Flann 5 wrote:Hi Robert, how are you?
Hi Flann, kind of you to ask. I am very well. I retired from the Australian Public Service on 3 January, and plan to devote my time to writing, reading, music, gardening, pursuing my intellectual interests and keeping myself healthy. I have just finished listening to Sam Harris’s podcast conversation
#63 Why Meditate? and found it very illuminating.
Flann 5 wrote: The truth is that neo-Darwinism is the shaky bulwark for materialist philosophy.
Yes, that is an important observation, which raises big problems about the relation between science, atheism and materialism.
My view is that nothing exists outside our universe, and that claiming otherwise is impious before the grandeur of nature. That means that ideas about God are generated by processes and patterns within our universe, including complex inter-temporal relationships and energies that our science does not begin to understand.
While such incomprehensible realities are inaccessible to our reason and observation, they still could have major influence upon us, and can still be posited as somehow generated from matter.
An example within the realm that we can understand is that the annual pattern of the seasons has deep influence on our DNA and our instincts, since seasonality is hardwired into our genes due to its constancy over the four billion years of evolution of life. But it is impossible for science to fully describe such subtle patterns.
One of the problems of materialist philosophy is the tendency to argue that only what we can perceive can be described as real. But there are undoubtedly things that influence us that we cannot perceive, and which can give rise to the intuition of divinity.
Flann 5 wrote: Personally I choose the authority of Jesus and God's word over alleged scientific refutation supposedly supplied by neo-Darwinism.
It is simplistic and harmful to posit the authority of God as standing in opposition to science. Clearly science does provide simple refutations of literal biblical claims. But what that means is that we should look at those claims more deeply, to find their rich meaning for faith, rather than argue that a literal surface meaning exhausts their content.
On Christmas Day the new minister at my church preached on how Luke’s nativity story is a foundation myth, full of rich meaning. She argued that both literalism and scepticism fail to engage with the meaning of faith. I completely agree with that line of reading.
Flann 5 wrote: But my belief is grounded in the many very remarkable fulfilments of prophecy pointing to it's divine source and personal experience of God hearing and answering prayer among other reasons.
Prayer is a way to refine our intentions and construct our hopes. The complexity of the human mind and spirit is so deep that it would be foolhardy for science to say that the answering of prayer is a meaningless claim, despite the very tenuous status of prayer against evidence. The healing power of faith is very strong.
My Bible Study group is currently reading Isaiah, and it is a truly wonderful book. This week we read
Chapter 55, which includes the great line ‘my ways are not your ways’. Seeing the numerous prophecies of the coming of Jesus Christ fully confirms my view that the process at work was that the hope gave rise to the belief, as key support for the scientific hypothesis that Jesus Christ was fictional.
The traditional line that you mention about fulfilled prophecy is far better explained in Darwinian causal evolutionary terms, that the Jewish people’s familiarity with the prophetic predictions primed the culture for the emergence of Christianity, using Isaiah and other prophets as a blueprint for the imaginative descriptions of the incarnation, which over time evolved into literal beliefs.
Flann 5 wrote:
So mine is a faith position but not without reasons supporting it. On the other hand the materialists hope to silence those disquieting voices saying Darwinism is the naked emperor of philosophical naturalism by name calling against their I.D. opponents.
Yes, there is a lot of rudeness from scientists towards people of faith. But that clearly cuts both ways.
The debate is over our highest values, with materialists believing that evidence and logic are the framework of ethics, against people of faith who see traditional authority as the highest value.
I think there is merit in both sides of this debate, and that what we will see is a cultural evolution of faith through a new reformation making Christianity compatible with scientific knowledge in a new integrated synthesis of faith and reason.