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Post by turoldus on Jun 15, 2009 18:10:34 GMT
http://metamagician3000.blogspot.com/2009/06/noma-no-more-great-accommodationism.html
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Post by humphreyclarke on Jun 15, 2009 19:24:11 GMT
NOMA is dead?. I didn't know it was alive in the first place.
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Post by jamierobertson on Jun 15, 2009 19:37:53 GMT
Not sure how I feel about NOMA, but there are some rather odd statements about religion in that article.
True; but I similarly fail to see why a prophet should divulge these things, when they are (after all) things that could be discovered through science without God's explicit help. The primary function of a revelaed religion, one would think, is to... well, reveal that which wouldn;t be known otherwise. Humanity needed a saviour much more than we needed to know how old the earth was - hence, God provided us with one.
Eh? That's begging the question a bit, isn't it?
Similarly, nowhere is the underlying assumption of utilitarianism examined here. Morality is the end, in and of itself - whilst I have seen from history that God's moral commands usually do result in the greatest fulfillment of humanity when they are adhered to, there are other factors to consider, like justice and (gasp!) altruism.
Ultimately, our moral direction is to love God and love others. Now, love (agape) means doing what is best for someone's welfare, but this is a) sometimes not what makes them happiest (as a doctor who has wielded numerous needles and instruments of examination, I know this well!!!) and b) is often not immediately obvious to us. Is it perhaps possible that God, knowing all possible futures and being the ultimate definition of justice, has a better handle on what is the right thing to do?
Well, that scriptures tend to be interpreted differently by flawed people is hardly the fault of the scipture, especially when people exist in such a wide variety of flawed forms. But I'd suggest that it would be impossible to provide a fully comprehensive, every-possible-scenario-covered law. Even Deutoronomy, whic is pretty extensive, was didactic and expected to be interpreted and executed according to the circumstances and context. Lying may be deeply immoral (if you're putting an innocent person in jail) or very moral indeed (if Anne Frank is in your loft) - that it depends on context does not mean that we should think that Exodus 20 is nonsense.
And as for Euthypro, it's a bit rich to call God's morals "arbitrary" when the humanist alternative is "whatever the humanist author of the blog happens to whip from his posterior".
Again, a little deontology helps the tricky conundrum go down. I can't prove that stopping gay marriage will improve human prosperity, but I am pretty sure that:
a) God, the definition of morality, thinks it's a bad idea and
b) God's morality has a track record of helping people in the real world (John 10:10).
Therefore, I trust Him on that one. (I know others on the board might disagree with my view on gay marriage, saying that premise 'a' is flawed, which is fair enough; but I hope my reasoning from that point is sound!)
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Post by humphreyclarke on Jun 16, 2009 10:13:39 GMT
NOMA was never really taken very seriously by anyone; I doubt it was even taken very seriously by Stephen Jay Gould when he proposed it. I think the present spate of NOMA bashing is just a frilly way of saying you think religion is a load of tosh rather than a threat to some established order.
Let's turn to Russell Blackford:
I think these kind of comments are built on a rather superficial view of human categories of knowledge. If you look for example at the history of ideas you will see that there is invariably a kind of interplay between religion and other disciplines; for example between religion and law in the case of people like Francisco de Vitoria, Hugo Grotius and the Bologna Jurists; between religion and science in the case of Descartes, Galileo and Newton; between religion and political philosophy in the case of John Locke and even someone as recent as John Rawls. This invariably leads to religious ideas being interpreted and expressed in a 'secular' context.
In the OT or the NT, divine inspiration occurs within a specific societal context and it is generally applied in the field of morality and ethics; the workings of nature are rarely mentioned. The intent of someone like Isaiah or a Jeremiah is to denounce the cruelties and injustices of their society and prophecise an impending judgement. Jesus also appears in this tradition. Hence while there is no reason in principle why scientific knowledge can't come from religious contemplation in the OT and NT it isn't the pre-occupation of any of the writers.
What we do see later on is that religious reflection does result in scientific knowledge and here one thinks of Descartes reflections and his laws of Motion, Kepler's Laws, Copernicus's notion of divine simplicity and the way in which Natural Philosophy was pushed forward in the early modern period. So for example, Stephen Gaukroger writes:
'...what made natural philosophy attractive to so many in the seventeenth and eighteenth century were the prospects it offered for the renewal of natural theology. Far from science breaking free of religion in the early-modern era, its consolidation depended crucially on religion being in the driving seat: Christianity took over natural philosophy in the seventeenth century, setting its agenda and projecting it forward in a way quite different from that of any other scientific culture, and in the end establishing itself as something in part constructed in the image of religion.'
So I think that there is an issue with restricting the Christian tradition to the OT and the NT and saying 'well I don't see anything particularly useful in there, therefore religion is useless'; the reason being that these texts have been interpreted by later writers to develop concepts and systems of knowledge that we mistakenly believe have an entirely secular origin. For example, the western legal tradition was mainly a product of medieval jurists re-interpreting Roman law through the prism of their Christianity and completely re-inventing it in the process. The idea of natural rights (human rights) is not explicit in the bible but it followed from religious reflection on the scriptures, the development of a legal vocabulary to support it and the arrival of contingent historical events in which they could be applied.
One could turn this statement around and say that, far from being authoritative, secular wisdom ends up needing to be interpreted in the light of holy books. That is what we often see in history. Hence, despite some herculean efforts from utilitarian philosophers, purely rationalist systems of morality usually end up as failures. Legal positivism was a disaster so we got the UDHR which is a sort of return to the natural law tradition inspired by religion.
Lastly Greek natural philosophy had to be completely reinterpreted in the light of scripture and it was this marrying of the Judeo-Christian worldview to Hellenic knowledge (Via Islamic monotheism) which created modern science.
Hence I don't think it is an either or thing as Blackford makes out. It should be a dialogue between religious insights and secular concepts.
Good example would be this case here. We would have to have a theological discussion concerning A) and apply secular knowledge to the problem as well.
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Post by unkleE on Jun 16, 2009 11:40:48 GMT
This awakens my imagination .....
Moses: Hey Aaron, how do you spell "quark" in Hebrew?
Aaron: No idea. What do you want to know that for?
Moses: It's Yahweh again. Keeps telling all this strange stuff about strangeness and charm and spin, and quarks and gravitons and dark matter. I don't mind not understanding, but I need to know how to write this stuff down.
Aaron: Tell him we're just stone-age goat-herders living a subsistence existence, and you're the only one who can read and write. Ask Him for something simpler, like why does the sun rise every morning?
Moses goes away up Mt Sinai, and returns 3 days later.
Moses: He says the sun doesn't rise in the morning, its the earth moving.
Aaron: I've felt the earth move once or twice (snigger), but not usually in the morning!
Moses: Nothing like that bro', we live on a giant ball, and it goes round and round on its axis, and that makes the sun look like it's moving.
Aaron: What's a ball?
Moses: Dunno, bro', I asked him that and he started to talk about radii and something called a pie, and the number 3.1412, but then he said "forget it!" and muttered under his breath about next time I'll just say 3.
Aaron: Did he tell you anything else?
Moses: Two more things. One was that when he said we came from the dust of the ground he meant we had gradually evolved for billions of years.
Aaron: What's billions?
Moses: Dunno mate, but I think it's a number greater than two.
Aaron: What does evolved mean?
Moses: He says it actually took him more than 6 days to make all this. I told him I didn't really care how long he took, I wasn't in any hurry.
Aaron: What was the other thing you learnt?
Moses: He said that one day people would find it easier to believe all this came about by chance than believe in him. I said, no, I was willing to believe all the other crazy stuff about quarks and pie if He said so, but I couldn't come at that!
Aaron: What did he say then?
Moses: He said, let's start again. Just write this down: "In the beginning, God made the heavens and the earth" And I said, that's more like it, now you're talking my language! He just smiled and said, thanks.
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Post by humphreyclarke on Jun 16, 2009 11:49:50 GMT
This awakens my imagination ..... Brilliant  |
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Post by bjorn on Jun 16, 2009 11:58:00 GMT
I'll quote it on my blog. If you allow. In praise.
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Post by jamierobertson on Jun 16, 2009 12:20:41 GMT
What humphrey said.
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Post by unkleE on Jun 16, 2009 21:31:10 GMT
Thanks guys. I had fun writing it. Of course you can quote it Bjorn, I'd be honoured.
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Post by Al Moritz on Jun 17, 2009 0:17:09 GMT
Hi Unklee, I would like to quote that excellent piece in an essay as well, thanks.
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Post by unkleE on Jun 17, 2009 4:22:45 GMT
Hi Unklee, I would like to quote that excellent piece in an essay as well, thanks. No worries Al, thanks for the compliment. Maybe this is my time for my 15 minutes of fame!? : ) |
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