2 posts tagged “science”
A good deal of “scam science” comes out the propaganda mills in Washington and Washington that Karl Rove used to give us George W. Bush—these operations are rather ridiculously called “think tanks.”
These are “rent-a-mouthpiece” operations that make their members big bucks by telling the general public anything that will serve the religious, corporate and political interests of those that buy them. Thinks-tanks such as the Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), Project for the New American Century (PNAC), and Discovery Institute will be happy find that privatization of Social Security is a wonderful idea, global warming is a scam, efforts to save the Florida Everglades are unnecessary, invading Iraq was a great idea, and Creationism-Intelligent Design only took God six days to do.
You too can start your own tax-exempt Think Tank. Just put some pages out of the web that attack something that is rational, include one or two nice pictures, list a bunch of folks as experts (either living or dead), and include an easy way for people to send you money—they call it getting involved.
If your think-tank cause is not supported by scientific research, just say that it is. If experts in the field have come to censuses about something that you do not like, just say that they have not.
And be sure to make it look like you are not someone out on a broken limb that is sawing it off—insist that there is a groundswell of opinion that is with you. This astorturfing should be supported by expert opinion from someone in or Forest Lawn Cemetery (oops, that cemetery is too close to Hollywood—list another one).
Remember, you are not trying to convince real thinking people that you know what you are talking about; you are just trying to get some fellow culturopaths to go along with you and send money or at least repeat your shtick.
Credo of Sam Osborne
Reflection in historical evolution:
Years of curiosity and more recent days spent in reading and contemplation of the origin and development of religion have led me to formulate a bit of way‑station theology of my own.
I have been greatly influenced and encouraged by Teilhard de Chardin's thoughts on the religious implications of progress in general; the Vatican's position, as voiced by John Paul II, on the scientific validity of the concept of evolution; and John XXIII and Vatican II's views on the role of progress in theology.
In reflection of the thoughts of Teilhard de Chardin, Richard Kropf writes in Evil and Evolution:
Just as the general theory of biological evolution has become the working model for the majority of modern scientific endeavor, so too I believe, as did Teilhard de Chardin, that any area of human thought, be it sociology, psychology, history, even philosophy or theology, must take the evolutionary structure of our world and our development into consideration.
My Church, which draws me to worship the God of my faith, has expressed sympathy for such a consideration. In an October 22, 1996 address to a plenary assembly of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Pope John Paul II allowed that the theory of evolution was "no longer a mere hypothesis." He said:
It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of this theory.
In recognition of the evolutionary nature of faith, John XXIII, in Encyclical Pacem in Terris Paragraph 5 issued April 11, 1963, stated, "The search for truth and goodness is never a ready made nor a `once and for all' discovery but rather a growing and dynamic search in historical evolution." De Ecclesia Constitution of the Church of the Second Vatican Council in Article 8 of the Constitution of Revelation of the Church proclaims, "The Church, we may say, as the ages pass, tends continually towards the fullness of divine truth, till the words of God are consummated in her."
A Faith in Existence, Life, and Awareness
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In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning God,
and without him nothing came to be.
What came to be through him was life,
and this life was the light of the human race;
the light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness has not overcome it.
John 1:1‑5
In The Modern Temper, Joseph Wood Krutch expands on William of Ockham's 14th‑century view that man knows nothing outside of particulars to be real, and that the mind of man can therefore not know the essential and inimitable being of God. Krutch writes:
It is only when the thinker discovered how small are the things he can do that he succeeded in doing anything at all, only when he renounced the effort to find the key to heaven that he was able to keep chimneys from smoking and only after he had stopped believing in the possibility of eternal life that he learned how the gout might be prevented.
In the unending cycle of things, the reverse of Krutch's contention is just as evident. It is only after toiling‑man learned how to keep chimneys from smoking and discovered how gout might be better endured that he enjoyed enough time and comfort to focus his thinking more keenly on the root meaning of it all.
I have come to root my religious beliefs in what I know personally to be most true, the "particulars" of my life and times. I cannot accept religious contentions that require me to assume things that exist outside of these particulars or that operate in a manner separate from the ways of the present, or of the past as revealed in recorded history, scientific investigation, and common experience. Angels, evil, show‑offish miracles, and much that goes bump in the night hold no more mystery or import to me than do tricks of the sleight of hand.
Primitive understandings, misunderstandings and superstitions served early mankind's needs, but many do not fit with what we know to be true today—nor will those of today with what will be known tomorrow. Even the most sacrosanct of contentions of early believers—like the misdirected astronomy that held the earth be the center of our solar system—were but steps and missteps along mankind's path to ever greater understanding.
The relatively advanced knowledge of the present times brings to our awareness miracles of a nature different from those that were assumed in times when mankind understood little of the conditions and forces that affected life and death. Current knowledge allows us to focus our faith in miracles that are more basic, more real and more compelling—such are the miracles of (1) existence, (2) life, and (3) awareness.
EXISTENCE: It amazes me that there is a something—existence. As Irish playwright Samuel Beckett observed, "Nothing is more real than nothing." Thus for me it is easy to understand how there could be absolutely nothing, all a total void, but this is not so. There exists a universe and it is as real as nothing.
Our current understanding of this universe indicates that matter is energy, and time and space proceed in mirrored image of each other. And, all at base constitutes continuous process—cause upon cause upon more cause. Reminiscent of Ockham's observation, psychologist B.F. Skinner contended that mankind, even with the most powerful of scientific efforts, cannot know ultimate cause—such is beyond science. Although Skinner may have been an agnostic, his observation on "ultimate cause" admits the existence of an essence that precedes all. This essence and Essence of essence is God the Father of Existence. Thomist theology extracted this point of view, ipsum esse subsistens, from the Septuagint, the ancient Greek rendering of the Hebrew Scriptures and writings. Thomas Cahill in The Gift of the Jews writes, “It was this translation that Thomas Aquinas used in the thirteenth century to build his theology of God as the only being whose essence is Existence, all other beings being contingent on God, who is Being (or Is-ness) itself.” The God said to have said unto Moses, "I AM WHO AM."
LIFE: It further amazes me that within existence, there is life. It is difficult if not impossible to adequately define what this miracle of life is, but we know that it exists. Such an essence can exist in the germ of a seed that can rest there for hundreds of years and then sprout forth in new abundance. This promise of miraculous inception, conception, sustenance and renewal is Jesus Christ the Son of Life, the essential presence in the celebrated Eucharist of bread and watered wine at
AWARENESS: Atop these two miracles rests a third, that of awareness—an incomprehensible capacity to comprehend. As the great Hebrew scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel observed in MAN IS NOT ALONE—a philosophy of religion, "The most incomprehensible fact is the fact that we comprehend at all." Of what there is to comprehend, the man of science Albert Einstein said, "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."
We can know and know, and know that we know, but the essence and personal nature of awareness is encompassed in an ultimate understanding and persona that goes before and beyond us, the Holy Spirit of Awareness. Of sensing and experiencing this Awareness, German theologian Friedrich Benesch wrote: “The Father God lives in being; the Son God lives in creating and transforming; the Spirit God shines forth from the Father and the Son as the essential, divine consciousness.”
The Father, the Son, and the Spirit form a triune essence that makes possible all personal existence, life and awareness. This is the Great Personal Trinity that essentials the being of the children of God. This is the fount from which flows all being, love and meaning.
It is the Trinity of Existence, Life and Awareness with which I, as a person of my times, commune. This is the One I reach out to in worship services, prayers of thanksgiving, cries of anguish, periods of meditation, service to others, and moments of awe. This is who I respectfully contemplate when reading the primitive Scripture that is loosely sketched in my Bible, and when observing the Tradition that has been passed down to me by the Church.
This is a personal and essential God that lovingly gives rise to all that is personal, essential, and loving in me, and all reaches of the universe—the God of all times, and the God of these times. This is the God that I comprehend directly through enjoyment and celebration of existence, life and awareness—the God of the excitement of bright beginnings, the comfort of loving nurture, and the fulfillment of apt conclusions. This is the God of infinite grandeur whose inchoative flux is perceived as weal and woe by a limited humanity.
This is the real God evidenced by unswerving faith in what we know to be lastingly tangible and true. The One from whom cycles all that humanity embraces as most dear: love and compassion, joy and good humor, expectation and reward, dignity and respect, beauty and appreciation, peace and tranquility, and comfort and good will.
It is from the Father, with the Son and through the Spirit that we share these goods‑of‑God with friends, neighbors, loved ones, and occasional strangers. All this shared within the Wondrous Image of Certainty reflecting back to me the certainty of my own existence, life, and awareness.
In want of heat and light and good
This is the God who sustains us in our struggle over the self‑inflicted woe that we have come to call evil—evil being a lacking of good as cold is of heat, and darkness is of light. The limits of this lacking are described by Karl Rahner in his commentary on Evil and the Devil: “There is not absolute evil. All evil is finite; it is not a positive reality in itself but a want of good in an entity that remains good in its substance as coming from God and indestructible.”
The only devils to be encountered in life are the misdeeds that appear as the dark side of any of us. With mankind being a part of and not apart from the universe, the dark side of any of us is but a collecting point for bits of folly and futility that seem momentarily to impede the inherent progress of existence, life and awareness. As a St. Pogo would say if he existed, "We have met Satan and he is us." Or, as Mark 7:15 has Jesus teaching, “Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person; but the things that come out from within are what defile.”
To paraphrase Mike Bryan from his book, Chapter and Verse, weal and woe would not exist on the planet Mars until God's children had arrived. Or as Shakespeare has Hamlet saying of the world in general and Denmark in particular, "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison."
Finding God's good in order
Wherever there is mankind, his preference for weal over woe is the motive force in the unending and unrelenting search for meaning—a search that progressively finds new order from that which was mistaken for chaos. "Order" (which is) is the Word of God; it is the "Logos" of early Greek and "dbr" of ancient Hebrew (dabar [dbr] being a term that according to Walter Ong, in his book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, meant to the ancients both 'word' and 'event'). "Chaos" (which is not) is but a curse uttered by mankind when confused by an unknown part of the Order of God.
As Claude Levi-Strauss observed in talks on CBS Radio in 1977 under the title Myth and Meaning and recorded in text in a book of the same title:
To speak of rules and to speak of meaning is to speak of the same thing; and if we look at all the intellectual undertakings of mankind, as far as they have been recorded all over the world, the common denominator is always to introduce some kind of order. If this represents a basic need for order in the human mind and since, after all, the human mind is only part of the universe, the need probably exists because there is some order in the universe and the universe is not a chaos.
Abraham Heschel in his study, Who is Man, says of order, "The order of things goes back to an `order' of God." Of the meaning of things, Heschel says, "Meaning insinuates itself into our existence. We cannot grab or conquer it; we can only be involved in it."
The divine insinuation of meaning is the presence of God that descends to me from the awe of Neanderthal man; the wonder of Cro‑Magnon man; the Sumerian folklore of Gilgamesh; the imagination of Akhnaton; the faith of Abraham, Moses, Peter, Paul, Mark, Justin, Augustine, Aquinas, Ignatius and Newman; the doubt of Galileo, Darwin and Einstein; and the love, respect and tolerance of Teilhard, John XXIII, and my family. This is the God that I celebrate and seek communion with through the Body of Christ, the Church, and the One found just as readily in the sharing of God's love with God's children.
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The above statement was taken from the first eight pages of my personal apologia.
