...Even if he does say "Jehovah"!
I've just discovered that two of my sixty undergrad students write God as "G-d"! Hilarious! The strange thing is that they're not defending creationism but they fear Yahweh enough not to write his euphemistic title out in full. Go figure. I wonder if they take a bath before writing it. (I asked the other AI about this. Being a Red Sea pedestrian himself he didn't find it so weird but said he never does it himself. And apparently it's only the tetragrammaton that you have to take a bath for.)
I already make a habit of saying "Yahweh" as much as possible but next time I do it I'll have to watch them to see if they flinch. But, you know, I'm a very brave person when it comes to naming names, I even say "Voldemort" out loud!
posted by Nick @ 12:42 am
8 comments
8 Comments:
There was a guy who wrote an article for the Case magazine once who wrote Yahweh instead of God. I've had students who write G-d too. But why would they have to be defending Creationism if they fear God? I fear God in a sense, but I believe that he intended us for an intimate relationship with him. As Paul wrote in Romans 8:14-15,
For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, "Abba! Father!"
("Abba" meaning something similar to "daddy", not a bunch of Eurovision winners.)
The point? Well, partly that you know that not all Bible-believing, evangelical, fundamentalist Christians (as an example of religious people) are young-earth Creationists, but from what you write on your blog, sometimes it seems that you think that belief in God or Yahweh or G-d means you have to abandon science and reason.
P.S. I know this is your sinister, controversial blog, but can we have some genuine controversy please? I'm so over the whole creation-evolution thing!
But surely one must concede that there is no such thing as faith without discarding reasoning.
Not necessarily holistically, of course. One can have views on, say, vehicle dynamics, yet still fulfill their spiritual requirements with faith. Hence the stats on how many scientists and engineers are religious. This may not compromise their professional work, but the two must be kept separate - as an unfair example, I would not want to see a doctor who gave me two panadol for cancer and said "Let G-d take care of the rest, lad."
To illustrate further using the former case, religious belief does not comprimise the ability to say "my opinions on shock absorption are based on solid scientific grounds," but it does mean that this person has discarded reason to fulfill a gap in their spiritual requirements that they are not comfortable with.
I don't think faith requires the discarding of reason at all. As a Christian, I have faith in God. Does that mean that I believe he exists in spite of evidence to the contrary? Not at all. It means that I think there is reasonable evidence to believe not only that God exists, but that he will fulfil the promises he has made through Scripture.
I don't think that scientists or engineers need to keep their religious faith and their professional work separate - I think the two can be integrated. One could even argue that without people who did integrate the two, we wouldn't even have modern science!
Damn that sting in the tail! I can't fault her on that one - it's true we wouldn't have modern science without Christianity. (At least not in the form that we have today.) But I still think that the evidence for Jehovah is really bad, in itself and compared to the evidence against. (Evidence for other gods is just as bad but if you leave out the omnipotence etc. they dodge the evidence against them a little more effectively.)
But Lara and I both know what all the evidence is, we've heard the same arguments; that leaves us with the question of why we think that the same set of evidence points in opposite directions. I would conjecture that people of faith who come to a belief in God through their upbringing are the ones most likely to use reason as a post hoc justification of what they've been believing all along. And, conversely, that converts will almost always rely on some gestalt switch of faith.
I base this generalisation on no empirical evidence whatsoever.
What about people who have been brought up believing in God and then turn away from it? Or people who have been brought up with no faith whatsoever but end up as believers? It's not all about upbringing.
One could even argue that without people who did integrate the two, we wouldn't even have modern science!
Feel free to elaborate on this. I do not mean to trivialise your faith - I can neither prove the existence of a God or Gods than I can disprove their existence. Hence I declare no particular faith either way. Presented with the same or similar evidence, you elect to have faith. This I shall not, and will never belittle.
Basically, I'm not looking for a tiff, but am open to all views. To my mind, advances in mathematics, transportation, medicine, resource and waste management, and other such 'essential' sciences occurred under a variety of belief systems at the same time worldwide. My reasoning suggests that wonderment and, perhaps more so, a desire for military prowess has driven science since the proverbial day 'dot'.
I do not mean to trivialise your faith
I don't think you were doing that. I'm just trying to get across the point that faith and reason are not opposites. To be a believer, one does not have to leave one's brain at the church door.
One could even argue that without people who did integrate the two, we wouldn't even have modern science!
Feel free to elaborate on this
OK! But you might not want to get me started...
Modern science developed in a particular time and place. There's even a name for the problem of why science developed in the Christian West and not in other areas, such as China - the Needham problem, after the historian who did much work on this subject. There are also arguments to do with theological issues such as voluntarism being necessary for empiricism, the idea of a divine law-giver being necessary for the concept of laws of nature, the Protestant work ethic and so on. I also think it is significant that several key figures in the history of science - Galileo, Kepler, Boyle - considered themselves something like "priests of nature." Boyle viewed natural philosophy as "philosophical worship of God."
I don't think I would argue that modern science would not have developed in any form were it not for Christians, but as it happened, many of the key figures were Christians and theological concepts and issues were important.
Presented with the same or similar evidence, you elect to have faith. This I shall not, and will never belittle.
I'm not sure I would put it that way, but it's an interesting thought. Does one elect to have faith? Is it a case of choosing to believe, despite what the evidence may suggest, or is it a matter of being forced to accept that a particular belief is the best way to make sense of the evidence? I'm not sure it's as simple as either of these, but I shall think on this some more.
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