The Nature of this Conflict (Humans)

by George Jelliss , Crewe, Tuesday, January 19, 2010, 20:20 (5421 days ago) @ David Turell

There seem to me to have been some weird responses in the last three posts!-xeno maintains that spiritual people have a different "threshhold ... for evidence ... than someone who is more materialistic." ... "Because everyone is a metaphysician, we all have our own personal criterion for what is credible and what isn't." It is necessary to distinguish between personal beliefs or fancies and human knowledge, of value to us all, that can be established by rigorous methods. -The fellow who believes God saved his father from a car crash, is I'm afraid all too common. I've had an occasional brush with death, such as coming off my motorbike some years ago, but I put down my escape to chance factors. Someone who escapes a disaster in which others were killed and thinks it was his personal God looking after him is just showing a despicable inability to see the situation other than from a childishly egotistical viewpoint.-
dhw as usual blows up the "mysteries" of the origin of life and of consciousness into mystical proportions, and can't accept that a simple joining up of the dots between the materialist descriptions of the before and after is the most likely explanation, but prefers to think that some sort of spiritual miracle occurred here, rather than a natural process.-dhw continues: "The materialist claim that science and religion are incompatible (a claim which Darwin himself emphatically rejected) is therefore not only baseless, but is also indirectly a confession of faith no more scientific than theism." Here again, it is clear that science and "religion" in most popular senses of that term, are indeed incompatible. It is only a severely watered down "religion" that is compatible with science.-DT says: "I don't see what is wrong with a 'watered-down' version of God." There is nothing wrong with it. That is my point.-Rabbi DT offers the notion of a "tough-love God" who expects the human race to rise above the challenges of every day life and asteroid strikes, and look after the Earth and its animals and plants. But this is litle more than "Nature" personified. I can see no point in "praying" to Nature; it has no effect. One can "worship" Nature in the sense of appreciating its grandeur and power, but would one want to worship its arbitrariness in dealing out death?

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GPJ