I'm surprised no one has commented on this movie yet. It appears God and science are getting back together. Sad news for atheism:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRFFjpEs4IA
Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up - GK Chesterton
In Standing on the Sholders of Giants, David Boyd Haycock writes (my emphasis and [comments]):
If Baconianism, Newtonianism and the Royal Society were three of the most significant influences upon the development of science in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England, then a fourth requiring full and equal consideration is religion. As we have seen, Baconian scientific methodology advocated a split from the earlier, uncritical Aristotelianism of the scholastics. However, in the Middle Ages Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology had become thoroughly assimilated through the apologetics [He did pure philosophy and theology, too.] of the medieval scholar Thomas Aquinas, so that at least one cautious seventeenth-century religious commentator, writing as 'S. P.' (possibly Simon Patrick, later the bishop of Ely), feared that since 'philosophy and divinity [i.e., theology] are so interwoven by the schoolmen ... it cannot be safe to separate them; new philosophy will bring in new divinity.' [Yes, St. Thomas's doctrine on faith and reason will never be superseded.] It was this very fear which had led the Catholic Church to its persecution of both the former Dominican friar and philosopher Giordano Bruno [Suspected of the Arian heresy, he was a pantheist and materialist who said "Matter is not without its forms, but contains them all; and since it carries what is wrapped up in itself, it is in truth all nature and the mother of all the living." (C. Gutberlet).] (who was burnt at the stake [by civil authorities, not clerics] in 1600), and the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei. Though English Protestants considered themselves well above such Papist extremes, Newton's critic Dr Edwards castigated his contemporaries for their practice of 'coining ... New Systems in Divinity.' He observed how 'this vain Apprehension [Yes, it certainly is vain. What is their justification of it?] possesses them, that, because in this Learned Age some parts of Humane Knowledge are censur'd [Such as?], and the very Principles of some Arts, especially those that relate to Natural Philosophy, have undergone a great Alteration [But not so great that, e.g., quidquid movetur ab alio movetur ("that which is moved is moved by another") is no longer true.]; therefore they may venture to advance some unheard-of doctrines in Divinity, to new model our Religion, to mend the Gospel, and to present us as it were with a New Christianity'. [So basically they changed "Divinity" in order to advance their supposedly greatly altered "Natural Philosophy," based on which they would try to justify the "New Christianity"?] Bacon had attempted to defend his new method from any such criticism by arguing that 'we do not presume by the contemplation of nature to attain to the mysteries of God.' [Cf. Romans 1:20: "For the invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made; his eternal power also, and divinity.] But it was impossible that a science based upon the empirical study of a world considered to be divine handiwork would not inevitably lead to questions relating to the very nature of the divine itself. [This is why by their very nature "philosophy and divinity are so interwoven," so, with Dr. Edwards, I reiterate: "Why the need for a 'new philosophy' and 'new divinity'?]share
"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became [an adult], I put away childish things." 1 Corinthians 13:11 KJV
Religion (dress it up however you wish "divinity" "theology" etc) is a childish thing. It's a wilful substitution of one's own desires and fears in place of, and in defiance of, the actual world.
A portion of humanity grew past religion during the Renaissance, slowly of course, and not simultaneously with advances in science, but that portion is getting larger through the results that science alone leads to, and the internet which permits religious individuals access to information that allows them to see the world accurately, safely, and find that path out into the sunshine.
In order to live a life, we make some tiny assumptions:
* That we and the world are real
* That we can remember our past (via memory or records)
* That if A caused B yesterday, it will do so today (or we can refine A and B such that it does)
Keeping assumptions to a minimum, the most useful explanations of the world necessarily come from gathering evidence and applying logic.
There is no need, at any point, to assume gods.
There is no path, at any point, that leads to gods.
Yet we are able to understand far more about the world than holy books ever purported to guess, and the application of that knowledge leads to great advances in human capability, in reducing disease, in feeding ourselves, in understanding ourselves, and so on.
There will always be room for gods, but the gaps get smaller, and to pretend to know which gods might fill such gaps is sheer arrogance, except to the degree that we can rule out gods like Abraham's god who clearly does not exist, by contradiction in the written accounts, no science even needed for that one. It's unlikely, but there may be a god that inspired the stories in the Bible or Koran -- it is certainly not the god OF the Bible, nor Koran.
"by civil authorities, not clerics" -- Minimize it all you want, but the civil authorities who executed Bruno would not have burnt him at the stake if the Roman Inquisition hadn't asked them to. Indeed it was Pope Clement VIII himself who proclaimed the death sentence. It's the same lawyering as in the story of the crucifixion; somehow the religious nuts who call for death are never the guilty ones -- it's always the guy duped into actually carrying it out who gets blamed.
That comment is not only incredibly naive and childish, it's amusingly ironic, since the basis of the author's argument is his own childish conception of religion, not to mention the "tiny" assumptions.
share[deleted]
[deleted]
Google "map of the known universe"
shareYeah, I'll believe the rubbish conjecture at the heart of this film, just as soon as geocentrifrauds can show me a universe with a non-zero angular momentum, where galaxies and galactic clusters are gravitationally bound and not moving away from each other and from us at faster than escape velocity, and where all the bodies in the universe actually move like gravitationally bound free falling bodies revolving around a center, where their angular momentum decreases as a function of their distance from us.
Shame the universe just doesn't work like that, and geocentrists have no evidence for their mindless drivel.
[deleted]