By “Scotsman” here, I mean not only the newspaper in which this mushbrained article appeared yesterday, but also its author, Peter Kearney, director of the Scottish Catholic Media Office. The piece, “Science and religion can be compatible,” floats a twisted form of “compatibility” which isn’t compatible at all. The thesis is simply this: science doesn’t understand everything, and therefore science and religion are compatible. He doesn’t even suggest directly that what science doesn’t understand—and by this I mean tangible, empirical observations—is the purview of God, though of course that’s probably his motivating idea. I suppose he’s simply recasting the God-of-the-gaps arguments: when we solve a mystery, it’s not that another appears, creating a gap, but that we simply can never solve the “why are things like they are” question. He uses the Higgs boson as an example:
The “discovery” of this particle, quickly christened the “God Particle”, brought him worldwide recognition. Despite its seemingly spiritual title, the “God particle” or “Higgs-Boson” does not conclusively prove the existence of God. Rather it conclusively proves the existence of the inexplicable. It is, in effect, a proof of doubt. Though lauded by science, and by many atheists, all too eager to use scientific discoveries or developments as nails to be hammered into the coffin of religion, it does in fact present a problem for science.
It seems Professor Higgs and his colleagues proposed this particle as a way to explain the existence of mass, since without it, science can neither explain why matter has mass, nor why it sometimes behaves as it does.
By postulating that this particle exists, that problem is solved by presuming the existence of another, heretofore unseen or unknown entity.
What? The particle was postulated, and THEN IT WAS FOUND. We don’t need yet another particle to explain the Higgs. The problem is solved. Kearney is deeply confused. And I’m not a physicist, but it seems to me that the existence of the Higgs field indeed explains why matter has mass. And we can explain most of what it does, too. But even if we can’t yet, why does that make religion and science compatible?
As for why the laws of physics are what they are, I find the answer “we don’t know yet, and maybe we never will” more satisfying than “There’s a triune God, a disembodied mind, who will take you to heaven if you accept as saviour the part of him that is the Son. If you don’t, you’ll fry forever.”
Kearney says even crazier things about dark matter and dark energy than he does about the Higgs. We don’t understand them and haven’t yet observed them directly, and so he claims that any explanations are “gap filling theories.” He doesn’t realize that these theories are provisional, but rather implies that making such hypotheses suggests there’s something wrong or even devious about science. He doesn’t seem to realize that that is in fact the way science works. Have a look at this crazy argument:
This isn’t the first time that science in general and cosmology in particular has had to come up with a “workaround” to explain the inexplicable. Among them; Guth’s Theory of Inflation which attempts to explain the absence of temperature disparities across the universe; the theory of “Dark Matter”, which is defined as something which can’t be perceived or measured in any way but whose presumed existence helpfully papers over a large number of theoretical cracks in our knowledge; and “Dark Energy”, an invention designed to explain why far from slowing down from the moment of the “Big Bang”, the expansion of the universe actually appears, counter intuitively, to be speeding up. They are all far from satisfactory “fixes”.
The so-called “scientific” explanation for the beginnings of the universe is very far from the neat and mathematically exact calculation, which many assume it to be. We’re told rigorous scientific method is the universal panacea to all our doubts and questions, a dependable calculus which always and everywhere explains the particulars of our origins and existence.
The fact that it doesn’t comes as a bit of a shock.
The proliferation of gap-filling theories is an acknowledgement of the unknowable and the unprovable.
In short, we don’t know everything. Reasonably, science accepts that things which can’t be seen or detected can have their existence proved by the measured reactions of other bodies affected by them – a rather spiritual formulation!
Well, Darwin’s 1859 book was also a “gap filling theory” at the time, but it’s one that proved to be correct, so the “unknowable” can indeed be known. Does Kearney know anything about science? Why did The Scotsman publish his lazy lucubrations?
Further, dark matter and dark energy are not “fixes,” they are “hypotheses,” and the conflation of these words (“fix” sounds both devious and pejorative) shows again that Kearney doesn’t understand science, and thus has no business saying that it’s compatible with religion. Can you show me a physicist who claims that dark matter and dark energy are “spiritual formulations”? Yet Kearney sees stuff like dark matter as a severe blow to unbelievers:
Such messy realities deal a significant blow to atheists and humanists who have invested so much of their energy in the primacy of what might be called “scientism”, the false creed which asserts that everything can be fully explained, leaving no need or place for a creator or deity. With the “discovery” of Higgs-Boson the jury is now in, and the verdict is clear; it can’t deliver it.
Of course even the most negative formulation of scientism doesn’t assert that scientists can explain everything “fully.” That’s Kearney’s take. In fact, I doubt you’d find a scientist who thinks that everything can and will be explained fully. We may be able to recreate life under primitive-earth conditions in the lab, but we will never know for sure that that is how it happened. So many historical events in evolution, geology, and cosmology are beyond our grasp that it would be insane to think that we could ever explain everything. As the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane said, in what I think is his best bon mot: Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”
Yet in that normal part of science, the part temporarily or even permanently beyond our reach, is where Kearney sticks his God. I find the following sentence rather amusing:
The unknowable and inexplicable is terrain on which the Church speaks with vast experience.
What Kearney means here is that the Church speaks on these matters with vast authority (“authority” meaning only that lots of people believe them). The church has no more knowledge or experience with scientific mysteries (or even matters like morality and meaning) than anybody else. All it has is millennia of pretended knowledge. But Kearney deliberately conflates that “tradition” with “experience”—with “experience” meaning “wisdom.”
The area of doubt or mystery, understood as that which is beyond human understanding, is very often where humanity finds itself. Grappling with mysteries, inaccessible to reason alone. That reality of course should no more deprive us of faith than our inability to fully explain the beginnings of the universe should undermine our belief in its present existence.
That is so garbled I don’t know where to begin. First, scientific theories like that of dark matter and energy, are based on evidence, not faith. The existence of God and other religious “mysteries” is based on faith and revelation, not evidence. When scientists don’t know something, they admit it. When the faithful don’t know something, they believe it anyway, and make up reasons (which they see as “rational”) why it’s true.
What should deprive us of our faith in God? The same thing that deprives us of our faith in Nessie, UFOs, or ESP: lack of evidence. Kearney is a man who starts out knowing what he wants to prove (probably because he was brought up Catholic) and then justifies it a posteriori. Such a method cannot be compatible with science. Further, Kearney cannot give us evidence that could disprove his God Theory. I can give you at least a dozen potential observations that could disprove the theory of evolution (none of those observations exist). And we can do that in physics: the Faster-Than-Light-Neutrino Theory was disproved by finding a loose cable.
In the end, perhaps unconvinced by his own argument, Kearney uses the Last Resort of the Beleaguered Theologian: he drags science down to religion’s level by assuming that both are based on faith:
Too often, however, we hear that doubt does not exist in the measurable and empirical world of science. It does. It always has. Faith and science in their own ways are driven by it as they seek truth. The “Big Bang Theory” is simply a theory, an effort to explain how something might have come from nothing.
But science can find truth (provisional, to be sure, but often very sound and unlikely to be overturned), while religion can find no truth. If it could, all faith-based inquiry would result in the same conclusions. The more than ten thousand religions on this planet, all with different tenets (does God love homosexuals? How many wives can you have? Is there a triune God, or only a unitary God? Must women sit at the back of the house of worship? Can you work on Saturday?) prove that faith is completely useless at understanding our cosmos.
And, by the way, the Big Bang is not simply a theory. There are ample observations to support it, including the temperature of the universe and the persistence of background radiation. How it came about de novo is a theory that hasn’t yet been substantiated, but it’s one that we might understand some day. That will never apply to the theory held by Catholics that Wine and Crackers Turn into Jesus on Sunday.
Kearney’s article doesn’t begin to prove that science and religion are compatible. He doesn’t even try. What it does prove is that theology and incoherent arguments are compatible—indeed, synonymous.
h/t: pyers
sub
//
As a Scotsman, I can only apologise.
Your fine whiskey makes up for it in amplitudes, no need for apologies.
Skål.
Exactly. The whole of Scotland would have to make many errors for centuries to make up for what they have given to my nose and taste buds.
You mean, like bagpipes?
b&
Ears were not mentioned
Slainte!
I must point out, however, that Scotland produces no whiskey.
All our glorious malts and bends are called whisky. By law.
Glad you like them better than our idiot theologians 🙂
Whisky it is from now on. 🙂
No need. All Scotsmen are entirely practical and well-grounded in reality. Peter Kearney cannot possibly be a Scotsman.
Indeed! No True Scotsman could write this rubbish. So many strawmen, the article constitutes a serious fire hazard.
+1
sub
Holy crap!…..literally.
This whole paragraph falls into the “Not Even Wrong” category. Everything that follows can be safely rejected without comment.
F. see me after class.
Holy crap = Divinity fudge.
A nice Fisking of the article, Prof Ceiling Cat.
There’s also some entertaining stupid on display in the comments!
Are nightjars indigenous to Scotland?
I’ve never seen any, not even on this site.
Ah ha! Proof they are there! Nobody ever sees them!
I expect that there are many who truly believe that they are, and the fact that they’ve never been able to see/find one only strengthens their belief.
Kearney, who I regret to say must be a distant relation, “The unknowable and inexplicable is terrain on which the Church speaks with vast experience.” Utterly brilliant, like Jane Austen at her best.
Cheers.
Yes, it’s worth inclusion in the famous anthology of the most absurd Christian statements.
I think this should be:
“Church people have vast experience in talking about what they don’t know and can’t explain.”
Makes perfect sense in this way…
Yes. It’s really sort of an own goal.
Peter Kearney, director of the Scottish Catholic Media Office has an incorrect title. It should be chief clown of the Catholic Media office.
Besides his ignorance of science and his ridiculous straw man arguments, he just makes shit up.
Does this clown have any education?
Surly he has a PhD? But that doesn’t address your question at all. Likely he was exposed to attempts to educate him, but much of the important parts didn’t take.
But, hey, he’s Catholic clergy so by godly fiat he is correct.
Religion and Science are as compatible as water and oil. Shake them together as much as you like, they just don,t mix. The only way to get them together is to add the surfacant of denial.
Hey, I like that phrasing!
Or the amphipathic molecule of accommodationism. But I like yours better.
Good. What logic, reason, and evidence have kept asunder, let no Catholic bring together.
Surfactant.
/pedant
It’s the Immiscible Conception!
Kearney is a man who starts out knowing what he wants to prove… and then justifies it a posteriori.
The posterior has historically proven to be a rich source of many assertions.
“A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.” — Bertrand Russell
This is well on display here.
Excellent job in dissecting this specimen. All the factual errors and logical fallacies are neatly dismembered and laid out nicely on the table.
Russell’s quotation here expresses a common indictment of atheists. The atheist can’t understand the depth and nuance and majesty of our talk about God because he or she always translates what they hear into something they can understand. Thus we have nonsense like God being a “hypothesis” or a “cause” among other causes — instead of metaphysics and God as the necessary precondition of causation!
Trouble is, the more the “clever” people try to explain what they mean about God, the more apparent it becomes that apparently the clever thing to do in this case is give a series of reasons why we should care nothing about either accuracy or understanding when it comes to God. God gets blurrier the closer you get.
“Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics [astronomy, biology, geology, etc.]; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. … Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books.”
— Augustine of Hippo (A.D. 354-430), The Literal Meaning of Genesis
[source][/source]
This sounds very much like a review of Ken Ham’s performance in the debate against Nye.
Augustine was basically a very smart man. In earlier times, he might have become a great Greek philosopher.
As is, he practically single-handedly invented the doctrine of “Original Sin” that succeeded in poisoning the mental balanc of the millions of Christians who ended up swallowing it.
Another fragment of evidence that gives support to the etymology theory that the word “cretin” derived from the Southern French pronunciation of “Christian”.
Original sin via Jesus ben Sirach (writer of Ecclesiasticus) ca. 200 BCE, hints in Paul then Irenaeus of Lyons (ca. 200 CE).
Cheers.
Sirach is one my three favorite books of the Bible.
Please give us ch. & verse number.
I never miss an opportunity to reread it or quote it (still very applicable to our modern world), but I would expect you to be able to mention the right citation.
As for Irenaeus, or Paul, hints were not enough to make the concept of Original Sin the virulent universal dogma that it became. Without Augustine, those hints would have remained frozen as what they were, hints.
There are strong hints of evolution in Lucretius’s De Natura Rerum, not enough to make them the basis for a universal principle of anthropology or biology.
Ecclesiasticus 25:33. Ham couldn’t have put it better, nor would he want to.
Slaínte.
Dermot C:
In the full study I have prepared of the role of Wisdom in the OT and Paul, I have primarily used the Oremus Bible Browser, essentially because it’s so elegant.
There’s no 25:33 in there, and I assume that you’re referring to Sirach 25:24
“24 From a woman sin had its beginning,
and because of her we all die. ”
My backup is the New Advent Bible, because it shows the Greek text and the Latin translation based on Jerome.
There indeed is listed Sirach 25:33:
“33 Through a woman sin first began; such fault was hers, we all must die for it.”
33 ἀπὸ γυναικὸς ἀρχὴ ἁμαρτίας καὶ δ{I’} αὐτὴν ἀποθνῄσκομεν πάντες
33 A muliere initium factum est peccati,
et per illam omnes morimur.
Yes, no doubt, Sirach says that we, humans, were made mortals because of the sin of Eve, but it was HER sin. Sirach is only making a reference to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of immortality.
Sirach does not say that this action made all descendants automatic sinners. This would be in total opposition to the teaching of the Hebrew Testament which imputes sin to specific actions of the individual Hebrews, not as a global malediction or a tribal fate.
In Sirach and other books of the OT, there is no collective condemnation of the whole race of Hebrews to become sinners as soon as they emerge from the womb.
It is possible to go back to that Sirach quote to illustrate the sin of Eve, and the mortality of the human species as consequence, as Sirach just does, but it is in no way the establishment of the fatalistic ORIGINAL SIN of Augustine – which does not sound as an ancient Hebrew thought.
And the development of early Christianity shows very well that the doctrine of universal sinner-fate —sticking to all men and women — was not even a firm tenet of the early Christian beliefs. Since the “hints” of Paul and Irenaeus had never resulted in a general Catholic dogma.
This universal malediction of collective sin became adopted by Catholics only after the contorted exegesis and inventions of Augustine.
Augustine definitely remains the founder and propagator of the Catholic dogma of Original Sin.
Yup, Roo, that’s the line, in my mum’s Catholic Bible,
The point I was rather making in abbreviated note form was the evolution of the idea: Jesus ben Sirach from 200 BCE is the first author whom I know to interpret the Fall in terms of sin – after all the word does not appear in the text. The Genesis story condemns man to toil: I think JbS introduced the interpretation of death for us all.
St. Paul in Romans 5: 12-21 ran with the death trip, something about many being made sinners by the disobedience of one man, if I remember correctly. Baptism obviously is a response to the taint.
A hundred or so years later Irenaeus, who I think first referred to ‘original sin’, ascribed mankind’s sin and mortality to the Fall; he also thought that humans shared the guilt.
The theology had a long incubation.
Slaínte.
Dermot C:
As soon as you introduce the notion of “Fall”, you already have injected the descent from grace into sin.
That is NOT what Sirach is referring to. He is simply mentioning that humans are mortals, and the fact is imputed to the Hebrew story of the expulsion from the Garden.
Sirach does not speak of “Fall”. This is a later Christian wording, injecting a lot of ancillary concepts.
Sirach does not speak of collective sin, or Original Sin, that is also a later Christian interpretation. A new phrase for a new idea.
And the hints of Paul and Irenaeus never established the belief in the original sin for all mankind since the exit from the Garden in all the branches of early Christians (and probably in none), considering that the first set of epistles did not appear until AD 140, and did not become disseminated until the AD 150-200 period.
By that time there had been dozens of roaming Christian prophets working the countryside, each promoting his “words of the Lord”. There was no press, no radio, no newspapers, no circulating library.
I have not yet checked out Q, the supposed collection of the “Sayings of the Lord” used by Matthew and Luke, to see, out of curiosity, if there is anything close to any concept of an Original Sin in there.
There were dozens of branches of Christian worship in the first centuries following Augustus, each with its own gospel, its own interpretation.
What was in Paul was unknown of most of them. Many early Christian writings don’t even quote anything from Paul. This was a time of free-for-all theorizing and preaching about Jesus.
This is what makes the study of this period so much fun — a historical detective story, more challenging than a chess game.
So there was no incubation, because there was no egg, because each branch was not only immune, but even opposed to the influence of its Christian competitors. If Paul emerged as the “super-prophet”, it is thanks to the accidents of history. His letters might never have come to light and disappeared like most early writings did.
Irenaeus was one bishop among many. Virulent Christian dissensions prevented the formation of any unified doctrine.
It is an illusion, created by orthodox Catholic historians, in rewriting history, that Christian beliefs grew organically in a straigh-line, like a chicken emerging from an egg. Genesis to Sirach, to Paul, to Irenaeus, to Augustine.
It simply was not how the Christian dogmas were hatched, ruminated, debated, emended and fixed. When they finally got established, it was by consensus in a series of Councils, the first one at Nicaea imposed by the military power of Constantine.
That is the very reason why Constantine ordered a Council of Nicaea in 325 to force the quarreling bishops to come to an understanding, under penalty or exile or even execution.
The idea of Original Sin didn’t even come in then. It needed a voice, a promoter, an advertiser, to give it literary existence, and that was the role of Augustine.
Adding to the mental torture of Hell, the malediction of the Original Sin painted a horrendous view of life to the terrorized European populations of the Middle Ages.
Future generations will have trouble understanding the absurdities of our modern beliefs, as we do those of the Ancient World.
I’m afraid I have to disagree with you about the Fall story necessarily involving the descent from grace into sin. It all depends how you interpret the tale within the Judaistic world-view. And, as I said, JbS appears to be the first to associate the tale with sin . ‘From the woman came the beginning of sin, and by her we all die.’ JbS was a nice man. I don’t see that as Catholic apologetics: it looks like a reasonable interpretation of the Hebrew text. I saw it first in the work of the atheist Robin Lane Fox.
I think I can save you some time rooting through Q, as Jesus, I think, does not refer to anything like original sin. I could be wrong.
Yes, I’m aware of the multiplicity of early Christian theologies and christologies – btw. I have Paul’s epistles collected by 120 CE at the latest (Robin Lane Fox, The Unauthorised Version). And of course, within the proto-orthodox they were viewed if not as scriptural, certainly as authoritative.
And yes, I do know of the heresies, the Marcionites, the Patripassians, the Sabellians, the Docetists, the Gnostics, the Ophites, the Ebionites etc.
It is possible to trace the development of the Original Sin idea back to BjS via the proto-orthodox and on to Augustine as one of many strands within early Judeo-Christian exegesis; whether one apologist was aware of another’s work depends on accidents of history but those ideas could not have been arrived at outside that tradition.
Yes to all the comments on Nicaea.
Btw, nothing is more challenging than a chess game, but it is good fun.
Slaínte.
Dermot C:
“I’m afraid I have to disagree with you about the Fall story necessarily involving the descent from grace into sin. It all depends how you interpret the tale within the Judaistic world-view. And, as I said, JbS appears to be the first to associate the tale with sin . ‘From the woman came the beginning of sin, and by her we all die.’ JbS was a nice man. I don’t see that as Catholic apologetics: it looks like a reasonable interpretation of the Hebrew text.”
No, it is not reasonable. You are reading these Hebrew texts through Catholic lenses.
First, Genesis 3:21-24 (I go back to New Advent)
“21 And now the Lord provided garments for Adam and his wife, made out of skins, to clothe them. 22 He said, too, Here is Adam become like one of ourselves, with knowledge of good and evil; now he has only to lift his hand and gather fruit to eat from the tree of life as well, and he will live endlessly. 23 So the Lord God drove him out from that garden of delight, to cultivate the ground from which he came; 24 banished Adam, and posted his Cherubim before the garden of delight, with a sword of fire that turned this way and that, so that he could reach the tree of life no longer.”
The Latin version is, to me, even clearer:
“23 Et emisit eum Dominus Deus de paradiso voluptatis, ut operaretur terram de qua sumptus est. 24 Ejecitque Adam: et collocavit ante paradisum voluptatis cherubim, et flammeum gladium, atque versatilem, ad custodiendam viam ligni vitæ.”
The whole discussion is about the TREE OF LIFE, which provides immortality. Adam & Eve are EJECTED (THROWN OUT) from Paradise (no mention of falling, or descending) so that they no longer can eat from the tree of life, and live ENDLESSLY.
So they leave Paradise to start a life of toil, of birth pains, and mortality.
No mention of grace, no mention of sin, no mention of anything that thrills the Christian mind. No mention of “original sin”.
I love the picture of the Tree of life, and the Cherubim planted in front of the garden with a sword of fire to stop any velleity of returning to grab the fruits of the Tree of Life. God watching from a distance, making sure that everything turns out as ordered. Pure Hollywood stuff.
Same with Sirach, who refers to the biblical story. If there is sin, it is strictly the sin of Even, who committed the FIRST act of sin. She did not create sin, she was seduced by the serpent, that’s all.
Notice that God is lenient, they are not even been threatened with annihilation.
In the Hebrew worldview, sin was not a vague virus that swims in the heads of humans.
It was not transmissible through parenthood. Sin was a definite ACTION against God created by a given mind rebelling against God. And as the Bible never ceases to repeat through the prophets, God didn’t take rebellion graciously.
The wrath of God was a constant threat invoked by the prophets. But always directed at people for a cause — naughty deeds.
[My suspicion is that those Hebrews must have been a very rebellious kind of people, for the priests to concoct such a military regimen of obedience, that was never fully successful.
Which is why the prophets kept popping up through their history to remind them of cleaning up their act and getting back into the good graces of God.]
I feel sorry for poor Sirach, who was a noble mind, to see him misread and misrepresented by Christian exegetes. But as a rule, misreading the Hebrew text was the habitual Christian style, and how they built the phantasmagoria of the Christ Jesus story by raiding the OT and distorting the meaning of its text.
Now, poor Sirach is not even escaping that fate.
It is only with Lorenzo Valla, followed by Erasmus (to the rage of Luther) that the early Italian humanists of the 15th c. dared claiming the right to examine the text and language of the Holy Scriptures for their real, original sense, not the official version invented by the Church over 1,500 years of massaging Greek and Hebrew.
Eve was never injected with a virus transmissible to all future generation, condemning all future generations to an incurable disease of rebellion against God.
God just wanted to take care of his people, destroy their enemies, and glorify Israel.
But he could not bear indifference, abandonment, even less rebellion. He was a jealous god.
The idea of an endless malediction against humans by God as a result of Eve and Adam’s actions is a Christian invention, concocted by the Christian minds who invented a new interpretation of the Hebrew Testament. This is no longer the Hebrew God, but a new, Christian god.
The idea of “original sin” transferable to all humans for eternity is a good fairy-tale massaged and put in good form by Augustine.
The hints of Paul, and the hints of Irenaeus had no impact on anybody. What about the hints of Tertullian, if any? He was able to concoct even more fantastic stories than any other early Christian.
The key is to reread the passages of Augustine where he develops the concept of Original Sin, and examine his arguments, one by one.
The Christian dogmas never developed like the fruits of a tree, because there was no Christian tree at all. Only bushes and wild herbs that never managed to create a nicely designed Roman garden.
@ Roo,
‘So they leave Paradise to start a life of toil, of birth pains, and mortality.
No mention of grace, no mention of sin, no mention of anything that thrills the Christian mind. No mention of “original sin”.’
Yes! Exactly the point I’m making. Btw. I read no biblical text through catholic lenses. And bravo for being the only other person I’ve ever come across who has used the lovely word ‘velleity’: and that’s not sarcastic.
As for the Hebrew God’s lenience, I prefer to call it caprice: after all, a prophet of YHWH told Ahab that he would pay with his life for not obeying YHWH’s demand that Benhadad be put to the sword; and Saul was deprived of his kingdom in Israel for failing to kill Agag, king of the Amalekites.
I can’t work up the energy to pity poor Jesus ben Sirach, the apologist for slavery, tiresome moral aphorist and misogynist extraordinaire.
We in the western Christian tradition have a tendency to think of the pre-Christian Judaistic tradition as ancient and set in stone: but just like the early Christian thought it evolved. To such an extent that the Eve story which dates from the early 8th century BCE in Judah could be interpreted within early 3rd century BCE Judaism, but not rabbinic Judaism, as a reference to sin.
Hell, if you read Law, ‘When God spoke Greek’ you’ll even find out that in certain ancient Hebrew traditions there were only the first 2 commandments; the other 8 come from different customs. Judaistic thought could be extremely fluid (within limits). Law is no apologist but he affirms that the Samaritan Bible, the Qumran Scrolls and even the Septuagint can be more representative of ancient Judaistic thought than the Masoretic text.
I think you have taken my inaccurate and throwaway word ‘hint’ and run with it: I withdraw it. But Paul certainly did have an impact: why otherwise would 6 of his 13 epistles be forged in his name if he were not seen as authoritative? Even Marcion included Paul in his canon.
I think it’s very difficult to determine the original meanings of the Hebrew texts; the more we find out, the more we know that there were many Hebrew texts, that the scriveners who copied the OT scrolls were as willing as the later Christian copyists to alter pericopes. Josephus mentions 22 books in the Hebrew Bible as opposed to the 24 of our Tanakh; he may have been talking about the same texts as us, but we don’t know.
Slaínte.
erm…late 3rd century. Sorry.
Cheers.
“The unknowable and inexplicable is terrain on which the Church speaks with vast experience.”
Arrogant fool.
Let’s look at the Church’s vast experience in speaking on the “unknowable and inexplicable”
epileptic seizures – unknowable (devil’s doing)
mental illness – unknowable (devil’s doing)
deadly infectious diseases – unknowable (god’s punishment)
…
Ugh. The worst form of accomodationism. It is “armchair accomodationism” that not only spins speculative castles in the air out of nothing, but actually fails to understand scientific method!!!
This fellow simultaneously
a) appeals to the open-endedness of science as an apology for religion. (As Dawkins has noted the fact that science doesn’t know everything doesn’t mean religion knows anything.)
b) Describes various hypotheses as “fixes”
as if scientists do NOT realize their field is open and are generating hypotheses in order to establish science’s omniscience. (Not really.)
This sort of accomodationism is a science-stopper, effectively suggesting science should throw in the towel when there are strong mysteries, although I don’t think this fellow will admit it.
“That will never apply to the theory held by Catholics that Wine and Crackers Turn into Jesus on Sunday.”
I was taught that transubstantiation was the real deal. Easily substantiated by a controlled test for human protein and DNA.
Still waiting for the results.
The DNA would settle a few other questions as well.
Yuck!
a buddy, raised Cafeteria Catholic style, was quite surprised the wafer and wine were not metaphors
My favorite:
“Too often, however, we hear that doubt does not exist in the measurable and empirical world of science.”
…according to who? Every actual scientist I’ve ever spoken to said science *runs* on doubt. It’s the churches that claim to have a headlock on certainty.
According to whom?
According to every pseudoscientific crank and crackpot who has failed to dazzle the scientific world with their paradigm-shifting claims, that’s who. Instead they’ve been dismissed with some well-chosen evidence and argument, neither of which they believe to be the real reason. The real reason they’re being told they’re wrong is because the measurable and empirical world of science is a hegemonic closed-minded group of gatekeepers who do not DOUBT because they do not dare to DREAM.
There are a lot of things scientists are technically prepared to doubt but for all practical purposes don’t — usually for good reason. But cranks know better. Therefore any failure to reduce ALL beliefs to the same epistemic level of probability — or at least do this with theirs — is “fundamentalist extremism.”
Kearney’s article is poor science, and poor theology.
OMFSM — it’s the Wind Argument!!!
“Now, when we look outside the window we can’t see the wind, but we know it is there because we observe the moving branches of the trees. That is how we can know that God exists. We can’t see Him directly, but we know God is there by looking to see what He has done and is doing.”
Welcome to Sunday School. This is an apologetic which is often given to small children because it’s simple and easy enough for an immature mind to grasp. It takes a more mature mind to realize that hey, no, this doesn’t really work. In fact, it’s pathetic.
Kearney is beefing up the juvenile Wind Argument with a lot of analogies to science in order to hide its impoverished and childish origins. “You know the way that scientists hypothesized Dark Energy from anomalies in measurements? Why, children, that’s just like the way we can know there is a God!”
“Spiritual formation” my *ss.
Take all the garbled analogies out of apologetics and where would the enlightened, reasonable, sophisticated defenses of faith be? When you finally get reasonable people to explain why they believe in God, this is the sort of mess which often ensues. They think it’s lovely and wise and deep because they keep running it by lovely, wise, deep fellow believers and they all love it!
It’s a lot of wind. And it blows.
+1
Analogies can be very useful, but they are ultimately a form of rhetoric. Science doesn’t need analogies the way theological apologetics does. As you wrote, take the analogies out of theology and you’re left with just about nothing.
And this formulation of the Wind Analogy is particularly frustrating because it seems that Kearney is at once trying to attack science for the “stopgap” theories of dark energy and dark matter (scientists don’t actually know what’s going on; they just made this shit up; you can’t trust scientists), while simultaneously saying “we can find god the same way we find dark matter and dark energy”.
As you’re fond of writing, “pick a horse and ride on it!”
The worst thing for me about the “Wind Argument,” as Sastra has labeled it, is that you really, truly, honestly can actually see the wind and the air. When stars twinkle, it’s because of wind. The shimmering of distant objects on hot days is a related visible phenomenon. Look up on a clear day and you see blue, right? You’re looking at air. Look at distant mountains, and they take on a sky-blue tint; that’s the air between you and the mountain that you’re looking at. The farther the mountain, the bluer it looks — just like how, even when you’re under water, the farther the object the bluer it looks as well.
This, of course, ignores all the non-visual ways of directly experiencing wind — such as dust devils and blowing leaves and flags and windmills — let alone all the technological ones like doppler radar.
If the gods were anything like wind, we’d all have apps that came pre-packaged with our smartphones that told us as much about the daily divine whims as the real apps that do come on the phones tell us about the weather.
Cheers,
b&
Definitely. First and foremost it’s just plain wrong.
But then there’s this whole inconsistency thing Kearney does with it, using it both to denigrate science and to legitimize religion.
Anybody interested in the actual explanation and significance of the Higgs would be well advised to pay attention to what this Web site’s official physicist, Sean Carroll, has to say about it. He’s got a book on it, and you can find some great lectures of his on YouTube with excellent summaries — summaries that, oh-by-the-way, are also very good layperson-accessible introductions to Quantum Field Theory.
Cheers,
b&
I really, really, really want to kick the crap out of the publisher that wouldn’t let Lederman go with the “Goddamn Particle”. There will be no end to this stupidity in our lifetime because of this.
This sums it up pretty well:
http://lolyard.com/3897/god-particle
b&
That is one of my favourite memes because Pulp Fiction is one of my favourite movies.
Once I was home sick & reading about the Higgs-Boson & JWs came to my door. I almost shared what I was reading with them but 1) I was sick 2) I remembered the advice from my exJW friend not to engage them if you don’t want them to return.
But if they don’t come back then where are you supposed to get your squeaky toys?
b&
That’s what the interwebs is for. 🙂
Not for you — for the cats! Most cats prefer fresh squeaky toys….
b&
Yes. Bugger. I was going to comment they should have called it the ‘Satan particle’, that would have shut the god squad up, but ‘Goddamn particle’ would indeed have been better.
Or, they could have called it the Goddamned Motherfucking Sonofabitch Asshole Shithead Particle — “Jesus,” for short.
Cheers,
b&
Ha ha. A Classic Ben Goren post. 😀
Might have had something to do with the fact that I just had some Jesus for lunch.
No…actually, it was cheeses. And crackers.
Close enough.
b&
“The unknowable and inexplicable is terrain on which the Church speaks with vast experience.”
In other words (mine), the Church doesn’t know what it is talking about. I agree.
That’s exactly how it reads to me, too.
An important question for the theologians: Do the wine and crackers turn into Jesus or does Jesus turn into the wine and crackers?
My all time favorite link from the wine and crackers crowd: http://www.catholic.com/blog/michelle-arnold/god-is-in-the-details
God isn’t a bearded guy in the sky. He’s a bearded guy in a cracker. Some like to hang out in the presence of the cracker so that they can bathe in the goodness of Jesus.
I kept reading the post at that link thinking, “man, what a great deep parody…”
But it never quit being serious…gahh!
I haven’t read any of the comments yet, but I expect there are about seven “no true Scotsman” references already . . .
/@ / Paris
I’d take up the wager but it wouldn’t be fair. 😉
I was overly … pessimistic, I guess?
/@
Can the accomodationists tell these people (the author of the dumb article, not the posters here) not to speak about science? 😉
“The unknowable and inexplicable is terrain on which the Church speaks with vast experience.”
ROFL
http://news.sciencemag.org/social-sciences/2014/02/live-chat-can-science-and-religion-coexist
Answer. No.
“Among them; Guth’s Theory of Inflation which attempts to explain the absence of temperature disparities across the universe;”
Kearney has this pretty well backwards. Guth developed his inflation theory to explain the absence of magnetic monopoles. That an explanation of the homogeneity of the universe emerged as a consequence contributed to the acceptance of inflation by other phycists, but was not the initial focus of Guth’s thinking.
I think that sect should be told the first rule of religious holes: if you are near one, disengage tongue – unless you like the taste of crap.
– I can’t tolerate the mistaken idea that inflation, dark matter or dark energy/cosmological constant are “gap fillers” or “place holders” elsewhere. What makes Kerney so sure I will accept his crap among others?
All of these hypotheses have been successfully ordered into the well tested and accepted standard inflationary cosmology, and all the contenders have been rejected as inadequate to boot.
[Inflation is still considered open, but that is because the most constraining test of finding primordial gravity waves have not been done. If it turns out it will be impossible, a not unlikely condition, what likely will happen is that scientists, kicking and screaming, will have to accept inflation as what remains.]
– I have also a hard time to understand what people mean with “direct” and “indirect” observations. All our sensory observations, as well as our experimental observations are indirect.
Quantum mechanics tells us that is how it must be, since observables aren’t decided until observational interaction happens.
Relativity tells is that is how it must be, since we are forever looking into the non-present non-local relative past of “there” instead of “here”. It also tells us the correspondence is between physical laws and not observations.
And it seems to me the large dichotomy instead is between lab observations, that can be repeated at will, and non-lab observations of processes. Those are either one offs but that can be observed repeatedly (deep time cosmology, geology, evolution) or are stochastically repeating (astronomy). Resolution and constraint suffer in the latter case, but that is “all”.
Right. I don’t see religious sects working hard to try to understand matters of cosmology or chemical evolution.
A nit:
Ironically it doesn’t, and it doesn’t pretend to. It is a media duck that Kerney takes for a walk.
To break it down:
– Dark matter is ~ 80 % of the universe mass. The Higgs field doesn’t interact with that particle sector. If it is supersymmetric particles, it’s SS partner the higgsino may play a similar role.
– Of the remainder, most particles (10^9:1) are CMB photons but the bulk of mass is in hadrons (protons and neutrinos). And those are bags of relativistic quarks and gluons, where the 3 valence quarks stands for a mere 5 % of the mass while the remainders are relativistic mass.
– So by matter content, among the standard model particles whose mass are supplied by the Higgs field (not the massless ones, not the neutrinos and partly not its own free Higgs particle), the Higgs field supplies a few percent of mass.
But it is important mass, if Higgs didn’t made its contribution the neutron would be stable instead of the proton. And so no atoms – everyday matter – would exist.
My 2 p (and I’m no biologist):
That may now depend on how much resolution [there is that word again!] you ask for I think. There are abiogenesis pathways worked on where homologies between geosystems and biosystems seems to be present, as opposed to earlier theories.
So we may be able to resolve what happened in some respects, even point to relevant geological fossils akin to the CMB fossil radiation, like ‘other’ paleontology.
Oy. “protons and neutrinos”.
Also, not a typo but a dumb-o: “hadrons (protons and neutrinos)” also include mesons (2 valence quarks). I wasn’t including them in the rest.
If you stumble at “Higgs-Boson” …
Like tech journalists that write “I-Pad”.
It’s just not what it’s called!
/@