Why Don’t You Both Just Shut the Hell Up and Talk!!
Author:
Right, let’s take a controversial topic today. Religion. The world’s great spiritual traditions. And militant atheism.
The pope is in Turkey today, as a head of state, as a source of encouragement for the country’s beleaguered Catholic population and most importantly, it would seem, as an agent of dialogue between religions- in this case, the Greek Orthodox Church and the colossus that is Islam.
I am myself a severely lapsed Catholic. I went cold turkey several years ago, when I first heard Jeffrey Lewis sing:
“God is just a story someone made up long ago
Before they had books and t.v. shows
I don’t believe in him and I ain’t afraid to say so…â€
I’m currently chugging along on rationality and some vaguely utopian ideals, but again as the great songwriter said “It’s hard not to be superstitious, despite all you know.†That pretty much sums up my position. Sometimes I get so thankful, and sometimes I get so scared and other times so concerned, that I positively need to unload my hopes and fears and joy into something inconceivably bigger than myself. And I need to believe he’s listening.
There’s also the question of rationality, which in itself has no rational basis(at least I think that was the gist of Bertrand Russell’s writing-there were large tracts of his books I didn’t understand.) There is always the possibility that God really is just messing with our heads, or in the Buddhist tradition, we are messing with our heads. There are monotheists in all faiths who believe everything just occurs through the will of God, and at a certain fundamental point, this is as rational a position as holding that the universe runs according to certain immutable laws that can be determined through reason and observation.
The problem is that we’re all starting from different points of view. Two people who look at a wafer of bread in the hand of a priest will see very different things depending on whether they believe at the most fundamental level in pure reason, in God’s message as communicated by his incarnate son, or in God’s message as communicated in our heart of hearts, but only when we stand on our heads in genuine faith and squawk like a chicken. There is no real objective way to decide which of these beliefs is the truest. At a certain point, everything is faith.
This is why, when on my frequent and aimless trawls through cyberspace, I find some asinine group with a name like The Rationale Police or The Society for the Prevention of Intelligently-Designed Anti-Theism, I get all annoyed and write vaguely offensive gobbledegook like this sentence. It is utterly, utterly pointless and stupid to go about trying to destroy religion, or even convince others of its untruth. I have no problem with people ridiculing intelligent design or being generally insulting when religious groups try to go toe-to-toe with scientists on their own turf, but when you try to dispute their beliefs from first principles, you’re guilty of the same mistake.
The worst thing about this whole ‘science v religion’ debate/fiasco, is that really most of the people are on the same damn side. There are no substantive ideological differences between any middle-class western people. None. Do you think that people that support abortion believe that aborting a fetus is the same as killing a child? Or that those against it think they aren’t acting in the woman’s best interests? Each side believes they’re acting in the best interests of the child, the mother and society. Yet with these acres of common ground, there is no dialogue between the two sides. So we bicker over our petty differences while crime spirals out of control, adolescents kill themselves and the world begins to broil…
Frankly, I admire all the religious men in the world who have peace as their aim, whether they are protestant ministers, Roman Catholic priests or Muslim Imams(I hope thats the right word, I really am not au fait enough with the Muslim religion.) I particularly admire the pope when he calls for tolerance and dialogue between religion(it’s a little known fact that this was the subject of the speech he with that medieval quotation in it, the one that sparked those riots all over the middle east.) This tolerance and dialogue must extend further however, to encompass all ideas and philosophies. The only means through which the human race will have a future is if the battle of ideals is moved to a plane where everyone will suspend their preconceptions and actually figure out where the hell the ship is going.
And that means scientists too.
That must have been painful for you to recall. It brings to mind a saying from a great moron, “wateva watev, I do wat I want”.
There is no argument. To disagree like most anything else is vanity, arguably the most deadly sin. Do I pit my wit against yours? I think not unless you disagree.
Faith is what we have to give back to Jesus(oops,I’ve said it now). It’s all we have to give and is all He seems to want. In comparison our faith in exchange for The Blood Of Christ doesn’t appear equal to me but for Christ Jesus(there I go again), giving His All in exchange for my filth is why It’s in my faith to believe Him worthy of my worship. Nothing else can compare.
We can have fun playing with words all we want but The Word Of God was written to be the last word. Prove me wrong, not that you should feel challenged.
I find myself wanting to say this more and more the older I get(the more I listen), coming to terms with that Deity is as personal as our most inner thoughts. Relax your keyboard Brendan, it’s because we’re not The Word Of God that what Jesus(oops, sorry) wants of us can’t even be spelled out not to mention argue the point. It’s all in two factors, (1)names written in The Book Of Life and (2)that gift Jesus(=/) sent us when we first believed, The Holy Spirit that comforts us and teaches/instructs us in ways indescribable.
I suddenly feel the need to focus on my prayers. I have you to thank for that Brendan this time. Our witness exists despite our vanity. Such is the power and mystery of God. cya
P.S. I wasn’t seriously apologizing for mentioning the name of Jesus, there is nothing I could be more proud of.
“Frankly, I admire all the religious men in the world who have peace as their aim,”
well, i agree, but MANY reliions dont do that.
i was raised catholic, but became buddhist years ago.
i also learned a good bit about deism
deism.org
too bad Americans forgot about this (NON-religion)
Deism believes in the “God of reason”
Jefferson was a Deist, so were many more of our founding fathers.
Most Deists now think that religion should be taxed, and i agree. instead of the president of the US giving my tax $ to faith based orgs, it should be the other way around.
As far as abortion, well, i certianly think its WRONG, but what is even MORE wrong, is the government telling me what to do.
Wait till George Bushes daughter is raped by someone on crack with aids, and lets see if Bush wants her to have an abortion?
You mentioned the POPE, well, last i heard, he said that the people in Iraq should be brought to justice.
sounds like just another bush backer to me.
instead of saying how the violence should stop,
it seems he wants more dead people.
“The worst thing about this whole ‘science v religion’ debate/fiasco, is that really most of the people are on the same damn side.”
unfortunatly i disagree.
there is a REAL problem here.
many of these people want us to turn back the hands of time, like galleleo and darwin never existed.
This is a turning point in our civilization to keep believing in the tooth fairy, or to wake up to reality as it is.
The real unfortunate thing is that the bible is a great book to learn how to live moraly, but was never meant to be taken literally.
The right wing christinas forget that many books never made it to the bible , they were not deemed to be needed by certian persons hunderes of years after it was written.
many books of the bible were written well after Christ died, and written by man.
its not the word of god, its the word of mans interpretation of another man that was dead for 100 years.
Then, edited, translated, and edited again.
A Buddhist can lok at the bible and see no problems with the lessons it tries to teach, actually, budhism teaches many of the same lessons.
In the end, we are not perfect, therefore can not see things perfectly, and our vision is skewed by this.
So everyone interpretation of “GOD” will be different.
the question is, will these differences change us for the better, or worse.
Brad
http://911review.org
911review
This blog tasted like an oasis of water after oceans of nonsense in the World Wide Web. I really believe that rationality, secularism, and scientific materialism have a real and substantial place in the modern world. I think, however that sometimes people go a bit too far. No matter how many times you subtract all the superstition and deism out of a materialistic universe, the next guy to come along will take the materialistic universe and add God. It’s a simple matter of saying, “yes but before the Big Bang…”
Secondly, according to Goedel’s Incompleteness theorem, there are always thing that are true about any given system which cannot be proven within that system. For example, God may very well be true for our universe, but within that universe we cannot prove it.
In short, I enjoyed the lucidity and moderation of this blog.
Interview by Carl Wieland/Jonathan Sarfati:
Ours is an age of incessant pro-evolution media tub-thumping. Some have even declared that ‘all of biology’ depends on the truth of evolution. So it was refreshing to talk to Professor Veith (pronounced ‘fight’), a zoologist of the highest academic rank, who is firmly convinced of the truth of Biblical creation.
When we asked how he became a Christian, he said:
Walter Vieth: ‘It’s a long story, but I was an evolutionist, and an atheist. I started to get interested in the subject of Biblical prophecy—for example, prophecies in the book of Daniel, chapter two. They were written long before the events portrayed there, and the kingdoms came in succession just as it says. And the Dead Sea Scrolls seemed to confirm the authenticity and antiquity of the Book of Daniel. So I started to get interested in the rest of Scripture, including Genesis.’
Dr Veith said that he had already been undergoing some ‘evolution’ himself—he started off as a classical Darwinian ‘gradualist’, believing that evolution happened by the slow accumulation of little changes. But because the fossil record does not show creatures gradually changing into others, he was drawn to the later idea that evolution must have happened ‘in spurts and bursts’. He noticed also that evolutionists were conceding that in the so-called Cambrian rocks, supposedly not long after the dawn of multi-celled life:
‘Even the chordates were there before they were supposed to be. Articles were appearing in the literature about “explosive evolution” in the Cambrian, in which there were already chordates, the phylum to which man belongs. So basically it was just one logical step to believing in Creation.’
Natural selection
There were other problems with evolutionary theory to which Walter Veith’s training and experience alerted him—for instance, natural selection. He said:
Professor Walter Veith
Dr Walter J. Veith
‘The very name “selection” implies that you’re choosing between two or more variants. So that means that the end result is extinction of one in favour of the other. Natural selection never increases the number of variants; it only decreases them. So my problem with it was, “how does a mechanism that makes less and less end up making more and more”?
‘The answer obviously is, it doesn’t. That leaves chance mutations as the only source of the new information. You have to have all these new genes coding for new features, all interacting precisely with one another, continually arising as animals get more complex, by chance. To believe that, you have to have a lot of faith. It’s certainly not something I see in my work as a zoologist.’
Some fascinating comments by Dr Veith concerned the tremendous built-in ability of some animals to adapt to changing conditions, much too rapidly to have anything to do with any proposed evolutionary mechanisms or millions of years. For example, island deer have been seen to respond to a scarcity of resources by decreasing their body size, by as much as two-thirds. He also pointed out:
‘Naked mole rats, if the ecological circumstances get tough, respond with a whole host of drastic rearrangements of their genetic material, so-called “jumping genes” doing their thing. This creates a far greater variety in the offspring, which of course has an effect on selection.
‘I think that organisms were endowed with a great capacity for variation, and that we haven’t begun to figure out all the mechanisms in the latent DNA. Evolutionists have tried to write this DNA off as leftover “junk”, but it is increasingly recognized as playing an important (though still largely unknown) role.’
After the Flood
We asked Prof. Veith whether such built-in mechanisms for rapid variation could be the remnants of mechanisms from the original kinds which, after the Flood, enabled populations such as the original ‘dog kind’ to rapidly diversify into wolves, coyotes, dingoes, etc? He replied:
‘Absolutely. A lot of the rearrangement can simply come about by playing different tunes on the same piano, as it were. There are organisms where there appears to have been a fusion of chromosomes, but basically the same information is there, just the order in which it is arranged is different, which has tremendous effects on the organisms themselves.’ 1
So what happened after he became a believer in creation?
‘When I started lecturing to my students (about creation evidences) at my previous university, it caused havoc, and I had to leave because of it.’
How about the present university?
‘It’s still very secular and evolutionistic, but it’s much more tolerant of other views. They’re a bit reticent to let me lecture on the question of evolution, but I get opportunities to put the counter view. The occasional creation/evolution lecture after hours is normally well attended and appreciated. The students here tend to have more religious roots, so they are not as evolutionarily inclined. We have a large number of the previously disadvantaged community, and when people have been through tough times like they have, there tend to be closer ties with God.’
Racism
Here was an obvious opportunity to raise the subject of apartheid, etc. Dr Veith agreed totally that if people had taken the Genesis history of mankind seriously, they would have realized that we were all closely related, anyway, so the differences between ‘races’ must be trivial (which is now confirmed by genetic and molecular studies). He said:
‘The paradigm of evolution (even in its pre-Darwinian manifestations) is one of the root causes of racism.’
We asked him about the way in which some in the former South African regime had actually tried to base their racism on the Bible. Dr Veith replied,
‘Yes, and that is a gross distortion of the Scriptures. My Bible tells me that God made all people from one man [Acts 17:26] and that the Gospel is for every nation, tribe, and people [Rev. 14:6].
‘Some even used the account in Genesis about the “curse on Ham” to justify discrimination. But it was not on Ham, but on Canaan [Genesis 9:25–26], and there is no evidence whatsoever of any discrimination on the basis of race—on the contrary, that is against the whole thrust of the Bible.’
Animals without death?
With his experience in ecological matters, we asked Dr Veith about a common argument raised against the clear Biblical teaching that death and bloodshed among animals2 only commenced after the Fall of Adam. I.e., that looking at today’s world, it appears that one needs death in order to have a finely balanced food chain.
‘But that’s looking at what we have today, not what we had in the beginning. We only have a fraction of the flora and fauna that were there at first—the fossil record bears that out. We don’t know what animals ate in the past. Tooth structure is not a good indicator. The panda bear is classified on the basis of its tooth structure as a carnivore, but it eats bamboo. An animal that has the tools for the original diet may also find them suitable for a more carnivorous diet if a need arose. There are many examples of that. With the destruction of northern hemisphere forests by acid rain, for instance, animals like chipmunks, normally seed-eaters, will now eat animals run over on the road.
‘New Zealand’s kea parrots started to attack and eat sheep. They have the same talons and beak structure as a bird of prey but weren’t using them for this until their food source ran out. And most bears—even fish are only eaten by them at the time of the salmon run, because there are no berries around in that early season. Later, they become 70–80% herbivore, even though they have the “equipment” to be carnivorous.
‘Even the venom apparatus in snakes may have been used to inject an enzyme to soften food. So, many things may not necessarily have been designed for killing other animals. But it does indicate in the Bible that God restructured some organisms.
‘I think He used the existing genetic material and just reorganized the way it was expressed. For instance, a thorn is a modified leaf, just curled tightly upon itself. So the gene didn’t necessarily change; the way in which it was expressed changed. Or perhaps some latent genetic information switched on after the Fall.’
Playing God
Dr Veith’s current research appears to be showing that herbivorous animals fed with large amounts of animal protein are in danger of osteoporosis from excess calcium excretion.3 He said:
‘They lock up these animals and feed them anything from edible plastic to manure and ground-up animals. That’s one of the factors behind the spread of mad cow disease, 4 one of the things I am working on. People treat farm animals like commodities, because they think they are just chance accumulations of evolved genes. So if you think an animal doesn’t have everything it should have, why not just play God, and take a couple of genes from something else and add them? Animals were also created for man’s pleasure and companionship, not as mere food factories. Today, there is of course also the opposite side of the evolutionary coin, the animal rights movement, which elevates animals to the level of humans, since all are seen as just chance evolved entities.’
We asked him if, in the light of man’s dominion mandate over other creatures in Genesis, he would have problems with all forms of ‘genetic engineering’ in animals. He said:
‘No. But I would have a major problem transplanting genes that totally changed the physiology. For example transgenic pigs, where the gene for human growth hormone is engineered into pigs. You get very large pigs, but they are also incredibly diseased—because these are not “add-on” genes, they alter something integral to the normal developmental process of the animal.
‘You need proper research to be able to make the decisions as to where to draw the line.’
Dr Veith is also convinced about the evidence for a young world, and a global Flood. He said:
‘I gave a lecture at the University of Cape Town once, and presented the evidence from my slides that the famous Yellowstone petrified “forests” were not a succession of separate forests over vast ages, but were the result of a catastrophic event. 5
‘The geologists were so furious they exploded and called me a liar, that such research had never been done. Knowing where it had been published, I asked them, “What journal would you like it to be published in?” They said, “If it was in something like The Journal of Paleontology it would have been acceptable.” I said, “That’s exactly where it is, and you’ll have a copy on your desk.” 6 So I sent them a copy, with the article by a creationist scientist. And the next day they came back and said, “But it says nothing about a world-wide Flood.” I said, “Exactly. If it said it was a world Flood, nobody would ever publish it. But it’s clear that these logs were deposited by massive catastrophism.”’
We asked Dr Veith for a final comment to leave with readers. He said:
‘Read Genesis just as it stands. There’s a lot of evidence to favour the words written there. For evolution and long ages, there’s nothing but propped-up theories that have to be re-propped and re-propped every so often to be maintained. But God’s Word is timeless.’