An omniscient God would by definition know everything about the future. He would therefore know that old Uncle Joe is going to die tomorrow morning. Yet he couldn’t change Uncle Joe’s fate without being wrong about his knowledge of the future. Omniscience would make him limited in power.

On the other hand, an omnipotent God could change the future at will. Since he can change everything, he doesn’t know the future with a 100% accuracy. Being all powerful would prevent him from being omniscient.

The Christian concept of God is self-contradictory.

Keep up the great work!

AngelVamp
http://www.vampiretemple.com

Yes, I just read this question on a “curious” article that appeared today at the NYT (click for the full article), entitled “Matters of Faith Find a New Prominence on Campus”…

What might be of some interest to you is, a few of the experiences some of his volunteers had while partaking in the DMT study, relate to coming into contact with a creating force.

I won’t elaborate any furthure. I do however, suggest if you are going to take a peak at his work, do read some of his interviews, before reading his book, DMT, The Spirit Molecule. This type of scientific inquiry is usually berift with lunatics, he is not one.

The information might add another aspect to your blog on ” The Physics of Hallucinations” or “The God Conumdrum”.

I think you will find him cautious and level headed in his attempts to explain what he found.

I hope you all realize that I’ve not written in to your great physics blogsite to engage in controversy but to seek more understanding. There’s the great difference between science and philosophy (theory and epistemology are my philosophical fields), which creates a lot of problems for all of us. And there’s the frequent great lack of comprehension between people of science and faith.

My website isn’t polemical. It’s seeking to explain how different the ways of knowing are, by starting with the Greeks who invented the “ways of knowing,” a term I use because it is so unfamliar in our own period and helps us think in fresh ways. The best stuff on my website isn’t in the posts, but in the Sessions from my lit theory course that I’m posting over on the Pages. I’ll continue to publish more of the sessions as time goes on. Session one deals with language, art, and representation (or mimesis) and with theory, in a rapid-fire overview. It’s intense.

Session Two deals with the Classical Greek Thought-world, and how Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle started Western educattion by theorizing “the arts and sciences” as ways of knowing…. Basically, the possibility of human knowing begins for them with the presence of order in the world, but it is various KINDS of order, each requiring its own discipline to come to know it….

Okay, so you’ve been invited. Now I will cease to advertise!

Hi, I’m not a scientist but I do love love science. I’m an old lit professor out of Jennifer Ouelette’s past, who got directed to Sean’s great website. I read Sean’s review with great interest, because I am a theist. I’ve been fascinated by this whole discussion and I really, really care about science and faith. I taught an honors seminar in science-and-faith for many years in which the science students sometimes spoke about the anguish they felt at having to keep their deep commitment to science and their faith in separate compartments. This was because their faith communities were intolerant. But now I see that it could just as well be that their scientific communities could be so intolerant.
Now I don’t mean to say you folks are “intolerant,” because I’m so struck by the open and humanistic tone of the posts, and especially by the give-and-take of the conversation. But, and this is a big “but,” I had thought that the animosity between the scientific ways of knowing and other ways, even mystical ways, was waning in our post-modern period, and I think that would be a very good thing. It’s as though you don’t know that breezy dismissals of faith as mere illusion or seritonin highs and so forth, can be just of painful and damaging as Fundamentalist attacks on and misunderstandings of how science works. I’m struck by how much most of you agree — and agree as scientists, quite clearly — that science and “reason” go against the God hypothesis. That was Sean’s opening thesis and I simply find it extremely surprising. (Especially since I totally agree with Sean that the muffin joke is funny!)
I think what Ellis was getting at by criticizing Dawkins’ lack of “philosophy” was that Dawkins and almost everyone in this thread are taking for granted a basically Anglo-American intellectual tradition based on scientific realism in the good-old British empiricist tradition. Now I think the good old church of England does an amazing amount of good around the world, but I’m not so sure about British empriricism! It’s really true that we all in this thread know a lot about some things and a lot less about others.
But questions like “God” are important questions, and people should talk about them — way to go, Sean — and they should radically disagree. What’s perplexing me is the lack of radical disagreement. Everyone, even Bob, seems to assume that there’s a kind of reason that scientists use all the time and it goes against God and Bob’s experience is just a “personal” experience, not like reason, which is public and objective. But these are all Enlightenment oppositions — reason and religion, objective and subjective, public and private.
I am not trying just to make a compassionate case that Bob’s “personal experience” should be respected and not denigrated. I’m saying that we’ve spent way too long in North America thinking that scientific ways of knowing are the only ones with true discoursive communities and evidentiary standards and validity-testing. What I’m saying is that in disciplines like philosophy and theology — in other than the Anglo-American rationalist-empiricist tradition — have produced perspectives on “truth” and “coming to know” that can differentiate, I think, between what scientific ways of knowing try to know and what other ways of knowing may try to know. Religious and mystical ways of knowing can be very taxing, arduous, discoursive, communal, and deeply tested over centuries and longer.
I am curious about two things — and I really want to know what you think.
1) What would be lost be adopting an agnostic stance toward religious ways of knowing, just as we do for culturally different practices and peoples? Okay, I know, I know. Scientists feel attacked and threated by Fundamentalists. But believe me, they feel just as threatened and endangered by the intellectual elites (as they see it) which have denied ordinary people any wisdom for several hundred years. But does it help anything to maintain the fortess mentality, on either side? Plus the fact that you rule out the pleasure of knowing the third group of people like me, who are charming and fun to know! The people for whom both science and God are the reason they get up in the morning with joy and hope.
2) Isn’t it still true these days to say of current science what science — let’s say physics — use to say — that it started with methodological reductionism (a good thing)and ruled out questions of metaphysics, esp. origin and purpose, in advance? So does it seem to you that science has changed and become a broader and deeper way of knowing, perfectly able to not only tackle but answer these kinds of questions? Doesn’t it seem to you that there are belief-structures operating in your reasoning that are based on your experience in your way of knowing and how it has shaped you and ought to be taken as such by you and others. Rather than on some obvious, irrefutable reasonableness in how you think, I mean.
Okay, I lied, I have a 3) You all sound so chipper and confident. For me, it was utter anguish and existential pain for myself and the human race and the whole planet, along with guilt ands helplessness, that was the arena in which God started to be compelling to me. It’s been Lent and the readings in the Old Testament again and again have said that God’s promise of mercy and justice and peace for all the nations is more astonishing and more counter-intuitive than anything else in the universe. It’s supposed to be a surprise, a relief, and a consolation. But I don’t want to argue pros and cons about that. I’m more interested in asking about whether science deals with the weight of experiences of evil, despair, guilt, joy, love, ecstacy. And if it doesn’t or if it dismisses them, then have they no evidentiary weight at all, perhaps for other ways of knowing, which could be respected?

The universe very well could just have come into being due to physical laws. The opposite may be true. One could equally write a book called, ‘The Science Delusion’, if arguing over the origin of the universe. Until then, why are we forming opinions? Presumably, so humanity can be more accurately informed to make decisions for its betterment. If the greater good of humanity is the object, only such delusions, based on faith both in science and religion, that achieve or aim for the opposite, should be opposed.

To say God doesn’t exist because of what people believe is foolish. God is not changed for better or worse by what people do in His name, humanity is. God, if He exists, is evidently beyond our collective comprehension. (So, I could add, is the physical principle behind the universe’s self-creation.) Therefore, a religion cannot communicate certainly and permanently the truths inherent in this hypothetical God. A religion that could would be too good for people; we would all fall short. And uncertainty is a uniquely human fate. The animals are below it; God, if He exists, is above it. Surely the rectitude of our beliefs and the need of other people to agree and conform to it matter less than ending the suffering that is caused by people in God’s name. Neither religion or the idea of God need opposing so much as all ignorance that causes ill.

The holiday season is typically a time when most of us over-consume in almost every category possible. I am certainly no exception to this. From dinners with friends, to the chocolate tucked away in every nook and cranny of the house, I certainly ate …

On the horizon appears an approaching confrontation so contentious, any clash of civilizations will have to wait its turn. On one side, a manuscript titled: The Final Freedoms, against all the gravitas religious tradition can bring to bear.

This, the first wholly new interpretation for 2000 years of the moral teachings of Jesus the Christ focuses specifically on marriage and human sexuality, challenging all natural law theory and theology. At stake is the credibility of several thousand years of religious history, not to mention cosmology, all psychology related to human sexuality, and theories on the nature of consciousness.

What at first appears an utterly preposterous challenge to the religious status quo rewards those who persevere in closer examination, for it carries within its pages an idea both subtle and sublime, what the theological history of religion either ignored, were unable to imagine or dismissed as impossible. An error of presumption which could now leave ‘tradition’ staring into the abyss and even humble the heights of scientific speculation. For if this material is confirmed, and there appears to be both the means and a concerted effort to authenticate it, the greatest unresolved questions of human existence may finally have been untangled.

Published [at the moment] only on the web as a free pdf download, made up of twenty nine chapters and three hundred and seventy pages, this new teaching has nothing whatsoever to do with any existing religious conception known to history. It is unique in every respect.

This new teaching is pure ethics. It requires no institutional framework, no churches, no priest craft, no scholastic theological rational, no dogma or doctrine, costs nothing and ‘worship’ requires only conviction, faith and the necessary measure of self discipline to accomplish a new, single moral imperative and then the integrity and fidelity to the new reality.

Using a synthesis of scriptural material from the Old and New Testaments, the Apocrypha , The Dead Sea Scrolls,The Nag Hammadi Library, and some of the worlds great poetry, it describes and teaches a single moral LAW, a single moral principle and offers its own proof; one in which the reality of God responds to an act of perfect faith with a direct, individual intervention into the natural world; making a correction to human nature by a change in natural law, altering biology, consciousness and human ethical perception; providing new, primary insight and understanding of the human condition.

This new interpretation explains the moral foundation of all human thought and conduct and finds expression within a new covenant of human spiritual union, the marriage between one man and one woman. It resolves the most intractable questions and issues of human sexuality. Offering the potential for resolving the most pressing health issues facing the world, including AIDs.

As the first ever religious teaching able to demonstrate its own efficacy, the first ever religious claim of knowledge that meets the criteria of the most rigourous, testable scientific method, this teaching enters the public domain as a reality entirely new to human history.

The beginnings of an intellectual and moral revolution are unfolding on the web and available for anyone to test, discover and explore for themselves, and what might very well define the nature and future of humanity itself!

Links:
http://www.energon.uklinux.net
http://thefinalfreedoms.bulldoghome.com
http://www.dunwanderinpress.org

However a question remains that if the process of secularisation is proceeding apace then why is it that fundamentalist religion in different guises is so significant in world affairs today?

I would argue that one answer to this enigma is that the human being has a fundamental hunger for meaning and purpose in life that science often does not seem to provide. I speak as a scientist for whom the scientific dimension to my life does provide much identity meaning and purpose, and Dawkins’ biological writings do much to keep that flame alive but I despair at the general lack of interest in science by much of the younger generation. The ’scientist as nerd’ is a popular youth image that, AFAIK, has not been propagated by religious leaders.

In such a vacuum fundamentalist certainty propagates itself. Therefore I would advocate a reasoned and tolerant approach to spiritual matters; outright antagonism often proves to be self-defeating.

I’d give up the ‘good old’ Church of England at the drop of a hat. Huge waste of money and offensive to democracy.

Do I fear the ‘God Delusion’?’ I hope not. On the other hand, I like to think of myself as a rational religious believer, even if you probably consider that an oxymoron, as a consequence I find myself trying to fend off religious extremism on the one hand and evangelical atheism on the other so I do worry about the effect the book might have if left unchallenged.

Finding myself somewhat in the middle I cannot help but reflect on apparent similarities between both sides.

Apart from rehearsing all the evil done in the name of religion, in which case I join in with its condemnation, there has also been a lot of good.

If a person wants to rid the world of the religion virus then to be consistent they ought do away with all the organisations and institutions founded and supported by religion, in Britain we would loose most of our old hospitals, ancient schools and the good old Church of England, of course we should not forget the universities of Oxford and Cambridge as well. But then as not only would I loose my job but also Richard Dawkins as well, perhaps that would be a step too far!