Peter Kreeft on the importance of Miracles

Randall ended last weeks Forum by posing the question: What is lost if Miracles didn't happen?

Peter Kreeft comes to this conclusion:

"Subtract miracles form Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, or Taoism, and you have essentially the same religion left. Subtract miracles from Christianity, and you have nothing but the cliches and platitudes most American Christians get weekly (and weakly) from their pulpits. Nothing distinctive, no reason to be a Christian rather than something else." (Peter Kreeft, Christianity for Modern Pagans, 1993; p. 273)

What are the miracles that form the structure of Christianity?...Peter Kreeft lists 8!

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John Lennox comments on Hawking's Unnecessary God

Stephen Hawking has claimed God is not needed to create the universe and there is no need for God in this universe!

Hawking is claiming that physical law created this universe...John Lennox is one of the men who is argueing against this. The interviews found here (Part 1 and Part 2).

What do you think...is philosophy "dead" as Hawking claims?

What implications does the creation of the world by physical law have on how we treat each other?

Since Randall made such a great comment...

on the last post, I thought we would flesh that out a little bit here. A key component of science is "repeatability"! "Science is based on facts"...so goes the claim. The effect of gravity, water boiling or freezing...we see the repeatability of science.

But take what Stephen Jay Gould says about Evolutionary Science in his book Wonderful Life: "you can't go home again, evolutionarily, unless you want to risk not being here when you come back." (quoted in Horner, How to Build a Dinosaur, 1)

Horner goes on to say: "What he [Gould] was saying was that evolution is a chance business, contingent on many influences and events. You can't rewind it and run it over and hope to get the same result. The second time through Homo Sapiens might not appear. Primates might not appear." (Horner, 2)

So evolutionary science is un-repeatable! It not only is impossible to test; but impossible to replicate.

The NOMA Theory of Faith and Reason at its best. Horner and Gould want their faith separate from their reason and scientific thinking; but as we can see there is no repeatability and empiricism that can be accomplished in Evolutionary studies!

Why do you think repeatability is a key to scientific investigation? What does "faith" have to do with "repeatability"?

Faith-based Science

This morning I was reading an article that started off like many others:

"Science, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term “doubting Thomas” well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue."

I was worried where he might end up. But in the article, Paul Davies points out the faith based system in which Science operates.

"The problem with this neat separation into “non-overlapping magisteria,” as Stephen Jay Gould (NOMA) described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order."

Remember the NOMA Diagram (two tangental circles with no overlap). Davies is obviously arguing against a NOMA paradigm. He seems to be advocating an integration system but to what degree?

"Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe"

Davies is ambiguous in where he lands on the question of God...but his point is apt: "science and religion both have their basis in faith." (Read the whole article here)

The big question remains: who (or what) does Davies seem to be putting his faith in as the organizer and rule outside of this universe?

Daniel Dennett says faith is as deadly as drunk driving...

"People are revered for their capacity to live in a dream world (faith/Religion), to shield their minds from factual knowledge and make the major decisions of their lives by consulting voices in their heads that they call forth by rituals designed to intoxicate them."

"It used to be the case that we tended to excuse drunk drivers when they crashed because they weren't entirely in control of their faculties at the time, but now we have wisely inverted that judgment, holding drunk drivers doubly culpable for putting themselves in that irresponsible position in the first place. It is high time we inverted the public attitude about religion as well, finding all socially destructive acts of religious passion shameful, not honourable, and holding those who abet them - the preachers and other apologists for religious zeal - as culpable as the bartenders and negligent hosts who usher dangerous drivers on to the highways. Our motto should be: Friends don't let friends steer their lives by religion."

"This imperviousness to reason is, I think, the property that we should most fear in religion. Other institutions or traditions may encourage a certain amount of irrationality - think of the wild abandon that is often appreciated in sports or art - but only religion demands it as a sacred duty."

"The better is enemy of the best: religion may make many people better, but it is preventing them from being as good as they could be. If only we could transfer all that respect, loyalty and intense devotion from an imaginary being - God - to something real: the wonderful world of goodness we and our ancestors have made, and of which we are now the stewards."

Read the full article here!

What method of interaction (between faith and reason) is Dennett advocating? Lord Wilson was debating him...what do you think about his responses? How would you respond to Dennett and his concerns and claims?

I agree with him that much atrocity has been done in the name of religion, but just as much attrition came at the hands of the religion of humanism!

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