Priscillian,

Thanks for you kind words, but I don’t feel like I deserve them. I can be such a klutz with this sort of stuff.

Waterboy,

Unfortunately what your response says to me, is that you’re more interested in quick answers than accurate ones and that you’re not so concerned about the truth of your answers as you are about having them now. It doesn’t seem like a very honest search for the truth.

If you don’t know the answer to something, what do you do? Admit that you don’t know, or make something up?

Admitting that you don’t know something is a far more honest way to go about approaching an unknown and for all intents and purposes, religion amounts to simply making it up. Particularly for those Christians who acknowledge that the more literal religious claims are fundamentally false and internally incoherent and thus move their god into such an unknown realm and make it so mysterious that it’s effectively useless. After all, you can’t answer a mystery with a mystery.

It all goes back to what I was saying in regards to caring about whether or not your beliefs are as close to the truth as possible.

<<Scientists are already resorting to metaphor and paradox to describe things that they cant really understand. Religions have been doing that for a very long time.>>

This, to me, sounds like an attempt to drag science down a little to bring it more in-line with religion - even if only by a tiny bit - while also trying to elevate religion a tad closer to science too.

While there are unknowns that both scientists and religion use metaphor and paradox to describe, there is nothing to suggest that it has anything to do with a god, or that they are even referencing the same thing to begin with. In fact, there’s good reason to believe that they’re not...

Continued...

...Continued

<<Perhaps these also turn out to be powerful intellectual tools even if the 'knowledge' they 'reference' is imprecise, uncertain and open to debate.>>

Perhaps.

But the difference between scientists and religion here, is that scientists attempt to learn more and more about the knowledge that is referenced (to borrow your terminology), so that it is more precise and less uncertain, whereas religion - in direct correlation - mystifies and obscures god the more scientists find naturalistic explanations for what used to be mysteries.

Crabsy,
That is a very honest summation of the subject. I wonder what Runner has to say to your post. Let's hear from you.

David