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Science 'versus' God ?
It has been posted that Carl Sandage wrote:
"People have attacked me because I do only one thing. But that one thing is to try to figure how the world is put together. The world is incredible, just the fact that you and I are here, and that the atoms of your body were once part of stars. They say I’m on some sort of religious quest, looking for God; but God is the way it’s put together. Anyway," he laughed,"I’m a nut, you know. Crazy."
The poster of the above message added:
Few agree with Carl Sandage, he admits this with his own words. He attempted to theologize science.
If you are making the point that unanimous agreement does not exist, you are correct but this has been known for some time. Astrophysics is a relative new field and theoretical. Attempts to formulate a Theory of Everything (TOE) continue much at the contempt of theists who oppose this.
Intelligent Design will not replace science.
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K B Robertson (RascalPuff) wrote:
Your invocation of Carl Sandage and theism launches the endemic rhubarb between theology and science - as though the two issues were stringently antithetical.
Whereas, 'god' is routinely considered as the intelligent designer of the universe since the times preceding and including Pythagoras, to the present; where mathematicians and heuristic scientists daily and openly proclaim to prove the existence of a supreme being. In contrast to your direct implication that it is tantamount to scientific heresy to do so. It is a long and widely known fact that the exemplary Einstein not infrequently - and openly - said that his endeavors included an inquiry as to 'how God thinks'. Due to the nature of what scientists preoccupy themselves with, many are not only non-atheistic, but closer to God than many avid church-goers and pulpit pounders.
The posturing of contemporary practitioners of science is certainly not in league with the 'creationist' schools of thought who glibly speak of a time when an anthropomorphically assembled 'god' snapped 'his' prototypically unimprovable fingers and 'made' a universe and earth, oh, say, several thousand years ago. Thereafter, inhabiting the earth with people, perhaps at a time not long before the Monkey Trials.
Such organized beguilements do not at all parallel the endeavors of men and women in science who are in search of the parameters of the final frontier, aiming to go where no man or woman has gone before. In these circles, the - perhaps inevitable - issue of god emerges only inadvertantly and until further notice in such company, it is regimentally understood that:
God is on sabbatical.
Perhaps after stubbing 'his' irreproachable metatarsal over scientific expeditions in search of a Theory of Everything (TOE).
The debate over the Biblical presentation of the original creation of humanity and Darwin’s Origin of the Species - the adventures of the Bible (many of which continue to prove out as true) and the contrary facts of life - is an argument that may never end. Speaking for myself and no small number of others I find it no less divine or miraculous - no less an ‘act of God’ - that mankind exists and arrived in the here and now (on its way to a future of there and then), by way of an evolutionary process approximately or precisely as Darwinism reveals. The transition from a fertilized mammal egg to embryo to a recognizable human fetus, includes an intermission of the entire process of evolution, not excluding the reptilian feature of gill slits - this is a powerful station for Darwinism, which, in 1950, was pronounced by Pope Pius XII (and other popes since then), as non contrary to Christianity.
Of course these considerations are not unusual in discussions relating to the mystery of human existence and the despair that may accompany an unanswered existential question of whether or not there is a God. A major grist of devout atheism is that ‘believers’ are afraid not to believe in God... That the burden of human consciousness is unbearable without the comfort of a supernatural reason for being.
Whereas, the inescapable fact that inanimate matter organized itself not only to become animate, but to become sentiently self aware is manifest proof of ‘higher power’; a so called ‘intelligent designer’, aka ‘supreme being’. ‘Nature’ by any other name.
Such considerations tend to reverse the question of whether there is or not a God, to a question of how could there not be...
Anti-theism is marooned with the manifest self and others who came into being ‘inadvertently’; without any guidance from a higher power. It would seem in such contemplations that it is much more difficult to be an an atheist, or anti-theist, than to yield to what is apparently the inevitability of intelligent design, so far, beyond the mortal human ability to fully accommodate.
There is the issue of ‘divine intervention’; reasoning that if there is a God, why are terrible events - large and small - allowed to occur in the course of human existence. This question and the disappointment that accompanies it, is based, a priori, on the existence of a ‘personal God’ - a power which insures justice - per individual - in the corporeal world of mortality. Clearly, such expectations of God intersect with superstition.
That perspective leads to what is called ‘victimology’. Where it is reasoned that those who suffer - especially extreme - misfortune, are (invariably) slated to do so by ‘the will of God’, who metes out punishments for trespasses committed in this life, or, in cases applying to the suffering of very young children, those who have sinned in a (reincarnated) life preceding this one (Granted that life is inherently a struggle, and that some suffering is inevitable...). In other words, those who suffer severe misfortune are unsympathetically perceived as being pronounced guilty - with a sentence of punishment passed - by God. Such reasoning is commonplace (and a misapplication of the word, ‘karma’) as it is applied to the destitute masses in the country of India, for example.
In Western culture, these and other dilemmas led to the separation of church from state. The schizoid argument continues, with routine stories of religious ritual and regalia being prohibited and removed from government institutions, for example. While the federal government continues to mint certificates of currency bearing the inscription, ‘In God We Trust’.
Your vigilant awareness and defense of scientific method and its practitioners does not go without appreciation in this discussion.
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Originally Posted by chazzysaw 
