quote:He quoted St. Basil the Great, a fourth century saint, as saying some people, "fooled by the atheism that they carry inside of them, imagine a universe free of direction and order, as if at the mercy of chance."
"How many of these people are there today? These people, fooled by atheism, believe and try to demonstrate that it's scientific to think that everything is free of direction and order," he said.
Moreover, B.J., you seem to have misunderstood my point, which was not "that dumb Pope believes in creation," but, rather, that the Pope recently implied that the underpinnings of modern biology were derived from an atheist ideology.
Yeah, because the fourth century was a time of enlightenment that should be revered. This is the guy that wrote:
quote:We will start, my children, by considering this human life as absolutely worthless. And anything that is useful to us only for this life we do not regard as good at all or worthy of the name. ...Our hope extends much further. We do everything we do with a view to preparing ourselves for another life. And anything that can be useful for that life must, we say, be loved and sought out with all our strength. ...
That gets back to the whole head-in-the-sand notion that anything can be answered by saying "because God wills it", so why bother trying to explain anything? After all- it's all just dress rehersal for the afterlife...who cares about silly biology when the only goal is to sit at God's right hand in a non-coporeal realm? We now return you to The Dark Ages (already in progress).
quote:Originally posted by Timo: Oops. Scrolling back, it seems that
a) Jason happened, and b) I was too damn busy trying to bi) earn a living bii) find a screencap of that map of Voyager's route home to do anything about it. Timo Saloniemi
I do that sometimes, sorry.
quote:Originally posted by Sol System: There is, if you want to really get down to basics, a leap of faith involved here from both angles. But they are qualitatively different leaps, namely: faith that your observations fundamentally map to some exterior reality (that we aren't just brains in a jar, as the old saw goes) versus faith that despite being unobserved an entity or realm exists.
Untill you get to Quantum Theory, anyway. Then you get a whole gaggle of scientists basing their careers on the possible existance of an unobserved realm of existance (String/Loop/Vibrational Attunment Theories).
I dig Darwin's rationale- that any discovered complexity and diversity only further glorifies God.
...though, I'm a supporter of Loki, myself, of course.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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