waterboy,
I essentially agree with what you wrote about miracles, which is very different from the style you used and that I objected to. These are just variations on what I meant by “miracle by definition is an event that cannot be explained from KNOWN natural laws“.

To ask the silly question whether a camera would have recorded this or that miraculous event - or whether a contemporary doctor would have proclaimed Lazarus dead - is irrelevenat to what the Gospels are about. However, an affirmative answer strengthens the faith of some insecure Christians, and a negative answer strengthens the “unfaith” of those who reject Christianity on whatever grounds.

What an irony that exactly those who emphasize that humanity is not in the centre and purpose of Creation/evolution insist that the Gospels have to be read exactly from the present-day scientific perspective. In centuries and millennia to come our “scientific explanation“ of Gospels will be as outdated, as a medieval one is for us today. The Gospels were written to say something to ALL generations.

As to whether it matters how you refer to the Christian God, I still see that it would be impolite for me to call you - or those close to you - names that are different from what you/they are generally known by, just because I think they befit you/them better. Today, Christians are used to all sorts of “impolitenesses”, so I was not concerned about them but about giving the proper weight to your arguments.

For instance in French, German and Slav languages “person” is of feminine gender (and it is irrelevant that both males and females are persons), and referring to it as if its gender was masculine is wrong grammar. If you do it consistently and on purpose people might wonder, why you need to mutilate their language. So though in your privacy you might pray “Our Mother who art in Heaven” should you wish so, if you publicly advocate this deviation from Christian usage, most Christians will question your motives.

Oliver,
Thanks for your comments, though please note that my remark concerned religion and science in general, not the Church (that faced for the first time a world-view forming competitor) and the pioneers of serious science (who themselves where not very much clear about the meaning and limitations of their scientific investigations). This is still true - though to a much lesser extent - on both sides.

>>some of the devout cannot see beyond the “literal” scriptures <<
I agree, although I do not know in what sense you would call “devout“ most of the anti-theists who attack Christianity exactly because they can understand the Bible and faith only “literally”.

Neither Science nor Religion as such can "see" anything: it is only some rigidly conservative e.g. Christians who might see their religion in an anti-environmentalist light (if that is what you meant), a concept that did not exist only a few decades ago. And certainly not all scientists see their faith as just "a cultural response to ecology and an aid to socialisation"; certainly not the Christians among them.

>>the notion of the perfect original watchmaker is corrupted by God’s alleged historical interventions being necessary to keep the Design on its course<<
Paley's idea of a "perfect watchmaker", as well as the idea that He has to "intervene to keep the Design on course", belong to nineteenths century, although some people (e.g. Richard Dawkins and his adversaries) try to resuscitate them. Also, the idea of God as a "perfect programmer" became outdated after epistemological consequences of quantum mechanics and quantum computing (only recently I read that Everett’s multi-world interpretation has allegedly become more popular among quantum physicists than the Copenhagen interpretation) became parts of world-view speculations by serious scientists, like John Polkinghorne or Paul Davies mentioned in this thread.

Oliver

You said
'... Science and Religion both employ “faith” and “intuition” and owing to these commonalities each side all-to-often crosses on the other’s prefecture...'

Without doubt science has trespassed on territory erstwhile claimed by the Church and given the Church's reluctance to concede territory conflict is, I suppose, inevitable. In the west the Church has obviously suffered from this conflict with Church affiliation falling dramatically over the last 50 years as people have reacted to the 'cognitive dissonance' rising from the disparate positions of a hugely successful scientific movement over against a very conservative religious dogma. What we are seeing today is a strong polarisation of views rather than a rapprochement of ideas as exemplified by people like George. At one extreme large numbers of people are totally rejecting all things spiritual while at the other extreme people are retreating into fundamentalist and pentecostal Church where they feel their faith is defended most powerfully. The middle ground is disappearing as the average age of local congregations increases and their numbers dwindle.

In the secular society that we now occupy where legislation proscribes discrimination and attempts to redress the imbalances of power that drive all forms of abuse, the spectacle of Churches refusing women basic rights, vilifying gay people and protecting paedophiles illustrates just how far the Church has digressed from the Word that Jesus commissioned her to proclaim.

It is difficult to associate the Church as we see it today with the words of Jesus that the Apostles and their immediate followers saw fit to record. I believe history will judge the Church of the 20th century very harshly indeed and I certainly would not be surprised if the 21st century saw its ultimate demise.

George, Waterboy and others,

Much unnecessary anxiety and suffering results from our not differentiating between gender and sexuality, and also between both of them and the feminine-masculine psycho-dynamic polarity. This occurs particularly in theological discussion.

To my mind God comprises both masculine and feminine principles. I am not referring to sexuality, but to the dimension variously characterised as yin-yang, outward-inward, active-passive, etc. One can even label logical thought as masculine in its linear progressiveness, and value-judgement as its feminine opposite.

In my (Anglican) church I have come across a number of well-regarded priests (both male and female) who have deliberately alternated between masculine and feminine pronouns just as waterboy does when speaking of God. They aim to avoid ascribing only one of the two polarities to God. Another strategy used at times within our church is to avoid the pronouns altogether. (This, however, seems very hard to sustain without running into linguistic difficulty.)

Perhaps we bring a lot of this angst upon ourselves by giving words too much importance in our efforts to understand God and our human being. That is why there is today a surge of interest in non-verbal avenues of enquiry, prayer and worship. For example, across the world members of Anglican, Roman Catholic and other “mainstream” churches are rediscovering and practising meditation, which has a hidden history of many centuries in Christianity.

I believe this is part of the regeneration of the Church that could allay waterboy’s fears of its demise.

Oliver,
Deism is essentially a rationalistic religion, which assumes that all men naturally possess the ability to know the universe’s Deity through reason, and that the creator of the universe was a rational architect. And it is interesting to note, ID comes awfully close in alliance to this definition, if one takes seriously its corollary of presuppositions.

ID actually originated as a short aberration into Christian theology in the late 17th Century and early 18th Century. Its revival is basically a recent American (Fundamental/ Evangelistic Christianity) phenomenon where, in 1987, the Supreme Court ruled (Edwards v. Aguillard) that teaching creationism in public schools was unconstitutional – i.e. the teaching of "creation science" alongside evolution was a violation of the Establishment Clause, which prohibits state aid to religion. ID is simply a Trojan horse for the Creation Science movement. Despite it’s so called scientific endeavor, where ID seeks to find “complex objects, specified to some pattern”, its basic component is a "cultural renewal" – focusing on ideological and religious rather than scholarly goals. For this reason I called ID fraudulent – not because there is anything wrong, per se, for having focus on a religion or ideology but rather, it is wrong to deceptively delegate this focus as ‘scientific.’

ID has been called an "argument from ignorance," as it relies upon a lack of knowledge for its conclusion: Lacking a natural explanation, we assume intelligent cause – a reversion to the old “God of the gaps” approach, but in a new, upbeat language. The ‘Old world’ beliefs, as held by Augustine or Aquinas etc, don’t need the ID deception to form a bridge to our ‘new’ one. The “religious masses”, on the other hand, may be falsely led.

George

Your point about the French, German and Slav languages shows that the problem of finding the 'right' pronoun for God is a peculiarly English problem. In those languages gender is a 'linguistic' property of words not necessarily identified with male/female as a 'property' of individual living things and therefore alluding to sexuality. Hence gender in language is never described as male-female but rather as masculine-feminine and is disassociated from notions of sexuality in the linguistic context. Gender is essentially an overloaded word in the context of those languages sometimes referring to feminine-masculine without male-female specificity and at other times referring specifically to male-female.

English has lost the linguistic notion of gender almost completely leaving only the male-female distinction. It is true that in English the masculine pronoun retains some sense of linguistic gender being the default pronoun used for God. The problem in English is that 'he' is so dominantly male (sexual gender) as opposed to masculine (linguistic gender) that its use distorts the representation of God in language making Him exclusively male.

If you say that some Christians might be offended by use of the female pronoun for God then I would simply ask 'why?'. Do they insist that God is male and that being called female is in some way offensive to God or 'diminishes' the Divine. I would argue otherwise that use of the feminine pronoun extends our perception of God and opens our minds to an even greater God than we had previously imagined. I don't see that as offensive and I don't resile from the 'offence' I might cause to people whose image of God seems to me unduly restrictive.