At 10:14 PM 10/19/2006, David Opderbeck wrote:
>....We should spend more energy on thoughtful,
>unified responses to the fallacies of
>materialism than we do on sniping at other
>people of faith who question evolution, however defined. ~ David
@ Maybe something along these lines. ~ Janice
<http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1498140/posts>Atheism,
Scientists, and Squids
<http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1498140//^http://wafflinganglican.blogspot.com/2005/10/atheism-scientists-and-squids.html>The
Waffling Anglican ^ | 10/2/2004 | Mike the Prof
Posted on 10/06/2005 11:26:01 PM EDT by
<http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1498140//~miketheprof/>miketheprof
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1498140/posts
In Adult Sunday School, we’ve been reading Luke
Timothy Johnson’s book on the Creed. As part of
the discussion, we started talking about how to
encourage people to consider the existence of God
in an empirically slanted world. A sort of
careless atheism seems to be the default creed of
a lot of technically and scientifically oriented moderns.
It seems to me there are a couple of reasons for
this attitudinal bent, depending on who you are
talking about. Johnson refers to “practical
atheists” who deny God in order to edify
themselves and there desires. I’m not sure that
is the correct way to look at such folk; I’ve
always thought that, for a convinced atheist,
radical self-centeredness was the only truly
reasonable approach to life, To quote Benedict
XVI’s sermon from the current Synod of Bishops,
“When man makes himself the only master of the
world and master of himself, there can be no
justice. Then, arbitrariness, power and interests
rule." Practical atheism leads to a rather severe
utilitarianism – if something doesn’t provide me
with any value, then what good is it? I really
have no idea of how to talk about God to people
like that; the only thing I can think of to do is pray for them.
On the other hand, there are a lot of people in
this world who are not like the “practical
atheists” described above; they are just those
for whom nothing can be known that can’t be
empirically demonstrated. They equate, to a first
approximation, “knowing” with “measuring.” I
spent a lot of years as a practicing scientist,
and the labs of the world are full of them. If
God ever falls out of the equations, they’ll be
happy to be believers; otherwise, it is nonsense.
The thing is, you can talk to these people
because most of them aren’t really the strict
empiricists they think they are. Guys that do
science for a living don’t usually do it for the
money – there are lots of more lucrative ways to
make a living, and anybody that can get an
advanced degree in a real science can usually do
several of them well. And they usually aren’t
utilitarians – they don’t really do science
because of the useful stuff that comes out of it.
Utilitarians may pay their salaries, but most
scientists do science because they are interested in what they study.
The guy that works on squids does so because he
thinks squids are neat; the woman who spends her
life looking for extrasolar planets finds the
whole idea of alien worlds cool. In other words,
they think that squids and alien planets are
intrinsically worthy of study for their own sake.
And the fact that something is of intrinsic value
is not a fact that can be empirically determined.
The squidophile has already admitted, without
ever thinking about it, that there are ways of
knowing something (that squids are neat) other
than the “scientific” way of knowing.
And with that admission, the whole theological
convention floor is now opened to debate. The
journey from squid to God can turn out to be a pretty short one.
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Received on Thu Oct 19 23:44:15 2006
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