Now Boaz, I know that you always find it necessary to exaggerate to make whatever point it might be that you are making, but this is simply ridiculous:

>>If....you were true to your presuppositions, based on the history of mankind, you would be relentlessly seeking the following:

1/ Power, building a powerbase, attacking perceived enemies, making them your slaves.
2/ Self gratification. Taking their women, enjoying them to the max.<<

Are you suggesting that this is the natural state for atheists?

What evidence can you possibly present to support this utterly preposterous claim? This, by the way, is not evidence:

>>When you think about it... in a meaningless universe there is no moral reason 'not' to do the above.<<

Grow up.

waterboy, sorry, I should have read Sells’ article more carefully. Both he, you and most of us have the right diagnoses but I do not think we - or the Church(es) themselves - know of a cure. Embracing the Zeitgeist does not seem to work. (In Germany the Lutherans did it and they lost even more members than the Catholics. Here the State acts as the tax collector for Churches so you have to register or "unregister" as a member of a particular Church.) On the contrary, it sends some of those who in the past would have been firmly within the folds of traditional Churches, to various evangelical, Pentecostal mega or mini churches, who concentrate on the psychological wellbeing provided by spirituality, and practice emotionally loaded worship long abandoned by the Catholic Church, at leat in the Weat. Others, I agree, leave the Church because the essence of Christian faith, that is unintelligible without an understanding of its symbols, is presented to them in a way that the Medieval person did not mind taking literally.

Well, the naive answer is that what is symbolic could not be taken as the Truth, for which my reaction is that all of mathematics deals only with mental symbols of what is real, nevertheless we would not understand physical reality without maths. So I would argue, that a way out might not be in abandoning the symbols that were self-explanatory to a Medieval mind, but to keep them as pointing to something that we otherwise could not grasp.

The “persistent and effective criticisms of an anachronistic cosmology/theology” is based on taking the scripture and religious symbols literally, not only by fundamentalists, and misguided RE teachers, but also by those who think this way it is easier to discredit the Christian faith as such. Every monotheist believes that God created the world but only religious fundamentalists and aggressive atheists claim that this is a scientific statement (which has to be accepted or rejected by everybody), c. f. the deliberate misuse of the term “creationist”. (ctd)

(ctd) I know, this is a rather theoretical approach, nevertheless I would liken it to the way we treat the slide rule: it used to be an important tool in the hands of any engineer. Today its practical use is superseded by calculators and computers, but the theory on which it was built, namely logarithms, is indispensable and contemporary science and technology is unthinkable without them.

As I see the Catholic Church, it is just one among many Churches, like the Greeks are just one of the smaller European nations; but they are somehow the direct descendants of what stood at the cradle of Christianity and Western civilisation respectively. I know, in case of the Greeks this is undisputed in case of the Catholic Church it is disputed, but still. So perhaps its new role - somehow hinted at by recent pronouncements of the pope - in Europe and perhaps also elsewhere in the West, is to act as a mediator (not his term) of the two extremes: the pious, emotional and somewhat irrational, people who take the symbols of Christianity too literally (evangelicals), and those who reject the Christian symbols and what they point to, their rejection often being also more emotional than rational. As I understand the pope, he wants this “creative minority” (his term) to act as living examples that a Christian can (a) have faith, which in the past not only used to hold the society together but also gave every individual a sense of personal purpose, and (b) at the same time show more respect for reason (including contemporary philosophy for those up to it), and the findings of science, than a fundamentalist. Whether this goal is realistic, only time will tell.

Thanks Waterboy, Bugsy, and George, for enlivening the debate.

As I tap on my PC in gleeful ignorance of the qualities of Macs, I reflect on the obscure colours of cars that I’ve bought previously. My first car was a pale green, but my wife contended that it was cream. It was officially registered as ‘chamois’. My second car was a kind of pasty gold beige, but it was registered as ‘champagne’.

If I could try to pigeon hole where you stand, George is happily Catholic. Bugsy is an atheist but seems to not like the usual dictionary definition of the word, which is the definite belief in no god (notwithstanding his protests that atheism is not an ‘ism’). Waterboy sounds genuinely disappointed when speaking of the 90% of the Australian population not attending church, and the church’s missed potential, so I guess he’s a Christian, but to say of which stripe or colour is a bit trickier. But since none of you think very highly of fundamentalists, I just thought I should try and prop up my side of the argument.

Bugsy, if you like the teachings of the apostle of atheism, Richard Dawkins, you should become more aggressive in your atheistic stance. To quote from the Good Book, ‘the God Delusion’, “I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented. … I shall have Christianity mostly in mind, but only because it is the version with which I happen to be most familiar’ (p. 36-37). There is nothing passive about Dawkins’ beliefs.

Waterboy, I don’t believe those Australians not attending church are staying away because of any real scientific arguments. Some may claim to, but this would reflect their poor understaning of science and its limitations. More likely they have never properly considered or even heard of what the Christian faith is about. (And by the way, there are a good number of Catholics in the creation and intelligent design movements.)

(continued …)

What Christianity is about is bearing witness to the life of Jesus of Nazareth, and his teachings which are contained in the Bible, the world’s most read book. Central to these are his death and resurrection, which assigns Christianity its place in history. Therefore, no amount of science can disprove or even challenge the faith because science can’t judge history. Can you prove scientifically where Captain Philip’s First Fleet landed? No. Even in criminal trials, scientific evidence only attempts to persuade a jury beyond reasonable doubt. It is incapable of proving or disproving history in any definitive way.

The virgin birth and Christ’s other miracles are events of history, and therefore attested to by history and not science. The same can be said of the world’s creation. It was a one off event, therefore unrepeatable, therefore not testable, therefore outside the bounds of science. Genesis’ description of the creation is an historical statement, neither scientific nor unscientific.

Parts of the church that I see attracting the young and educated and experiencing growth are those favourable to these fundamentalist and creationist beliefs and have not sanitised or compromised the Biblical message for the sake of some modern philosophers (Hume).

The thousands of practising scientists around the world, who happen to be Christians and see no place or no need for the false assumptions that have attached themselves to so called science, know this well. Reason and science are fallible. They can be good servants, but a bad master.

Mick

Well said. . . for a fundamentalist.Asyou say,science isabout evidence and interpretation. It is distinguished by constraints like standards of evidence,repeatability and refutability. Refutability is an important one.If a theory/statement/hypothesis is by its very nature irrefutable then it is,by definition, not scientific. So a healthy scepticism is an important part of the scientists intellectual makeup.Good scientists spend most of their time trying to disprove their own theories.This is in stark contrast to religious/Christian folk who expend a lot of energy trying to prove their'theories'are true.
Lets call the creation/virgin birth/resurrection 'events' faith knowledge to distinguish them from'scientific'knowledge.Faith knowledge is by its nature irrefutable,either its absolutely true or the faith is invalid.Believing that the resurrection happened in history,literally,as told in the Bible,is the foundation stone of a certain sort of faith.Not believing it is a denial of that faith. This is a very different kind of knowledge to scientific knowledge.

Good scientists do not claim that sciencific knowledge offers absolute truth because they are all deeply sceptical and understand the interpretive nature of their work.Believers,misunderstanding, observe that science does not offer absolute certainty and mistake this for lack of confidence.How many times have I heard creationists saying that evolution is"only a theory"as if that condemned it to insignificance.The thing that makes evolution such a successful scientitific theory is the number of people,creationists included,who are trying to disprove it.Creation,on the other hand, is faith knowledge.It doesnt qualify as science because no-one is trying to disprove it,not even the'creation scientists'themselves because they're too busy trying to refute evolution.

My view,for what its worth,is that people are distancing themselves from the Church simply because the Church does not respect or allow them their doubts and uncertainties.People going to Church are often confronted with this simple choice:Believe like us or go away.Far more often than not,they choose to go away.There are a few,as you say, who manage to hold together the tension between their'scientific knowledge'and their 'faith knowledge'.That can be a very creative situation and it works best when the Church respects peoples doubt and uncertainties. There are Churches that can do that,thank God.