Letters to the Editor
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What if...
Q: Teilhard argued that the universe is still evolving. Wasn't that the cosmic process he was trying to explain?
A: ... He saw the emergence of what he called "more" coming in gradually from the time of the big bang... this process of growing complexity as something that's still going on. ... And the process is accelerating today at an enormous pace because of communications technology, engineering, economics and politics. The globe is shrinking. We're able to connect instantaneously with other parts of the Earth, in the same way that nerve fibers carry an electronic message from one part of the body to the other.
Hmm. So, a species / world / universe continuously becoming more complex, more interconnected, more evolved, with increasing understanding of how things work on sub-atomic levels. Where does that path end?
It would be no small irony if science, and scientists, were actually agents in an evolutionary process focused on an ultimate goal of creating God.
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Surprised If Anyone Reads This
...but I'm happy to chime in anyway.
What's instructional for me in any discussion about religion vs. science is the way that argument is structured. There are more varieties of arguments, and fallacies, and appeals to X, Y and Z here than in many public debates. While my own position was decided long ago -- largely emotionally, I might add -- I can always add a new arrow to my quiver after reflecting the discourse.
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I tried to write a letter in response to qazwart
who insisted that Atheists with a capital 'A' are cocky and self-assured, and who also insisted that his or her children are getting the best education in parochial school, but I couldn't get past all of the grammatical mistakes in the letter to understand it fully.
Maybe I'll have a clearer understanding of the proper exaltation of religion once I put away my Madeline Murray O'Hare shrine and focus on the use of "your" and "you're" and "life" and "lives".
Hopefully the parochial children are learning to read and write better. We need that in a Godless world where knowledge of Science and Math will help Americans compete for 'Jobs'.
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There are worse things than Haught air
If all the faithful were as reasonable as John Haught, the world would be a grad school seminar. We should be so lucky. But I can't imagine who would find his mild musings (you could hardly call them "arguments") of interest. They're too bland for most believers and too jejune for everyone else.
It's hardly fair to fault Salon's readers for being theologically illiterate. Do we really need to master the intricacies of internecine debate among the world's religions to be suspicious of their universal claims? Still, even those with only a passing knowledge of theology will recognize that Haught is simply rehashing the nostrums of a half-century ago. In the 30s Karl Barth and Emil Brunner had a spirited debate about natural theology. In the 60s the "God is dead" theologians said everything Haught is saying, but far more panache. I wanted to weep with ennui when he invoked Paul Tillich, whose tomes of theology are not only systematic but stultifying. And Teilhard de Chardin with his echoes in the noosphere?! Why not Rudolph Steiner and Madame Blavatsky? In this case, ignorance is bliss.
On the other hand, secularists have to recognize that the religious will always be with us. What we need is a viable pluralism – not "truth" but a way to live in peace with many points of view. In that respect, Haught is on our side. Unfortunately, his rather etiolated notion of "ultimate concern" is unlikely to inspire anyone. As Geoffrey Hill observed in his poem "Genesis"
By blood we live, the hot, the cold,
To ravage and redeem the world:
There is no bloodless myth will hold.
That's what's scary. Fundamentalists of every stripe want apocalypse now. If atheists had any sense, we'd be sending Haught to churches everywhere, because they're never going to listen to us.
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Assumption on Evolution
"How can a person of faith reconcile the apparently random, meaningless process of evolution with belief in God?"
It is interresting how people place resrictions on God. Who says that Evolution is random and meaningless. There reason that Evolution is a problem for the Church - not God - is the failure of imagination.
There is no way that any human can understand or begin to completely understand A being that can create an infinite universe. We can not really even understand infinity, much less its creator.
I was once confused into thinking I did not believe in God. I then realized that it was not God that I did not believe in, it was the Churchs version of God that just made no sense to me.
THe Church by its edicts, not God's, declares this or that as being out of the realm of God's existance, when if we are open we can solve all kinds of disputes of theology by just seing God as the Super Dynamic Complexity that he is. He is pandemensional and we, limited to just three dimensions, suppose to understand and judge God's way of creation. The Church Presumes that God's plan, which is self evident through the evidence, is random and meaningless. It is that way only to the Church. THe Church brought Galileo to his knees to recant that which was self-eveident then, that the Earth rotates anound the Sun. The current Church repeats that today with evolution.
So try this on for size: Predestination and free-will; how can God know what we are going to do if we have free will and have not yet made the decision.
The answer is simple, yet not common in current thought. God says he is the Alpha and Omega, begining and end. He is both begining and end simutaneous becasue he is not bound by our dimensions. We are trapped in three dimensions, he can be at all times all places and all at the same time. He knows what we will do next becasue he has already seen it, we made the descison and he saw it, so he knows what has happened and what will happen because in his existance everything is happening at one time. So there is contradiction, unless we impose upon God our limitations.
In the beginning was man and man made God in his image. One slight problem - God does exist and he is not limited to what we can percieve or envision. The Church Grows when it give up its Dogma and allows itself to actually see God.