Munich manifesto as well as the entire Communist manifesto. The Democratic party is not only not opposed to either, but in fact explicitly supports the majority of the specific goals of both.
5) Therefore, Nazi ideology belongs to the Left and is an overt enemy of my right-wing conservative ideology.

34

A received wisdom that is untreatable, unprovable, and unquestionable. As I said, fine for church, death for the university.

Not entirely unlike the "Big Bang Theory methinks.

It's interesting to note that science inexplicably turns to metaphysics in order to explain the sudden existence, ostensibly from nothing, of everything. The source of this immense "explosion" of energy and matter? Unobservable, untestable, unrepeatable...but don't let that get in the way of calling it SCIENCE!!! It's the most plausible explanation (for those who from the outset discount the plausibility of a creator).

Ah, science...the faith of the faithless.

35

A little fun for the kids here...

Are you a Nazi?

1) Do you agree with the 59 percent of the European Union that believes Israel is the country that presents the greatest threat to world peace?

A) No; B) Yes; C) Only 59 percent? Damn Jewish pollsters!

2) Do you believe it is important for the government to fund newspapers, radio stations and television channels in order to counteract the influence of the independent media?

A) No; B) Yes; C) Yes, because everyone knows that Jews run the media. Didn't you see that poll?

3) Is the federal government's primary responsibility to promote the industry and livelihood of its citizens?

A) No; B) Yes; C) Yes, as long as they are pure-blooded Aryans.

4) Should the federal government be permitted to confiscate private property in order to convert the land to communal purposes?

A) No; B) Yes; C) Yes, especially if it belongs to Jews.

5) Does the federal government have the responsibility to execute individuals whose activities are injurious to the common interest?

A) No; B) Yes; C) Yes, especially if they're Jewish.

6) Should the education of poor children be provided by the government?

A) No; B) Yes; C) All education should be provided by the government.

7) Should the federal government apply itself to raising the standard of health in the nation?

A) No; B) Yes; C) Yes, except for the health of Jews, Catholic priests, homosexuals and enemies of the state.

8) Is it the responsibility of the federal government to provide generously for the elderly?

A) No; B) Yes; C) Yes, unless they're Jewish.

9) Should the federal government require the registration of all privately owned firearms?

A) No; B) Yes; C) No Jew should be permitted to own firearms.

10) National sovereignty is:

A) A right to be defended; B) An outmoded relic hindering progress; C) An affront to the right of the Aryan race to lebensraum.

11) Euthanasia is:

A) State-sanctioned murder; B) Sometimes in the best interest of the individual being euthanized; C) An excellent way to punish enemies of the state.

12) Christianity is:

A) The truth; B) A dangerous myth that threatens progress and the social order; C) A Judeo-Bolshevist pathology of decadence.

----------------------------------------------

Give yourself zero points for every (A), two points for every (B) and five points for every (C). A score of 24 means that you are in perfect, 100 percent accordance with the policies and positions of the National Socialist German Worker's Party, or NASDAP, known colloquially as the Nazi Party.

A score of 40 or more suggests that you made it to Argentina before that traitor Doenitz betrayed the Führer's memory and the honor of the Volk by surrendering the Reich.

36

Christ knowingly and willfully humiliated himself.

So His faith doesn't belong to you, you who love status and wealth, you who cling to dignity, you who refuse to be created by Him in His image, but wish to construct Him in yours, devils.

Christ's faith belongs to the people who knowingly and willfully accept humiliations. Christ's faith is known by prostitutes, subsistence farmers, muslims, migrant workers, the transsexed. You proud and rich seekers of certainty, you judges of others, you will never know Christ's love. To receive God's spirit, you need to open your selves to others, like women, and make yourselves vulnerable and meek, like children. But you can't do this, you can't even fathom it, can you, you poor, damned ones?

37

Posted by: Amy at November 3, 2005 05:34 PM

While your encouraging, loving, exhortation is certainly, er, interesting; I choose to believe the manifold wisdom of the Holy Writ rather than your prescription for salvation. You seem to believe that somehow it is what you do that earns the love of God, but you are sadly and perversely mistaken.

God's love isn't earned, and salvation isn't attained to, it is the free gift of a loving God who cares so much for us, His children, that He was willing to take our place and die for our sins, thereby making a way for us to be reconciled to Him through His Son, Jesus Christ.

Romans 10:13
For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.

Ephesians 2:8-10

8 For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: 9 Not of works, lest any man should boast.

John 3:17
For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.

Romans 10:9
That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.

Titus 3:5
Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost;

38

Ah, drinking orange juice to the glory of God. I notice that no one ever brings up other less glorious aspects of God's glorious creation--flatulence, defecation, and the like

I once saw a brilliant essay about the African dung beetle and how its existence was proof of a beneficient God. As someone said above, I wish I'd remembered to keep source material at the time.

39

Absolutely -- Christ's love is universal. Humanity's capacity to receive it is not.
Through pride and rigid hearts, people reject God's love.

Do you imagine it's possible love and lose nothing?? More incredible, do you imagine you can partake in the Most Supreme love and keep your self intact??!

You shouldn't blame me if God's Word doesn't console self-assured sinners. Of course you think it perverse!!

What made you think the path of Christ would ever comfort and reassure you on Earth?? Is it because you wish to sleep on earth?

Um, have you read the Gospels?

40

Not entirely unlike the "Big Bang Theory methinks.

Entirely unlike the Big Bang theory. In fact, I was out doing some yardwork today and thinking about this discussion we're having here, and the BB theory came to mind right off. Of course you'd think of this too, soup, because it cleaves against the same issue. Let's take a moment and lay it out.

For some reason, and I think I know what it is, proponents of Christianity continue to bring up several ideas that they believe to be important. One is the notion that "something cannot come from nothing," and another is the idea that if there is not a directing, intelligent authority, then everything is pure random chance and chaos. In such a system, man is not privileged and nothing has meaning.

To the secularist, I would offer to you, such ideas are not important. They are the kind of thing you might chew over while sitting in front of a nice fire and sipping brandy. These are not questions that press against us and demand answers; on the contrary, without certainty on them we can most easily proceed through life.

Because that's just silly.

Today you have to eat dinner, wash the dishes, take a shower, get undressed and go to bed. Tomorrow you need to rise, get dressed, eat breakfast (unless you're in my line of work, in which case you fast until dinner) and commute to your place of employment. These things need to be done. Questions regarding where we came from are amusing to consider, and questions regarding the origin of the universe are discussible, but not germane to anything practical.

That is, the bald declaration that "something cannot come from nothing!" does not argue for the existence of a superbeing. It's more of a philosophical point and one worth reflection. But it doesn't give us much one way or the other.

The Big Bang theory, however, unlike claims of Jehovah's existence, does have a certain amount of evidence to back it up. Red shift has been suggested, questioned, and is now under fierce attack in cosmotological circles, but it's the sort of thing that we can look at and measure. Our distance from other galaxies, our relative speed of movement from them, etc., give us some clues as to what might be happening. And we can think about that.

But no atheist (if I can speak for the group loosely) particularly cares about these things or invests any psychological capital in them. We read on these matters when we can and give them a measure of attention, but we also understand that in terms of universal time, we're here for an eyeblink and whether the universe is expanding or contracting isn't going to amount to a hill of beans as far as we're concerned one way or the other. The matter is purely academic.

The source of this immense "explosion" of energy and matter?

Here's where we separate the median IQ people from the upper echelon. Those with little imagination or intelligence attempt to view the physical universe as a static entity and cannot grasp the relationship between time and space. You, soup, are in the high-IQ grouping so you understand that matter and space and time are all manifestations of an identical property, but in different states, yes? So you also understand that when matter is more dense that space is confined and time is (relatively) slowed.

When we look at what the early stages of the universe might have been like, we cannot consider the matter from the perspective available to us now. At the origin point, or birth of the physical universe - what Christians would think of as the moment God said, "Let there be light," the secularist grasps as a state in which time, per se, is not an operative variable. So to talk about a "beginning" of things is anthropomorphising something not ammenable to such an analysis. OK for hoi polloi but not for the serious bunch.

It's the most plausible explanation (for those who from the outset discount the plausibility of a creator).

Again, an atheist does not require any explanation whatsoever. These are academic questions but they aren't germane to the process of living. They are akin to discussions of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. At no point during any such discussion does a "creator" factor into the discussion unless forced into it by dogma.

This much I know: I am here. Everything else is pure conjecture and open to question.

41

God should not be penalized for promising more than present technology can test.

A simple belief in scripture vastly simplifies the laws of nature and, in truth, ends our view of a three dimensional universe (excluding our perception of time).

This brings me to Edward Witten (whom some regard as the successor to Einstein) and Superstring Theory, in which matter is comprised of the harmony of extremely small vibrating strings which can fuse and break up.

Superstring accounts for almost everything and is the first quantum theory of gravity with finite quantum corrections in spite of its highly abstract nature, lack of any experimentally verifiable predictions, lack of a unique solution for our universe - it has millions of solutions (orbifolds) many if not all of which which have properties that might make our universe impossible - and any rational explanation for why it works (ie no conceptual framework uniting gravity and quantum theory).

It has a compelling, almost "religious" appeal for many physicists because, starting only from geometry and the condition that strings move "self-consistently" in spacetime we get magnetism, electricity, spacetime, general relativity, Klein-Kaluza, supergravity, the standard model, and even a hint of the Grand Unified Theory--it binds matter, energy and spacetime.

String theory does not however, predict or explain the properties of particles nor the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, uncertainty or entanglement (Bell's theorem).

Superstring Theory is so general and so powerful that one gets the feeling that it could explain anything in any possible universe; and in all fairness it can be said in that case it does not really explain anything at all--it becomes the mathematical equivalent of "God made it that way".

Which, of course, I believe.

42

Soup

It's the most plausible explanation (for those who from the outset discount the plausibility of a creator).

Whether or not a creator exists has nothing to do with the evidence which suggests that the matter in the universe we see today was once compressed into a smaller space.

How much intelligence does it take to understand this basic fact?

I'd say high school level, at a decent public school, B- grades or better.

You'll get there someday, Soup, but only if you apply yourself!

43

The Raven

You, soup, are in the high-IQ grouping

Quoth the Raven: "Grade inflation."

44

I am trying to assemble a small group of engineers, theologians, and possibly others, to collectively and intentionally seek God's will for the engineering profession and its Christian members and document the results in an article suitable for publication in a peer-reviewed or more popular journal.

There is no collective and intentional Christian influence in the engineering profession and no viable organizational vehicle to faciliate its development and expression. Is that God's will? It an unexamined question.

If you are interested in possibly participating in this project, for which generous compensation is possible, please contact me.

We'll try to get past 1 + 1 = 2 to address reality that 2 billion people live on 2 dollars a day or less and other "facts on the ground" in our world in 2005.

Joe Carson, P.E.
President, Affiliation of Christian Engineers
president@christianengineer.org
www.christianengineer.org

45

Though, dogmatists and literalists may seem to be the people who respect scripture the most, in fact, they're the ones who respect it least. Suppose a teacher were to ask you to understand something she said was personally urgent. If you were to demonstrate your understanding of and concern for her message simply by parroting random bits of whatever she said, in no particular order and with no coherent explanation of priority (except, maybe, 'Duh, that's how the person I was copying from did it'), and if you answered questions raised about these bits simply by parroting other random bits, without even feeling a compunction to do more, then clearly, you wouldn't have been at all concerned about the meaning of whatever it was that she tried to convey to you. Talk about disrespect.

Now suppose this teacher is God. Talk about blasphemy.

It's no wonder though that the lazy and structurally incoherent temptation of literal biblical interpretation appeals to people with student temperments, people who long for sleep. It makes sense too that this religious approach has grown step for step with the nation's obesity rate.

One day, sadly, we'll be known as America's 'Tired Generation' -- the generation that let loose the promises of Christ and America because we were too busy yawning.

46

Soup:

I must have hit a nerve somewhere. It probably had to do with the article by William Pfaff I quoted on my blog, which noted that we sentenced Germans and Japanese hanged for the kinds of violations of the Geneva convention we're committing in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Talk about "big goverment intrusion" into people's lives.

It doesn't get any bigger than the torture advocated by the presumed perps in the Bush regime.

And to those who'd invoke Godwin's Law, let me state Mumon's Law: If you worry about breaching some etiquette resulting from those who cry "Godwin's Law," eventually, we'll recreate worse horrors than Nazis because nobody'll speak up.

So bring all the (false) anti-semitic canards you want, (and false communist ones, I might add).

The fact is, the current regime, playing self-avowed "conservative Christians" for suckers has done more to degrade civil liberties- indeed, calling organizations that advocate civil liberties "communist"!- than anything in American history.

These are interesting times; you're witnessing the decline of the American Empire.

47

Whether or not a creator exists has nothing to do with the evidence which suggests that the matter in the universe we see today was once compressed into a smaller space.

How much intelligence does it take to understand this basic fact?

I'd say high school level, at a decent public school, B- grades or better.

You'll get there someday, Soup, but only if you apply yourself!

Posted by: Larry Lord at November 3, 2005 09:46 PM

Thank you for your condescension Larry. You fail to explain, however, the mechanism which held all the matter in the entire universe into that finite space, which you seemingly, implausibly, accept to be true.

When we are to (inexplicably) believe that all known laws of physics were simply defied by this collective, peculiar, singularity from time immemorial, for no particular reason, then it becomes the stuff of faith.

Why is it, do you think, that physical matter wasn't instantly annihilated by its counterpart - antimatter - during (or before?) the Big Bang?

Consider:

There is a fundamental problem with the fact that there is any normal matter at all. In the physics of the present day universe, there is symmetry in the relationship between matter and energy (in the form of electromagnetic radiation) as follows: nature on the one hand can create matter (and antimatter) in the reaction

high-energy photon ---> matter particle + antimatter particle

and destroy both forms of matter through the reaction

matter particle + antimatter particle ---> high-energy photons.

This is a symmetry relation in that we can consider the two sides of each equation to represent different aspects of what is essentially identical; in fact, we can summarize this relationship in a single expression where the double-ended arrow indicates that the reaction is permitted to go in both directions:

high-energy photon matter particle + antimatter particle.

The reaction can go back and forth any number of times and after an even number of reactions (no matter how large), the physical situation is exactly where it started -- nothing has been changed, lost, or gained.

I guess "things were just different back then", huh? I'm just curious how you address this quandary since you seem really smart and all.

48

Whether or not a creator exists has nothing to do with the evidence which suggests that the matter in the universe we see today was once compressed into a smaller space.

How much intelligence does it take to understand this basic fact?

I'd say high school level, at a decent public school, B- grades or better.

You'll get there someday, Soup, but only if you apply yourself!

Posted by: Larry Lord at November 3, 2005 09:46 PM

Thank you for your condescension Larry. You fail to explain, however, the mechanism which held all the matter in the entire universe into that finite space, which you seemingly, implausibly, accept to be true.

When we are to (inexplicably) believe that all known laws of physics were simply defied by this collective, peculiar, singularity from time immemorial, for no particular reason, then it becomes the stuff of faith.

Why is it, do you think, that physical matter wasn't instantly annihilated by its counterpart - antimatter - during (or before?) the Big Bang?

Consider:

There is a fundamental problem with the fact that there is any normal matter at all. In the physics of the present day universe, there is symmetry in the relationship between matter and energy (in the form of electromagnetic radiation) as follows: nature on the one hand can create matter (and antimatter) in the reaction

high-energy photon ---> matter particle + antimatter particle

and destroy both forms of matter through the reaction

matter particle + antimatter particle ---> high-energy photons.

This is a symmetry relation in that we can consider the two sides of each equation to represent different aspects of what is essentially identical; in fact, we can summarize this relationship in a single expression where the double-ended arrow indicates that the reaction is permitted to go in both directions:

high-energy photon matter particle + antimatter particle.

The reaction can go back and forth any number of times and after an even number of reactions (no matter how large), the physical situation is exactly where it started -- nothing has been changed, lost, or gained.

I guess "things were just different back then", huh? I'm just curious how you address this quandary since you seem really smart and all.

49

Make no mistake, science has built a formidable ivory fortress against the knowledge of God. It’s quite cozy and secure for the proletariat who roam its tastefully decorated halls, and sit congratulating one another around its fountains of knowledge. Yet, uncomfortably there are those men of deep, vast intellect who sit upon the minarets peering outward toward the ragged edge of the secure enclave of science. These are the chosen few who come face to face with the truly unknown, and gape with awe and wonder.

The fool is wise in his conceit; the wise are humbled by their ignorance.

50

Soup: There is a fundamental problem with the fact that there is any normal matter at all.

Is that right? Funny, but the other day I was out walking around, and I noticed all this matter around me. Didn't seem to be any fundamental problem with it, but thanks for letting us know.

I'll toss you a bonus point for noting one of the laws of thermodynamics. While we're on that subject, let's take a moment to see if our two camps can recognize each other across the gulf of perception. One of religious tenets (here's a nod to you, Joe) of atheism is that the universe operates in accordance with demonstrable laws. Conservation is one of these laws - i.e., you can't make anything not exist because all you can do is change its state.

From a rationalist perspective, the fact that the universe is fairly predictable in the kinds of ways mentioned above gives us the belief that we may come to understand its properties even better than we do now. So it does seem worth the effort to continue the process.

You are entirely free at any point, and in the midst of any observation, to claim that a particular aspect of the universe is due to God's influence, or maybe even proof of God's existence. You might say, per your previous remarks, that conservation of energy is a property of God, and that if there were no God, then we'd have no such property. Fair enough.

The rationalist sees things in exactly the same way, but we just don't think about God or insert the concept anywhere in the equation. Oddly enough, things work out exactly the same way when you do that. Occam's Razor suggests that whenever the removal of God does not change an outcome, then God is an unneccesary variable.

So when is God neccessary? Ethics are not a religious property - they are an aspect of developmental psychology. The appreciate of beauty and symmetry are part of the field of aesthetics. Any other ideas?

51

Any other ideas? Posted by: The Raven at November 4, 2005 08:10 AM
Actually you segue predictably (but quite nicely) directly into one of my favorite oddities of nature – the irrational atheist.

More on this subject later…

52

Make no mistake, science has built a formidable ivory fortress against the knowledge of God. It’s quite cozy and secure for the proletariat who roam its tastefully decorated halls, and sit congratulating one another around its fountains of knowledge. Yet, uncomfortably there are those men of deep, vast intellect who sit upon the minarets peering outward toward the ragged edge of the secure enclave of science. These are the chosen few who come face to face with the truly unknown, and gape with awe and wonder.

You must be smarting from that C- you got way back when. Or something. Really, I don't know why folks like you resent scientists so much. If you really do, maybe you should turn off that computer stop using your automobile, your prescription drugs, processed food, stuff made out of metal, your eyeglasses, of course, and anything else that science had a hand in creating or explaining. You should subsist on raw food, gathered or hunted exclusively (and no guns or knives).

The fool is wise in his conceit; the wise are humbled by their ignorance.

Plank examination time, dude.

53

Borrowed verbatim: THE IRRATIONAL ATHEIST

The idea that he is a devotee of reason seeing through the outdated superstitions of other, lesser beings is the foremost conceit of the proud atheist. This heady notion was first made popular by French intellectuals such as Voltaire and Diderot, who ushered in the so-called Age of Enlightenment.

That they also paved the way for the murderous excesses of the French Revolution and many other massacres in the name of human progress is usually considered an unfortunate coincidence by their philosophical descendants.

The atheist is without God but not without faith, for today he puts his trust in the investigative method known as science, whether he understands it or not. Since there are very few minds capable of grasping higher-level physics, let alone following their implications, and since specialization means that it is nearly impossible to keep up with the latest developments in the more esoteric fields, the atheist stands with utter confidence on an intellectual foundation comprised of things of which he knows nothing.

In fairness, he cannot be faulted for this, except when he fails to admit that he is not actually operating on reason in this regard, but is instead exercising a faith that is every bit as blind and childlike as that of the most unthinking Bible-thumping fundamentalist. Still, this is not irrational, it is only ignorance and a failure of perception.

The irrationality of the atheist can primarily be seen in his actions – and it is here that the cowardice of his intellectual convictions is also exposed. Whereas Christians and the faithful of other religions have good reason for attempting to live by the Golden Rule – they are commanded to do so – the atheist does not.

In fact, such ethics, as well as the morality that underlies them, are nothing more than man-made myth to the atheist. Nevertheless, he usually seeks to live by them when they are convenient, and there are even those, who, despite their faithlessness, do a better job of living by the tenets of religion than those who actually subscribe to them.

Still, even the most admirable of atheists is nothing more than a moral parasite, living his life based on borrowed ethics. This is why, when pressed, the atheist will often attempt to hide his lack of conviction in his own beliefs behind some poorly formulated utilitarianism, or argue that he acts out of altruistic self-interest. But this is only post-facto rationalization, not reason or rational behavior.

I am saying nothing new here. It is an ancient concept. More than 2,000 years ago, the first atheist martyr, Socrates, declared "The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance." Being fully aware of the repercussions of this teaching, he also argued that it was necessary to keep such virtuous knowledge to the elite.

"I mean, I replied, that our rulers will find a considerable dose of falsehood and deceit necessary for the good of their subjects ... these goings on must be a secret which the rulers only know, or there will be a further danger of our herd ... breaking out into rebellion."

The Romans, ever practical, understood this as well. Seneca the Younger wrote: "Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful." It is more than useful for a civilized society, though, it is a downright necessity.

Even the great champions of reason accepted this bitter truth. Alvin Bernstein writes of Voltaire: "He regarded belief in God and in an afterlife of rewards and punishments as requisites of ethical behavior ... Voltaire was convinced that the lower classes must fear God in order to be ethical. His religious outlook ... is a stepping-stone toward a full secular outlook in which moral judgments have nothing to do with religious and spiritual abstractions.

This is not to say there are no atheists who are rational, that there are none who are true to their godless convictions. Friedrich Nietzsche is the foremost example, but there are certainly others who do not fear to determine their own moral compass. Today, we call them sociopaths and suicides.

Without God, there is only the left-hand path of the philosopher. It leads invariably to Hell, by way of the guillotine, the gulag and the gas chamber. The atheist is irrational because he has no other choice – because the rational consequences of his non-belief are simply too terrible to bear.

54

Posted by: Mumon at November 4, 2005 10:55 AM

Why am I not surprised that you are unable to distinguish the personal from the abstract?

Pity...

55

Soup: Interesting cite from Vox Day. I won't fisk it, for fear of wearing out my welcome.

Cheers.

56

1) The central fact of Hitler's Nazi ideology was government control of society.
2) There were a number of social policy actions which the Nazi party wished to and did enact.
3) Most of those policy actions were very similar to those supported by the Communist party and the Democratic party.

The central fact of Hitler's ideology was a dogma that bordered on an almost religious belief in the superiority of the Aryan race & the need for all of society to revolve around maintaining the 'purity' of that race. Yes yes Hitler enacted other polices that are similar to policies of other governments. For example, he built the autobaun which is very similar to the Interstate highway system Eisenhower started. You could still be a good Nazi, though, if you opposed governmetn construction of large highways. You could not be a good nazi, though, if you opposed the central dogma of Hitler's faith.

5) Therefore, Nazi ideology belongs to the Left and is an overt enemy of my right-wing conservative ideology.

Nazi idology has characteristics of put it in a class by itself. Conservative ideology can be dated to Burke who argued in favor of respecting pre-existing prejudices and social arrangements but Burke's argument was to be slow and cautious with change. Nazi ideology was utopian in that it believed it could overturn all of society and restore some mythical golden age thru racial purity. For the most part you can cite the left wing as supporting utopian endeavors but few if any were based on racial purity nor did they harken back to a mythical golden age that supposedly existed in the past.

Matter vs Antimatter

I guess "things were just different back then", huh? I'm just curious how you address this quandary since you seem really smart and all.

I have to read up on this but from what I recall two possible explanations would be that there is not symmetry between matter and antimatter. Matter is more common hence our universe is made up of matter rather than antimatter or equal amounts of both. Another (and this may be related) is that antimatter may not be a perfect mirror of matter. It may be more unstable, less durable. So even if the universe started with equal amounts of both its only the matter that's left.

There is a fundamental problem with the fact that there is any normal matter at all. In the physics of the present day universe, there is symmetry in the relationship between matter and energy (in the form of electromagnetic radiation) as follows: nature on the one hand can create matter (and antimatter) in the reaction

On the other hand aren't we up to something like 95% of the universe consisting of mysterious 'dark engery' and 'dark matter'. It very well may be that the few percents of normal matter we see may be the 'lucky atoms' that got away from the great matter-antimatter conflict!

57

Posted by: Boonton at November 4, 2005 11:35 AM

It would appear that you concede much of my argument, correct?

Posted by: The Raven at November 4, 2005 11:17 AM

I'd still be curious to hear a defense of how your ethical and moral system a) has been independently and rationally developed; b) is superior to that laid out in the Bible; or c) is supposed to impress with its rationality or altruism.

58

Soup

Thank you for your condescension Larry. You fail to explain, however, the mechanism which held all the matter in the entire universe into that finite space, which you seemingly, implausibly, accept to be true.

Your welcome.

And I don't need to provide you or anyone else with a mechanism to justify my plain and clear statement of fact:

"Whether or not a creator exists has nothing to do with the evidence which suggests that the matter in the universe we see today was once compressed into a smaller space."

Precisely "how" the so-called Big Bang occurred and "how" the pre-Big Bang universe maintained itself are further questions for scientists to ask.

The answers to those further questions do not change the collected data which suggests that the universe we "see" today was once smaller before it expanded to its present size, just as the answers to those questions do not change the fact that I had some really nasty catered sausages for breakfast this morning.

And I have to laugh -- once again -- at your characterization of the Big Bang as "implausible" at the same time you advocate for some all-powerful being whose existence supercedes not only the known universe, but all universes, through all time, and who also sees fit occasionally to "design" anal orifices for tube worms or take the form of a plant so "he" can "speak" to human beings.

By the way, can you explain the mechanism by which this yellow dust speck landed on my computer screen? I never noticed it before. Please let me know a.s.a.p. the precise mechanism because if you can't provide a convincing second-by-second explanation of how this speck got on my screen then I have to assume that your deity must have personally put it there.

I surely don't want to wipe it off if that's the case, given some of the stories I've heard.

59

And I have to laugh -- once again -- at your characterization of the Big Bang as "implausible" at the same time you advocate for some all-powerful being whose existence supercedes not only the known universe, but all universes, through all time, and who also sees fit occasionally to "design" anal orifices for tube worms or take the form of a plant so "he" can "speak" to human beings.

Laugh if you’d like, but you are conflating arguments, and failing to apply standard logic. I freely admit that I believe – based solely on faith – that the God of the Bible created everything from nothing. Science rejects the assertion that faith plays any part in its “creation ethos”, yet implausibly turns to metaphysics when its failings or shortcomings are evidenced, or even alluded to. Unlike my faith, science is therefore burdened to be observable, testable, and repeatable or else it isn’t science.

Try to focus here, it really isn’t that difficult.

60

Speaking of Nazis and Godwin's Law, which questionably elected leader of a country does this remind you of:

His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong;...

The OSS must have been really good at predicting the future.

61

"Soup" wrote:

Why am I not surprised that you are unable to distinguish the personal from the abstract?

It's people writing this stuff, not abstractions.

62

Larry Lord:

And I have to laugh -- once again -- at your characterization of the Big Bang as "implausible" at the same time you advocate for some all-powerful being whose existence supercedes not only the known universe, but all universes, through all time, and who also sees fit occasionally to "design" anal orifices for tube worms or take the form of a plant so "he" can "speak" to human beings.

I have to laugh too- maybe Soup is one of those folks who think the dinosaur bones were put there to test man's faith or some horse-feces like that.

Likewise, I suppose the black-body background radiation residue from the bang is receivable for the same reasons the dinosaur bones are there...

63

Unlike my faith, science is therefore burdened to be observable, testable, and repeatable or else it isn’t science...

There goes the cat out of the bag.

Your faith- and your decisions based on it- and your actions- are therefore not burdened to be related to effects thereupon.

And that means, that you can do anything you darn well please, because there are no effects related to causes originating from your actions.

And that is why folks justify genocide.

Like in the bible.

64

It would appear that you concede much of my argument, correct?

I'm not sure, you have two going at once...one about Nazi's and the other about antimatter and such. Which one are you referring too?

Laugh if you’d like, but you are conflating arguments, and failing to apply standard logic. I freely admit that I believe – based solely on faith – that the God of the Bible created everything from nothing. Science rejects the assertion that faith plays any part in its “creation ethos”, yet implausibly turns to metaphysics when its failings or shortcomings are evidenced, or even alluded to. Unlike my faith, science is therefore burdened to be observable, testable, and repeatable or else it isn’t science.

I don't think you've demonstrated any of this. So far you've raised a few interesting questions but that's about it. For example, what mechanism 'held' the early universe together isn't a metaphysical question...its a good one. There's a host of possibilities but people who study deeper in the field than I would have to answer which one the evidence is most in favor of.

One that is sure to drive Gordon mad is that the universe was and is infinite, only our visible portion was compressed to a tiny dot at the big bang. Some theories that would fit:

1. A larger or infinite universe that experiences 'bangs' inside of itself expanding a portion of itself.

2. Imagine an infinite universe but with the density at the moment of the Big Bang. If you were floating around in this place the part that would go onto become our visible universe would be a tiny dot...let's say the size of a pea, the Bang was really the start of an expansion so that all points started racing away from each other allowing the energy to 'spread itself out' and cool down inside. So if you could travel 14 Billion light years in any particular direction you'd be in space that was only a pea's length away from us 14 billion years ago.

Neither of these answers are metaphysics, though. They are hypothetsises. Whether they can be tested and what the results are if they are will determine how compelling they are to the scientific community.

65

Again with the fallacies? Christianity provides a very clear moral compass by which to live: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. It’s commonly known as the “golden rule”, you may have heard of it. This is the essence of the entire scripture boiled down to a single, succinct truth: Love one another.

Your irrational fear of Christian genocidal tendencies is quite interesting. How many historical examples can think of? Casualty figures? The Inquisition is a popular leftist canard, but upon closer review, it becomes disappointing to the revisionists. Estimates vary but the numbers lie somewhere between 6,400 and 40,000 over centuries.

However the democidal tendencies of atheistic regimes can be much more impressively referenced: Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” and Stalin alone account for 35~50 million dead in a matter of decades.

Would you like to take another shot?

P.S. - I’d be much more concerned about the deadly nature of the rational atheist than the most fundamentalist, wild-eyed Bible-thumper if I were you.

66

Soup:

How many historical examples can think of...

I'd refer you to Gibbon's tome on the Roman Empire for starters.

Then there's the First Crusade. That little bit alone blows away "only" 40,000 people.

I'd mention- since after all, it's a popular canard that the US was "founded as a Christian Nation," the number of dead due to the slave trade; about 1 million conservatively on the passage to the US alone.

The number of Native Americans killed? Lots. Many due to disease, but many due to genocide.

Democrat Andrew Jackson figures prominently in that.

However the democidal tendencies of atheistic regimes...

Again there's kind of a false choice here: either Stalin and Mao or the Burning Times.

How about Ashoka?

67

This is the essence of the entire scripture boiled down to a single, succinct truth: Love one another.

Perhaps you've seen this.

Lots of folks who are not Christians have serious problems with the biblical approval of genocide.

68

Soup

Laugh if you’d like, but you are conflating arguments, and failing to apply standard logic.

No, I'm not conflating anything, Soup, and my logic is sound. I explained myself perfectly clearly.

What we are seeing from you now is known as "Lying for Jesus." This is where you (1) say something false or misrepresent someone else's statement, then (2) your error is plainly pointed out to you, and (3) rather than apologize and articulate your claim more carefully, you accuse the person who pointed out your error as "illogical" without explaining why the logic is faulty, and (4) make some other broad-sweeping, bizarre and wholly unsupported statement such as "Science ... implausibly turns to metaphysics when its failings are ... alluded to".

I've seen it a million times before, Soup.

Try a new salad dressing.

69

Good to know the devout atheists have their Ned Flanders' too. We all know who you are.

Hey, I've got an idea, I'll call everything I don't agree with a lie! Works in Washington where all our sterling role models hang out, anyway.

Okley Dokley...

Now don't bother responding to this at all, I've declared you a liar in advance...

70

Your irrational fear of Christian genocidal tendencies is quite interesting.

I'm not afraid of "Christian genocidal tendencies" primarily because I'm not a Muslim living in the Middle East.

But you're missing the key point (no surprise) which is that worshipping the deity described in this "holy bible" of yours does not, as a matter of incontrovertible fact, preclude someone from carrying out the most appalling acts of genocide and torture humans have ever devised.

You seem to be arguing that because (1) a majority of recent history's most ruthless nutcase dictator's have killed more people than the nutcases of yore and (2) these recent nutcase dictator's weren't Christian, that the key point I alluded to above is diminished.

It's not.

What all these nutcases -- Christian and non-Christian -- have in common is that they are fanatics who valued power and the promulgation of their personal beliefs and ideology more than the lives of human beings who disagreed with them.

The vast majority of today's fundamentalists don't go around killing heretics. Rather, they proclaim for all to hear that the heretics live a worthless, meaningless existence that necessarily interferes with the ability of "True Believers" to do whatever it is the "True Believers" believe that their deity wants them to do.

Don't get me wrong -- it's an improvement over the old days. But it's too easy to step back into something like modern Iran. If you doubt that there are well-funded and influential organizations and individuals who seek to turn the US into an official Christian theocracy, then you are hopelessly naive. And such groups and individuals are worth monitoring closely and skeptically, for reasons that are obvious to anyone who appreciates how easily rights can be made to disappear in this country.

71

"What all these nutcases -- Christian and non-Christian -- have in common is that they are fanatics who valued power and the promulgation of their personal beliefs and ideology more than the lives of human beings who disagreed with them."

Well spoken, Larry. It might be a good idea for each sides to ratchet down the rhetoric a bit and not be so quick to overgeneralize and demonize the other. I think worldview has less to do with motivating atrocities than with facilitating them.

72

Larry Lord:

The vast majority of today's fundamentalists don't go around killing heretics.

But some indeed do. For example, Efraim Rios-Montt, dictator of Guatemala, and self-avowed "born again" Christian murdered hundreds of thousands in the early 80s.

20% of the country voted with their feet in response to his butchery and fled the country.

The idea that some folks whitewash such butchery by saying Mao and Stalin were worse is appalling.

If a guy like Rios-Montt had the opportunity to head a country as big as the Soviet Union or China, there is simply no doubt his results would have rivalled or exceeded Stalin's or Mao's.

73

Rob Ryan:

Much as I'd like as much as the next guy or gal to maintain a level of civility and politeness, there are human lives at stake. They may be people who don't subscribe to our religious viewpoint, and may look differently than we do or speak a different language, but they're people. Not potential people. Not brain dead people. But living, breathing people with hopes and problems and foibles and aspirations who breathe and eat and defecate and love just like you or I do.

"Worldveiw" is meaningless if the crucial issue is whether or not your helping or hurting.

There's liberals' and conservatives' kids in Iraq helping the locals, and getting blown to bits as a thank-you.

There's locals in Iraq getting shafted because they did what they needed to do to survive under the old guard.

How much blood is enough?

74

Soup,

Remember when you are arguing with Larry that you are arguing with a person who claims to have a PhD (Made that claim on this website) but refuses to tell us where he obtained it.

75

Mumon writes;

"How much blood is enough?"

The answer to that question depends on your worldview.

76

"This is the essence of the entire scripture boiled down to a single, succinct truth: Love one another."

It's impossible to love someone without making yourself vulnerable to that person, don't you think? How, in your day to day life, are you receptive to prostitutes, migrant workers, muslims, transsexuals, etc.? How are you receptive to Bin Ladin, and to women who have abortions? And how does this 'receptivity' make you vulnerable?

"Without God, there is only the left-hand path of the philosopher. It leads invariably to Hell, by way of the guillotine, the gulag and the gas chamber. The atheist is irrational because he has no other choice – because the rational consequences of his non-belief are simply too terrible to bear."

If you're right, then explain not just how Daoism leads invariably to hell, but what Daoism teaches. What in your opinion was Chuang-Tzu's point when he distinguished between principles like "Three in the Morning" and the principle of "Two Paths at Once?"

Surely, if you're not just spouting self-aggrandizing platitudes, you ought to also be able to explain why you think Dignaga's or Dharmakirti's apoha theories do not justify dependent origination, the Buddha's second Noble Truth and the Buddha's Noble 8-fold Path. These afterall are just a few elementary parts of Buddhism's moral atheism.

Can you also tell us why Navya-Nyaya's pramana theory isn't sufficient for social and moral salvation. I mean, if you're sure it isn't sufficient, it's reasonable to think you ought to at least, well, know it. Right?

Soup, you're not judging others' beliefs without even knowing those beliefs, are you? That'd be a purdy perverse conception of love, afterall. It, it, it... it'd be unchristian!!

Have you ever wondered whether you in fact share Christ's faith? How do you know that you haven't actually constructed an idol to validate a fragile sense of self? I ask you sincerely.

77

And while you're at it, Soup, you might as well explain what you mean by this:

"More than 2,000 years ago, the first atheist martyr, Socrates, declared "The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance." Being fully aware of the repercussions of this teaching, he also argued that it was necessary to keep such virtuous knowledge to the elite."

You call Socrates an atheist, but he explicitly disavowed atheism when he responded to Meletus (and Theaetetus, and Meno, etc, etc.). How are you, more than 2000 years later, a superior judge of his internal mental states? And how do you avoid the elitist repurcussions you allude to if you hold that knowledge and observance of God's commands is the highest good and ignorance or defiance of God's commands in the only evil?

78

Heck, I'm also curious how one could describe the French Revolution as an atheist movement, while simultaneously asserting, I'm presuming, that the United States, whose Declaration of Independence was inspired by the French Revolution, was founded on Christian principles.

["Without God, there is only the left-hand path of the philosopher. It leads invariably to Hell, by way of the guillotine, the gulag and the gas chamber."]

"Try to focus here [Soup], it really isn’t that difficult."

79

Soup: I'd still be curious to hear a defense of how your ethical and moral system a) has been independently and rationally developed; b) is superior to that laid out in the Bible; or c) is supposed to impress with its rationality or altruism.

We are getting pretty far off topic here, and you're asking for an explanation that ought to be taken offline to e-mail or something. The rhetoric here is getting rather heated and I certainly don't want to aggravate matters.

But I won't dodge your queries. First, re: Vox Day's remarks, the arguments of Socrates getting boiled down to a simplistic "knowledge is good and ignorance is bad" dichotomy is purile nonsense. Plato writes a great deal about virture, goodness, evil and so on. Not just a few paragraphs, but hundreds of pages. Those ideas should not be simplified, because they press very strongly against what you are asking for in a) and c) above.

You remark above in these comments that a Christian holds to the Golden Rule, and the injunction to "love one another." Great ideas. I would ask you, though, why it is necessary to believe that Jesus is a deity in order to act on those ethical suggestions? The Kantian categorical imperative to "do only that which you would have all others do" is pretty much the same thing. The key idea isn't copyright 30AD, JC Inc., it's an open property and one that has been independently arrived at around the world, for millennia.

Per your query b) above, I make no claim that my ethics are superior to those of any other system. Superiority is not a function of ethics as I recognize them. In a nutshell, I'd say that I pay very close attention to matters of conscience.

Whatever I think about right and wrong, it is very much influenced by Lao Tzu, Plato, Robert Pirsig, and Western literature and philosophy in general. The Bible, as a work, seems very confused and contradictory on matters of ethics and I do not understand what it offers a follower that is compelling.

In fact, I don't claim to have any understanding of the Bible at all. But I suspect that the average Christian does not turn to the Bible to answers questions of right and wrong, to sort out difficult moral conundrums. No, I imagine that the average Christian looks to God, seeks inspiration and discernment in such cases. Which I would take as a kind of "flying by the seat of your pants" morality.

80

Amy - thank you for spending the time to consider some of my posts, in reciprocation I'll address some of your queries.

1) If you are familiar with the Christian scriptures, commonly known as The Holy Bible, then you would know perfectly well that I (as a Christian) don't hate or secretly despise, prostitutes, migrant workers, muslims, transsexuals, Bin Ladin, women who have abortions, or atheists. Jesus died for the sins of the world, and His love is unqualified. My role is to point to the cross of Christ which is the only bridge that spans the gulf between man and God. Sometimes people who love their sin, have had their conscience jaded by a life of depravity, and/or are deceived by any number of false beliefs (which I will address in point #2) will react quite unfavorably to the truth of Jesus Christ. This is not to be unexpected because man is a totally corrupt being who is selfish beyond comprehension. The flesh is powerful, and cannot be mastered apart from the indwelling presence of God's Spirit, which can only occur through the spiritual rebirth (i.e. being "born again") by receiving the gift of salvation vis-a-vis the shed blood of Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God.

2) Soup, you're not judging others' beliefs without even knowing those beliefs, are you? That'd