Posted by
Grampus on Thursday, September 28, 2006 7:02:44 PM
Lately, there have been comments coming from the Left concerning reaching out to Christians. Nancy Pelosi tried to quote the Golden Rule and got it wrong. It is only an election ploy coming from people that don’t believe in God and by their actions and words, display it constantly. It prompts me to make some salient points.
From an intellectual viewpoint, there is no inherent conflict between religion and science. Trouble comes from the efforts of atheistic materialists to hijack science.
Religion is obviously no impediment to scientific study of the natural world since all of the 17th century's groundbreaking discoveries and applications of mathematics to the natural world were the work of devout Christians.
In the 17th century, when natural science emerged as a new paradigm, religion and science were understood to be equally valid ways to study God's creation. The laws of mathematics and natural science had, after all, been created by God as part of the whole universe. The emerging paradigm of scientific experimentation was not conceived by seminal thinkers like Francis Bacon as replacing religion and classical philosophy. The physical sciences were, instead, to be a supplemental method to determine the nature of the physical world.
Religion, and the closely related field of classical Greek philosophy, are concerned with ultimate questions: who are we? whence came we? whither shall we go? why do humans uniquely among God's creatures construct political societies? what is the highest aim or purpose of humans and political society? how may we best attain them
Science seeks to answer more immediate questions: how do things in the material world work? In physics, the sub-field of cosmology deals with the structure, origin, and natural laws of the whole universe. The best known cosmological hypothesis is the Big Bang, in which the universe and time as we know it commenced with the explosion of unimaginably dense matter in a colossal release of energy at the sub-atomic level.
The Big Bang requires that all of the laws of physics, mathematics, and chemistry be in existence prior to the Big Bang. This means, inescapably, that God existed outside of time and outside of the universe, and that the Mind of God is the source of all the natural laws and mathematics that form the subject matter of the physical sciences. Matter being just another form of energy, God is also the source of everything that scientists study to understand the laws of nature.
Thus, when atheistic materialists, aka socialists and liberals, denounce religion and Greek philosophy as ignorant superstition, they are sinking their own canoe.
From the standpoint of atheistic and materialistic liberals, however, it is necessary first to destroy Western civilization's paradigm of religious morality if they are to replace it with atheistic materialism. Hence the unending assaults by the ACLU and other socialist organizations.
Grampus