Brethren, Peace and Good to all of you in Jesus Christ Our Lord.
OK, I don’t pretend to close this debate once and for all, but to continue my brief, limited contributions to the subject. ‘Tis because Yahoo News published this report, titled Does the GOP need a religious retreat? which says in part:
It's no surprise that Florida Sen. Marco Rubio took heat for an interview he gave to GQ magazine this month: Departing from scientific consensus, the rising Republican star refused to state whether the Earth is billions of years old or a few thousand, as many fundamentalist Christians believe.
What no one expected was the rebuke from televangelist and longtime Christian conservative leader Pat Robertson, dismissing theories of a "young Earth."
"If you fight science, you are going to lose your children," Robertson said last week during an appearance on the Christian Broadcast Network, the television empire he founded three decades ago.
Robertson wasn't directly speaking to Rubio, but the senator and others in his party might heed the advice. Viewed by many voters as anti-science and too conservative on social issues such as gay marriage, the Republican Party is in danger of losing young and less religious voters for years to come.
I applaud Pat Robertson, but I must say that ever since I’ve lived in the US mainland, I’ve never understood how people could accept the notion of a 6,000 year-old Earth as true. I had a Catholic education and I had no conflict between the notion of a vast universe billions of years old, and the objective existence of One God who created it all in time. I found the Bible literalism that confronted me childish, fearful, and ignorant.
Even the question “Do you believe in creation or evolution” leveled at me by fundamentalists from both sides of the issue is misleading. First, because I hold that “belief” is one act of the intellect and will that is different from the intellectual assent given to factual, albeit preliminary data always in a state of flux. I believein God which is to say I acknowledge the objective truth of His existence as well as the objective truth of his Word made flesh in Jesus Christ. However, I don’t acknowledge scientific data in the same way, I may think a given theory – which is more a model than a hypothesis – more reasonable than another according to the objective empirical evidence discovered to support one against the other, but I don’t give it my religious faith. It soon appear to me that both Christian and atheistic empiricists held with religious faith to one or the other explanation.
That takes me to the second reason I find the “Do you believe in creation or evolution” question misleading: because the questioner assumes that belief in a Beneficent, Creator God who created all is incompatible with the findings of modern cosmology, physics, and evolutionary biology. The Fundamentalist Christian questioner also adds “That’s not in the Bible, don’t you believe that the Bible is the Word of God”? whereas the atheist usually states,“If you understood cosmology, physics, or evolutionary biology correctly, you would see why the God (usually in minuscule, “god”) hypothesis is unnecessary or necessarily false”. Both fundamentalists would accuse me of gravely misunderstanding the facts, at which point I have to smile.
It seemed that no matter what I understood or tried to explain, I was the ignorant, uniformed one.
It seemed that no matter what I understood or tried to explain, I was the ignorant, uniformed one.
We can set aside for know the objections from Christian fundamentalists and focus on the scientist crowd's argumentation. A significant part of the problem is that outside of physics, no one holds to philosophical realism. Worse, many physicists fail to recognize their own position as philosophical realism, further failing to think outside their cosmological box. There is also a failure on the part of many atheist scientists to understand that their language is meant to reflect precisely to their intellects the nature of the things they study. This facilitates not only the study, but the construction of theoretical models and mutual communication between the scientists themselves. This mutual intelligibility between symbol (equations, schemes, diagrams) and the thing itself is also part and parcel of philosophical realism.
The above are Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism. These equations denote the nature of light as an electromagnetic wave. Later studies in quantum mechanics would subsume these equations to denote light’s dual nature as both a wave and a particle. Yet, the expression “let there be light” and Maxwell’s equations are functionally equivalent. The difference lies in that the equations lack an “active subject” which in the biblical verse is “God.” Adding God to the equations do not change the nature of light or the logic of the equation, but deleting God from the biblical verse renders the expression useless as a sentence.
Many unbelievers would say that since mentioning “God” in the equations is superfluous, that the existence of God as an actor is also superfluous in any meaningful empirical statement made about nature. Yet this denial itself is a matter more of faith – faith in “unbelief” – than a statement of science.
Scientific equations are an extension of language and therefore intelligible to the reader because of their logical interrelationship. This logic in communicating fundamental notions about nature is what sets apart these equations – mathematical sentences – from mere gibberish. The beautiful, mind-blowing thing is that these relationships preexist their understanding by the scientific mind, they are engraved in the fabric of nature itself, so-to-speak. It stands to reason that something or someone put them there, and that omitting God as an active subject of the equations is not a claim about his superfluity, but must be the common sense understanding that his active presence must be assumed in the fundamental nature of the cosmos and that therefore, “God” doesn’t have to be mentioned every time there’s an equation in order to reduce redundancy and repetition. The same applies to taxonomies or other mathematical or illustrations of physical, chemical, or biological phenomena.
In other words: God cannot be easily written out from nature, try as we can. Even at this fundamental level, the statement "let there be light" demands a Primal Actor.
In other words: God cannot be easily written out from nature, try as we can. Even at this fundamental level, the statement "let there be light" demands a Primal Actor.
Nature is indeed mysterious and beautiful. That scientists can use a series of symbols to describe “light” should move us to awe, but saying that God created light should move us to adoration.
I leave you with one question for your coconuts: Can the statement “God is Love” be explained mathematically? Yes, no, why or why not?