OwenKL
Teapot
Bertrand Russell posited that a teapot in solar orbit would be as difficult to prove as the existence of God. Thus, a teapot has become an icon for Atheism.
The ultra-conservative Tea Party, which is rife with Fundamentalist Christians, also uses a teapot as an icon.
Only the Atheists are likely to appreciate the irony of this dichotomy. To everyone else, it’s just a tempest in a teapot.
Science And Religion
Science And Religion
I get sick and tired of hearing Science constantly contrasted with Religion. The two are in no way incompatible. Indeed, Science is the great supporter of Religion. One of the greatest promises in the Bible is Malachi 3:10b, “…prove me now herewith, saith the Lord of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing…” Prove Me now herewith. Could there be any stronger affirmation of God’s acceptance of the scientific method than this?
Few examples of a scientific experiment could be more dramatic than that described in I Kings 18:18-40. King Ahab and many of the Israelites had forsaken Yahweh and turned to worshiping Baal. Elijah challenged this folk belief, and proposed a public test, to determine scientifically which god was superior. Two alters would be constructed, and two bulls butchered as sacrifice, and it was left to the two gods, Baal and Yahweh, to demonstrate their ability to devour their respective sacrifices. And the hypothesis of the Baalim was proven to be in error when their 850 priests and prophets were unable to call down Baal’s fire, while Elijah was able to call down fire from Yahweh.
Another story from the scriptures, now consigned to the Apocrypha, is told in Daniel 14:3-22. The Babylonian king worships an idol in the form of a great statue of a dragon named Bel. Food offerings are made daily to the idol, and gone the next morning. Daniel is a skeptic, and insists that the hypothesis that the food is consumed by the statue is flawed. The king gives Daniel a chance to prove his claim, and so Daniel performs an experiment. He secretly has soot scattered on the floor of the temple, and then has the king seal the door for the night. In the morning, the door is opened, and the food is gone as usual. But tracks in the soot lead to a secret door by which the priests and their families had come in to feast on the daily offerings. Thus is Daniel’s scientific deduction demonstrated, and he is given permission to destroy the now-discredited idol.
Other examples could be found, but this should be sufficient to show that Science and Religion are not fundamentally at odds. True, none of the roughly 850 televangelists of today have been able to replicate Elijah’s experiment, but that may simply be a reflection of the strained relationship between Science and Religion in our era.
And Technology
Nevertheless, Religion does have an arch-enemy. And that enemy is Technology. Science is the passive gathering and analyzing of knowledge, and has been around since the discovery of fire. When Adam named the plants and animals, he was doing botany and zoology. Cain and Abel were agricultural scientists. It wasn’t until the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution that the active usage of Science became Technology.
Technology is not something found in the Bible. When Moses or Jesus needed something done, they called on God for a miracle. When the mechanics and engineers and technicians of the ages of Technology wanted something, they invented it, discovered it, created it. In just a few centuries, the gods who had been so essential for millennia became redundant. Worse, they were being shown up! The human life-span in 1500 AD was nearly the same as it had been in 2000 BC. But by 2000 AD it had nearly doubled. If God was all-knowing, why hadn’t he taught Tubal-Cain how to make calculators instead of swords? Why hadn’t he helped Daedalus design a 747 instead of wings of wax and feathers? Why hadn’t he told Hippocrates or the physicians during the Black Plague about bacteria and viruses and immunizations?
Because, we must conclude, he didn’t know how. Speaking through Solomon, God said there was nothing new under the sun. But time and again, Technology has proved that god wrong. Telescopes. Cars. Phones. Computers. Vaccines. Organ replacement. Democracy. Mass production. Spaceflight. These and thousands more are all things man has created with Technology. These are all things that an intelligent god would have helped humans invent from their very beginning, whether it was 6000 years ago or 200,000 years. The people of around five centuries ago started this climb of Technology. If there were an omniscient god, we’d have been at our current level five centuries after the first monkey-human came down from the trees or up from the mud. That we’re not is proof sufficient that Technology is ascendent over Religion.
God, if there even is one, is so very, very much smaller than the Religionists think.
Hello World!
This is my initial post on WordPress, but previous posts from other blogs I’ve toyed with in the past have ported over.
My Creed
Owen Laurion, 10/19/2010
I’ve had a very eclectic history with religion. My dad was a reasonably devout Catholic, but also a follower of Edgar Cayce (the Scientologist-style guru of his generation). My mother had been raised a Lutheran, but her father beat her, claiming he was justified by his faith, so she had rejected all religion by the time I was growing up. I got a lukewarm generic Protestant background through my childhood, as a sort of compromise. When I was 17, I became a Mormon against both parent’s wishes, and became a very aggressive Christian. I spent the next 17 years like that. I went to BYU, took classes in the Bible and Book of Mormon, studied other Judeo-Christian denominations, and generally became something of an amateur religious scholar. Probably knew more about both Christianity and comparative religion than many lay preachers.
And what I finally decided was that it was all a myth and superstition.
The moral guides of religion were fine, and worthy. But every religion I ever discovered tied them to some sort of faulty religious history, and pictured a god as improbable as Zeus or Odin. If I were to become a Mason today, I’d have a hard time passing the Belief in God test. I’ve reconciled myself to believing in a Higher Power, but the Higher Power I accept is a combination of human racial memory and human racial consciousness. Something that’s evolved with mankind, and so can’t predate it. Odin, Zeus, Jehovah, Allah are all manifestations of this, but they’re all just masks. “God” didn’t create the universe, the Big Bang did. “God” didn’t create man, evolution did. But “God” did create religion, as well as being created by religion.
My scriptures are the Higher Power step of Alcoholics Anonymous, the Master Mind chapter of Napoleon Hill’s Think And Grow Rich, and the Oversoul sermon of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I embrace the ethics of Christianity, Hinduism, Native American beliefs, Wicca. But I don’t believe in any of them. I accept a Higher Power (which I’m willing to grant the honorific title of “Grand Architect of the Universe” even though it’s not literally correct), but it’s so different from what any modern religion espouses that I feel more comfortable with the Atheists. Even the Deists and Agnostics I find too tied to traditional concepts of “God” to be fellow travelers.
What is a god? To the ancient Egyptians, their Pharaoh was a god. He had been born in an ordinary way. He, or his father or some great grandfather, had grown up as a human, but then had raised to the rank of general, and conquered a throne and a country. And now he was a god. He could cause anyone to be killed or enslaved with a word; or by another word absolve any crime. Was that not enough to qualify as a god? He was mortal, he would die, but so had Osiris died.
One of the arguments I was given for a belief in God was that the concept of a single omnipotent god was innate in all human societies. While I was still a Christian, I believed this. But humankind has existed for tens of thousands of years, while monotheism is a relatively new 5,000 to 6,000 years old. Polytheism took many forms, and prior to the Hebrews, it was the only option imagined. All unequivocally monotheistic religions today, although they may number 80% of current world population, are descended from one otherwise insignificant Egypto-Arabic tribe that didn’t even register in outside world history until about 1000 BCE. And even when they took a single god as their own Chosen God, they still continued to admit the existence of other gods for generations. The Ten Commandments does not begin “I am the one and only god of everyone in the entire universe,” it begins “I am your god, you will not have any of those other gods before me!”
Uniqueness was not the only innovation of monotheism. So also were omnipotence and omniscience. The god who knew everything and could do anything, despite the paradoxes. The polytheistic gods were powerful, but they all had limitations — the spheres of the other gods, if nothing else. And for the God of the Hebrews, this omnipotence was also something that developed.
The God of Adam could be hidden from.
The God of Abel could be inattentive.
The God of Cain could be defied.
The God of Tubal-Cain could be surpassed.
The God of Noah could make mistakes.
The God of Babel could feel threatened.
The God of Abraham could be bargained with.
The God of Isaac could be abusive.
The God of Jacob could be wrestled with.
The God of Moses could play favorites.
The God of Solomon could be vain.
The God of the Old Testament was cruel.
The Christ of the New Testament could allow the slaughter of innocents, grow angry in the temple, weep with sadness, be deceitful with his parables, be impatient with his disciples, be arrogant with the Sanhedrin, be killed by the Romans.
And yet this is supposedly the same god that is worshiped today as all-knowing, all-loving, all-wise.
OwenKL 