Dear George,

Perhaps the New Testament, as a selected works, is a clearer example of a Procrustean bed.

Yes, I think Christians are aware of other religions, especially, the Abrahamic ones, but do so from a very biased perspective, and are possibly unaware of what happened before Nicaea. Furthermore, I agree that a religion "can" be looked at internally or externally. Yet, my experience of OLO theists is they live 99.9% inside their Creed. Sells, as I have said before, lives between 325(Nicaea) and c. 1760 (Great Divergence), without seeing the setting of the stone. Other theists are not so rigid, yet, the inclination is there to a high degree to look from the inside-out.

"The quantum theory works perfectly; no prediction of the theory has ever been shown in error..." - George, Friday, 4 June 2010

To my lay knowledge, QM phenomena are (exceedingly) accurate only when sets rather than instances are considered and infinities are put aside.If you are saying that the neuronal Bose-Einstein condensate is at the centre of the centre of a QM universe, I would feel you might be going way beyond the claims of Penrose or Zohar. Yet, were you to say that consciousness includes QM phenomena; e.g, quantum coherence entangled to a universal quantum state; I think the jury is still out. Were, the future, the primary case of quantum consciousness proven, I would expect that entanglement would be a better description, than having Humans returned to the centre of the universe.

Given, your restating the of Chimpanzee relationship, as a metaphor for the history of relgion, I put that one should, indeed, look at the DNA of the religions openly and pragmatically.

All,

"One of the problems with religion is an attitude of clergy. I have a friend who was a Lutheran pastor. We had a discussion about the mythical nature of much of the biblical material. He told me they had some good discussions at St. Olaf's seminary on that subject. I asked him if he had ever brought these matters up to his flock. He said he would not want to disturb their simple faith." - david f.

I too would like to see clergy being more serious interactive with the laity, discussing issues and answering questions, on occasion. Every fourth week? More like a forum. Say discuss Genesis versus positive energy/matter(a.k.a. e=mc2)complemented by gravity as negative energy; all the matter in the universe is cancelled out. That is, the initial state of the unverse is nothing comprised of two somethings.

If matter can be created, without God's breath or God, where does God stand in relation to the universe?

If matter was created after a zero state (cancellation of energy properties) what does this say about Genesis?

Did God just nudge physics and the universe did the rest?

Presumably, a cleric, who can learn Koine Greek to study the NT,can understand the Emperor's New Mind (Penrose).

Dear Banjo,

Well I do not know how google works. I got slightly different values when changing the browser (Safari to Firefox with Mac OS 10.6.3). Perhaps the results are still different with Windows. Also, the quotation marks are important, but I think you know that.

I am also sure you understand that this was not my point: it suffices to look at the first few hits to see that there are also scholarly works (about interpretations of both) reflecting neither a “competition between science and religion” nor a “stalemate position” in our 21st century.

Your “competition” would correspond only to the first stage in the - by now classical - Ian Barbour’s typology (conflict, independence, dialogue, integration, see e. g. his “When Science meets Religion”, Harper 2000). Barbour is one of the “trinity” of 21st century natural scientists with theological qualifications (Polkinghorne and Peacocke are the other two). There is also V.V. Ramadan, a physicist of Hindu background, interested in, and knowledgeable about, religion (see e.g. his regular articles on http://www.metanexus.net/). I learned a lot from his perspective, a perspective that cannot be accused of a "Christian (Abrahamic/theist) bias".

Dear Oliver,

>>Christians are aware of other religions … but do so from a very biased perspective<<

Again, would you also claim that e.g. “Australians are aware of other nations, but do so from a very biased perspective?” As in my post to Banjo, I would not object if your observation was qualified, e.g. as “but SOME do so from a very biased perspective” to make it less sweeping.

I do not understand how can phenomena be accurate, neither what a quantum mechanical universe is. However, you might be right that the phenomenon of quantum entanglement might be a better explanation of the violation of Bell’s inequality than observer-dependence. You are certainly right that the jury is still out on the proper interpretation of these things known as the quantum enigma. Anyway, I confess I should not have brought it up, since this detail is irrelevant for your comparison of the Nicean Creed with the Procrustean bed.

>>one should, indeed, look at the DNA of the religions openly and pragmatically<<
Well, to carry on with our analogies, you can look at Einstein’s DNA "openly and pragmatically" if you wish, however I think much more important than Einstein’s DNA is his contribution to our understanding of the world we live in.

How many clergies, and how many congregations, do you think you would find who would be able to seriously discuss the questions you ask, which require some knowledge of contemporary cosmology (theoretical physics) as well as philosophy of science and (theological) metaphysics?

As many times before, I thank you for stimulating my little grey cells to provide a (hopefully) clearer formulation of what I want to say.

Dear George,

Thank you for your thoughtful reply.

Yes, I would say that as an Australian’s my world-view is biased by be an Australian. Moreover, given I have worked offshore for ten years, in my case, there will have been acculturation factors too. I return to Polanyi in-so-much-as tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge are coefficient.

“I do not understand how can phenomena be accurate, neither what a quantum mechanical universe is.” Neither can I. I took the aforesaid to be the drift of your citation.

I think we can have it both ways. Einstein’s contribution and Einstein’s archaic DNA (or that much of the bacteria inside his body was not human) are individually important.

My meta/theoretical physics example may have been a little over top for reason of illustration. Yet, there could be more sophisticated forms of bible study, perhaps, pragmatically looking at history. Even if a theist, I would see no issue in taking a critical look at the Flood, the Shroud of Turin and Fatima. There is evidence of the foremost, yet, issues of scale need to reformulated.

Best regards.

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ON THE NATURE OF SWEEPING STATEMENTS

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In addition to the various sweeping statements already posted on this thread, please allow me to suggest some others:

cogito, ergo sum; the world is round; I love you; it's hot; I believe in God; he's my brother ...

These are all simple statements. All simple statements are sweeping.

Sweeping is a synthetic process that eliminates the superfluous and highlights the essential.

It is the Gaussian curve that describes the distribution of probability without necessarily crossing any particular point on its path.

It does not exclude deviances to the rule. It is the product of all deviances and non-deviances.

It is the synthesis. It is the essence. It is the end result of a lengthy process of analysis, interpretation and assimilation.

To put it simply, it is simplicity.

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