No Boaz-David it was not just opinion nor an objective standard, but a reckless judgement of another man's claim to Christianity that I am questioning and viewing as dangerous.

Likewise I can also question an intemperate, judgemental, diatribe of your Lord against the 'Jews' and can see the distorted thread to Hitler's statement in Mien Kampf; "Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord."

I used to debate freely with Creationists friends until I realised their vulnerability to any weakening of the fundamentalist pillars upon which their faith is based. At the risk of you calling me a bigot, as with my friends, I won't debate you about Genesis unless you could convince me that if I won your faith would be strong enough to stand without its creationist pillar. Maybe Peter’s article displays a strength you are yet to experience.

I shouldn't get angry at you, though I can get angry that a bunch of men in the 1920's could put forward a doctrine of the essential belief requirements that has perverted the messages of Christ and precluded many potential followers from walking a life enriching path.

I see you BD, unwittingly I know, as doing the work of those false teachers, turning away far more than you attract to the faith you profess so much love for. Luckily for you Jesus seems to have kept his ire for the false prophets if my reading of the bible is correct.

Therefore I do hope for your sake when you ask ‘Lord, Lord, didn’t I prophesy in your name, and in your name cast out demons and do many powerful deeds?’ you don't hear the words 'I never knew you'.

Perhaps an apology to Peter might help that cause.

Peter,
Thanks for a thought provoking article concerning in fact the relation between Christian faith and science. Comments on what you wrote by those who reject Christianity, (or even belief in a personal God) are like comments on the proper use of an English word by those who do not speak English; they should simply be ignored. Disregarding those as well as those who feel unconventional ideas threaten their faith, there are still some things I would like to comment on myself.

In the sense of Ian Barbour‘s typography (of possible relations between science and religion), conflict, independence, dialogue and integration, your presentation, as I understood it, falls mostly under the label “independence”, where science and religion are seen as “two magisteria" that operate in “complementary not contrary fashion in their totally separate realms." (Stephen Jay Gould). Perhaps too much. I think dialogue (or even integration) are more fruitful approaches, at least as seen by the well know scientist/theologian duo Polkinghorne-Peacocke, as well as Barbour himself.

I think the problem lies, at least partly, in different uses of terms like origin, creation, cause etc., depending on whether the context is religion/theology or natural science. For instance, causation, like time, can be clearly expressed in the mathematical language of relativity theory. However, independent of this, we have an innate sense of time and cause, so we cannot think very well outside these categories, including speculations about our very being, be it at a sophisticated theological/metaphysical level, or just the unsophisticated level of the religious “man in the street”.

Roughly speaking, a scientist does not think outside the realms of time and causation, the (pure) mathematician does, and the philosopher or theologian has problems trying to. The same about origin, creation. Of course, you are right that the Big Bang cannot be identified with the act of creation the Bible (symbolically) speaks of, exactly because physics/cosmology does not speak about creation or origin (like mathematics does not speak about time, or theology about electrons).

I think these remarks are valid irrespective of your interesting interpretation of the historical background.

I have no doubt in the existence of God, put that down to a sense of faith.

I do have serious and ongoing doubts and misgivings about the Church, the claims by different denominations to being the monopoly conduit to the true “God” and the authority they seek to exact demands upon people both of their denomination and beyond it.

Similarly, the Bible is claimed to be the word of God which is treated as literal; when it is really a collection of fables and folklore written by men and re-interpreted to suit the politics of Popes and Kings gone past and passed down in that rewritten state.

That some (fundamentalist) Christians are prepared to treat the literary work of the Bible as fact and demand it be imposed on all as the literal word of God tests their credulity but then, a fundamentalist view, at the edge of mainstream is where all the zealots, the gullible and the fringe believers exist

Hi Fencepost, In a previous article you noted "But personally I find all the Pauline christology stuff, and the Councils' holy trinity stuff stumbling blocks". I can understand that, because the "Trinity" doesn't exist and never did. Nowhere in the Bible is the word "Trinity" mentioned. Jesus Himself, clarified who He is simply in John 1:1-14, also 2 Corinthians 5:19,18,17, Colossians 1:15-19, there are many more scriptures in regards to who Jesus is. Note though the word "Son" doesn't have the same meaning biblically as it does in today's language. Son means the 'firstborn'. Even "Christening" the sprinkling on the head that one often has had done as an infant, is a man-made tradition. Jesus commands us as per Acts 2:38 to be baptized (fully immersed under water)in His name. That is in the name of Jesus, not under the titles of the Father,Son and Holy Spirit.

I'm reading from the King James Bible, this link may be of some help http://www.allonlinebible.com - this is a searchable online bible.

I hope this is of some help.

Thanks Z

Grey and George.
Grey makes a valid point about our causal sense. We intuitively link events as causative and life would look pretty strange without it. However the kind of causality discovered by natural science is not intuitive, indeed it is often counter to our senses and hence in a way the opposite of empirical. The most obvious case being that our experience is that the sun rises and sets. So there is a causality that can only be obtained through observation and theory. This is the kind of causality that prescientific peoples do not have and since cosmogony requires this then I think my point is valid.

I do not think that theology and science are independent of each other. As I indicated, science rests on the totally unproven notion of the biblical writers that the world is natural. However science must be free to find what it finds. This means that theology is not directly involved in what results come to light in the lab, as it were. I have always had trouble with Peacock and Polkinghorne, they are not theological enough and want to blend a Greek understanding of God with the Christian tradition that does not work. The key insight comes from the Cappadocian fathers that God is not a being, there is nobody out there. Rather, as I indicated “God is what happens between us and Jesus” as pure event. This overturns the Greek necessity to have a causal agent that produces a cause. If we say that God “is whoever raised Jesus from the dead” we identify the God we are talking about but we do not have to have a physical agent that did the raising. Thus the resurrection endures without any visible means of causal support other than it points to the truth of what happens in this man Jesus.

This all means that Christianity is closer to atheism than we might think and of course that the atheists have the ground cut from underneat

To me religion is a construct that is designed to make us feel safe and answer the questions that are as yet unanswerable.
Many religions exist, but very few acknowledge the truth of other faiths. So which religion is correct? The one with the greatest number of people or the one in which faith is strongest.
I am not sure, but think that John Paul II was the first pope to say that other religions can be a road to God.
Science is fluid and only puts forward its best supposition
Religion is static and states unproven information as fact.
I believe that the majority of religions generating factors have been elucidated using science and hence religion has little relevance.
Imagine you were on the market for a religion.
How would you choose? They all have very similar ethics, but then I think these ethics are inbuilt for all humans.
Heliocentricity was heresy but is now considered fact. Is it not suspect that once this contradiction of religion is considered fact the church changes its view. In that case I will chose to believe that I will go to heaven but not choose to believe that god exists.
Consider Occams razor “all things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually correct”
Conversely to all of the above Human conscience seems to contradict Survival of the fittest (we help each other) Unless Darwinism can be applied to survival of species. But if not then perhaps there is something to this religion thing
This is just some random thoughts and I know it is not a logical progression of thought but then this is the order these thoughts have occured in.
I mean no offence to anyon