Grim,
Thanks for your Hansonism. I could understand you scratching your head at my comment. It perhaps wasn’t the clearest. I was running out of word limit.

But your statement contrasted ‘science minded atheists’ as being endlessly curious, with ‘theists’ who were not so. I thought this was a false contrast, so I wanted to challenge it. I see you softened your statement later.

Relda caught on to what I was saying, and summed it up, ‘... our first scientists developed their theories under a religious framework.’ What was once a nice marriage is said to be having difficulties. Yet I think they were meant for each other.

Eve is said to have came straight out of Adam’s side. In those middle centuries, the flow of science out of faith wasn’t quite so intimate and direct, but many have noticed the close and natural bond.

By the way, two of the three character you mentioned need to find Doctor Who’s tardis to get back into the correct time period.

George,
To put into perspective “rapidly moving”, I’d suggest 100 years duration is quite rapid when compared with, say, 4 millennia. From purely a time perspective, mine and your life-span can hardly count. That God may have brought into being matter and energy out of nothing is certainly irrelevant to science - it is a claim made on the basis of faith. Origins necessarily fall outside of the realm of science, or that of the observable universe.

Creatio ex nihilo is one of the bricks that have contributed to the wall of American Evangelicalist theology. To accept that creation was not a one-time event six thousand years ago seems to undermine the ex nihilo layer. Fortunately, an historical counterpart to Creatio ex nihilo exists. Creatio Continua (Latin: ‘Continuous Creation’) is a concept relating specifically within the Eastern Orthodox tradition and some Process Theologies. According to this idea, creation can be envisaged not as a single act in the past, but as a continuing presence here and now, hence it is legitimate to speak of a continuing creation (or ‘evolution’).

‘Time’ is a human concept and Augustine of Hippo wrote that time exists only within the created universe. The metaphysics of eternity might be summarized with the question, if and how could anything survive time? So, yes, “our brains cannot work outside time.” Perhaps a consequent metaphysical question of importance is, can information survive without humans, and if so, what would be the content and purpose of such information?

For most of us, the material world provides the raw material for scientific research or, an “Ultimate reality”, not mystical illumination. If Christians wish to retain in Christ the very qualities on which his power is based, they perhaps have no better way of doing so than to accept the most modern concepts of evolution. So yes, I agree, contemporary theology is in need of science and its philosophy - and not vice-versa. This perhaps gives the appearance of an asymmetric or “unequal rights” marriage but they are, however, perfect partners and as historically shown, meant for each other.

relda,
Of course, you are right if by “is rapidly moving” you meant “has been rapidly moving”. The belief that God brought into being matter out of nothing, existed well before people differentiated between theology and science, so only since then became it clear that it fell outside the realm of science.

Thank you for the info that Creatio Continua (that indeed, in some sense is the precursor of process theology) was more representative of Orthodox theology. Since we do not have any more such a simple understanding of time, the concept of creation, of how to understand God’s relation to time, is more complicated even within theology. Polkinghorne, who as a quantum physicist is used to a “stereo-vision” of reality (the corpuscular-wave dualism) suggests a double vision of God as both in and outside of time (see e.g. http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=9423#150700).

I am not sure what you mean by “information surviving without humans”. Perhaps, self-consciousness surviving without the brian? That, of course, is very much outside the realm of science.

I think the only point where we disagree - although even that is not so clear - is when you seem to equate Ultimate reality (all that “exists”) with physical reality that can be made the subject of scientific investigation. “Mystical illumination” might or might not point the subject to something beyond the physical, since there are also those who claim to have experienced it but do not believe it points outside the physical.

I tried to spell out my position e.g. in http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=9389#150883. It all hinges on how you define your terms, and the fact, that some terms - like ”existence”, “reality” - must remain undefined at this metaphysical level. So I can understand Tillich when he does not want to answer the question whether God “exists”, although a “simple believer” needs to answer it affirmatively with his/her understanding of both “God” and “exists”. These understandings (“models”) depend on the subject’s denomination, cultural (ethnic) context, education, intellectual sophistication, psychological disposition, etc. In this sense “man created (models) God to his image” just complements “God created man to His image”.

George,
I guess if all existence is to be reduced to only the physical (or material), intelligence could be understood as a function of the circuitry in the brain and consciousness could be reduced to a complex series of chemical reactions, etc., etc. In other words, as argued by Teilhard, the mysticism of discovery deteriorates into the mere "worship of matter." Teilhard's major contribution to theology - and science, is his notion that matter, even in its most primitive forms, is impregnated with a purposive energy and spirit that constantly evolves toward ever-greater complexity. In other words, matter is the indispensable pre-condition for spirit and contains within itself the potential for ‘spirituality’. This 'presence' has many names including the Judeo-Christian 'God'. Fr. Paul Collins mentions George Steiner getting at this when talking about the experience of 'real presences' in the natural world, art, especially music, literature and all of the best in human experience.

Certainly, how we define our terms is important – “reality” and existence” are no exception. Metaphysically then, there is perhaps a sense in which we may not be the end-purpose of evolution, but rather just an interesting evolutionary experiment that has ended in disaster. Anthropocentric Christians, however, are likely to find this idea rather heretical.

relda,
I think “being present in” is not the same as “being reducible to”. For me “matter impregnated with a purposive energy and spirit”, as well as Paul Collins’ quote, is neither theology nor science - theology defines Spirit differently, and so does physics energy - but poetry.

I think - coming back to my two alternatives in http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=9389#150883 - you seem to prefer Sagan’s option, but I am still not sure if I read you properly. Perhaps not only “reality” and “existence” but also “spirit” and “energy” must remain undefined, and we have to agree (or disagree) on their meaning only on the basis of some shared (or not) intuition.

I do not think Teilhard would have agreed with Sagan’s option. His vision is concerned more with a reinterpretation of the concept of “God incarnate” (Cosmic Christ) than with the otherworldly or not character of the Judaeo-Christian God. I do not know if I am an “anthropocentric Christian” but I certainly do not think humanity is an experiment that we already can be sure ended in disaster. The worse we can say is that we might end up as a dead end, a dry branch on the tree of evolution (on this planet, in this Universe) like the dinosaurs, or any species that did not (is not going to) develop further towards consciousness and intelligence.

Against this, the Christian hope of the Incarnation is a promise, that this is not so, that we humans are on the right track, though probably not the final outcome, of evolution. Whether this outcome can be seen as Teilhard’s point Omega approached from within the material world, is not clear, especially now after physicists have apparently decided that the Universe will end in a Heat Death or maximum state of entropy, something Teilhard could not have foreseen. So as an individual’s life seems “purposeless” without “afterlife”, also evolution (of the Universe) would seem “purposeless” if ALL REALITY was reducible to the material heading towards its Heat Death. Some people are happy with that, I am not.

George,
I guess if we’re to speak in theological terms, we can say evolution is a development of matter towards spirit through God’s continuous, immanent and creative impulse until, in humanity, nature becomes conscious of itself . Here spirit, the distinctively human feature, is both self-conscious and conscious of God as the absolute mystery of being. This is reminiscent of Chardin. In fact Carl Sagan, along with Arthur Peacocke, Paul Davies, and Thomas Berry have indicated something similar by suggesting evolution is the universe’s way of becoming conscious of itself. Where Sagan goes on to deploy a “naturalistic religion”, whose metaphysical basis reaches beyond what science can warrant, he is perhaps to be questioned, i.e. - his conclusion about the relative unimportance of human life in the universe when argued using emotion and not logic. This is perhaps a little akin to the ‘tongue-in-cheek’ comment of the final paragraph in my previous post – mind you, I’d suggest a tilt at our anthropocentricity is certainly warranted.

One can probably say atheistic scientists who deploy a truly scientifically based world view tend to be less dogmatic and more tentative in their approach. Their conclusion is self-critical atheism rather than dogmatic atheism. One should also note, taking religious experience is also seriously problematic, since there is too much data, too much conflict among the data, and much of it involves manifest evil fashioned in the name of religion.

Nevertheless in relation to the above, and as we both seem a little struck on Tillich, where he believed literalism distorts the universal meaning, a static view of faith will tend to falsify Christianity's core message. Perhaps, a little paradoxically, this makes it more conservative than all the views by which it is judged radical. Tillich saw the objective and transcendent God of a classical theism as dead – perhaps we can say, when directed to the powerlessness and suffering of God in the NT, that “a world come of age” becomes a necessary abandonment of our false conceptions of God…