Christian Democrats in the United States

Wednesday, May 23, 2007 2:12 PM

theories, axioms and deductions

Every theory is a symbolic representation of reality: assume core axioms, and apply logic to deduce experiments that support the axioms.

Over time, this results in a symbolic calculus with predictive power.

But this predictive power of a formula cannot be confused with the real power of the universe described.

The history of science leads us to believe that every once in a while, people think they are right, but something else comes along and throws all that out the window.

Science cannot claim that it will discover the truth about everything, because no symbolic representation can be everything. It cannot claim that it will discover everything just because it has discovered some things.

Similarly, religions cannot claim that science discovers no truth, because science is only a language and method to describe the world around us.

I mean, gosh, why should the ideas of evolution and god be exclusionary?

Personally, if I were a supreme being who had total control over reality, I would get bored of using it all the time, because what is the fun of that? That is part of the gift of free will. If God micro-managed everything, the universe would be lonely and boring.

The clockwork of the universe is just as valuable to study whether an individual thinks there is a God behind the curtain or not.

Science people should relax about religious people who believe there is something more.

Religious people should relax about science people who say patterns in nature explain themselves, and stop telling us they have any idea of the details of God's plan, because no one knows.

If you want to believe in angels, why not? If a "scientist" thinks that all of creation can be figured out in a few hundred years with a computer, they are wrong. If the angels were purely spirit with existence outside our realm, or alien creatures from another planet, or bird-people with wings, the super-evolved product of the dinosaurs long ago, none of those possibilities would disprove a watching, present God, either.

An act of deception does not disprove the truth. Lucifer only claims to bring the light - but that deceptive claim cannot tarnish God's true light.

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Thursday, May 10, 2007 9:11 AM

evolution

Darwin said he didn't understand how humans made the leap that separates them from animals. That wasn't what he recorded.

All his theory says is, if a particular species of bird eats a particular type of flower nectar, and that flower mutates and its offspring have a different shape, only individual birds with the right shaped beak will survive, and the pattern for that beak will propagate.

If that were not true, would that somehow feed the poor? Stop worrying about what other people believe. Let your faith lead to acts of generosity so people will see God with you. Don't push them away with Sunday school parroting against evolution.

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Monday, May 7, 2007 10:34 AM

creation and big bang theory

Here's another example of where religious people and science people talk past each other.

Religious people are too stuck in time. "A thousand years is like a day to Him."

Anyway, religious people ask, well, what happened before the big bang? There was God setting it in motion.

But that's the thing -- space and time are blended on the edges mathematically, and when the universe exploded from being smooshed down into a nut in the first moments, space and time become indistinguishable. So the question of what happened "before" does not make sense. You ask "before" with the math and suddenly you are asking "left" or "right" and are going forward in time again.

That's what makes it so profound -- anyone on either side of this supposed "debate" can see that.

In fact, this has just been another method to divide people into camps that can be played off one another.

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Tuesday, May 1, 2007 8:00 PM

Science and Religion

Even if the daily mechanics of our clockwork reality exhibit regular behaviors that we call laws, for some reason it is not difficult for most people to imagine that the clockwork was set in motion, even if from outside time, by a creator that we do not claim to fathom, who continues to exercise divine authority here and there. As for the details, we don't think God or the devil is trying to trick us with dinosaur skeletons or carbon dating formulas. We choose not to debate the literality of the Bible or be drawn into false debates to "prove" the existence of God within limited conceptual systems. God laid forth a world before us, and though we should not allow ourselves to be mesmerized by it, we should learn to appreciate it at every level, but we must let love temper our curiosity.

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