Kupek wrote:I'm not surprised. As far as I know, the kind of Christian fundamentalism that pushes creationism is unique to the US.
My goodness, I hope this is true. It does seem very possible, however.
What I was refreshed to see was the seeming openness of these cardinals to have open debate between scientists and theologians, which I think could be absolutely crucial to the advancement of the human species, or race - whichever you like to call it - in the future.
Cardinal Poupard wrote:Poupard, for his part, stressed that what was important was that "the universe wasn't made by itself, but has a creator."
While I don't know how much I'd agree that this is strongly "provable", my own knowledge about the science of possibilities regarding a "creation" hypothesis is rather limited. It actually seems like one of those things that is not possible to "prove" either way, with the extent of human knowledge
as it currently stands. However, I don't know that this will always be true. I was quite happy to see the description of the "Vatican Project STOQ" that he had talked about, which sounded like an interdisciplinary conference between scientists, philosophers, and theologians - the kind of thing I think could lead to wonderful things in this area.
I don't agree at all with some parts of "formal" agnostic thought that such debates aren't worthwhile - I'm rather convinced, in fact, that the opposite is true.
Even though I value science extremely highly in my own personal belief set, I don't think this necessarily precludes discussion on traditionally religious topics. One thing that interests be in particular is the concept of the afterlife, perhaps selfishly, if only because I have recently rather become a fan of life and the living of it, and I very much tend to wonder what will happen to "me" when the conventional definition of "living" is no longer possible for the various parts that are lumped under the category of "me".
I'm not sure that a truly scientific worldview even precludes a belief in, or discussions about, an "afterlife", though I think it does tend to make one want to consider that there is a chance that this is "all there is". The phrase I like to use is "the subjective experience of consciousness after death" - and I'm not entirely convinced that this "ends", if only because I usually do tend to believe in two other things.
One is that there is some sort of larger reality out there that "I" am currently a part of. In other words, while I don't know if I think it's possible to disprove a "Matrix" sort of situation where my experiences aren't actually determined by interactions with other bits of what science understands as various forms of matter or energy, but by some other sort of agency that produces an experience that isn't distinguishable from it, I tend to guess that this isn't the case - Occam's Razor sort of thing.
Two, Einstein's mass-energy equivalence is generally accepted as true, and while I couldn't do a derivation of it (I really should learn to at some point), I tend to regard it as "true" for the same reason I regard evolution as "true" even though my education in evolutionary biology is rather small - there are a certain number of people out there who use it regularly in order to predict observable phenomena that it predicts, and predicts successfully. At any rate, if the mass-energy equivalence is "true", this would indicate that it is not possible to destroy the individual matter and energy that makes each of us up; only to change it into different forms of matter and energy. So while the specific configuration of quarks/atoms/molecules/cells/etc. that is generally accepted as "me" is not permanent by any means, the mass-energy equivalence - "matter cannot be created or destroyed" - seems to indicate that the total energy that makes "me" up actually is. More specifically, it seems to indicate that the energy that makes up the parts I usually think of as my mind (that which makes up the brain, mostly) will certainly exist in some way after my death, even though the specific configuration of energy that's currently there won't.
To me, this begs the question of whether or not it implies that there is a subjective experience of "being" or experiencing that will continue in some way after my death. Is my subjective experience of, well, experience, completely determined by the current configuration of my body and brain, or is it determined only partially by it?
To me, these are questions that I would be very keen on seeing investigation on, and cooperative debate around, which is why I believe the attitude of certain fundamentalist groups is so harmful. I don't generally have a problem with "this is the way we believe things are, or might be, and this is why", but I do have one with "this is the way things are, and we will look at you disapprovingly if you pursue investigation into ways that you think they are that are different".
Oddly and interestingly, put like that, if one looks at recent things such as the Kansas Board of Education debates, the evolutionists would seem to be more guilty of intolerance than the creationists. I don't really think this is the case, but I don't want to post additional material to this thread explaining why I almost always side with the evolutionists on that argument, because it might be quite lengthy. However, I do think that many evolutionists (and generally, people whose main "faith" is scientific thinking) can be just as intolerant of viewpoints that don't agree with theirs as the fundamentalists, and it is a reason I'm not a huge Richard Dawkins fan, even though I tend to agree with the man science-wise. I've heard he can be absolutely vicious with people of science who also have religious beliefs, and I think that attitude is harmful to open debate and the kinds of interdisciplinary cooperation Cardinal Poupard talks about in the article. To me, that kind of thing is very eminently worthwhile.
At any rate, this went fairly long, so I will try to reiterate the main thing I wanted to say, which is that I am a huge proponent of an interdisciplinary cooperative approach to "religious" questions, and that I am very happy to see that there is a significant element of the Catholic Church which feels this way as well.
