OUR TWO WORLDS, SPIRITUAL AND MATERIAL

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Opty

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OUR TWO WORLDS, SPIRITUAL AND MATERIAL

Sections 2 and 3 have been added to "Futile Confrontations" at:

http://pages.csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/theo/atheist.html

Comments will be appreciated, Thank you in advance,

Ludwik

Sorry for the late response but I only today stumbled upon this post.

Firstly, thanks for taking the time to write your thoughts and share your work.

It was a quick, easy read though it seemed a bit stale in some places. However, my main criticisms are disagreements with content rather than narrative voice.

Futile conflicts between theists and atheists, often amounting to "we are better than you" confrontations, are common, as one can verify by browsing the Internet. Those who promote such poisonous conflicts are usually neither scientists nor theologians.
From a mainstream context, the above statement is simply untrue. The most well-known, publicized, public debates from the past decade as well as those currently going on involve very high profile scientists (Dawkins, Krauss, deGrasse Tyson, Kaku, Carroll, Harris etc.), philosophers and intellectuals (Dennett, Kagan, Hitchens, self-professed philosopher Lane Craig, etc.), historians (Ehrman, Carrier, etc.), and theologians (Wolpe, Price, Plantinga, etc.)

Sure, if one were to simply survey the mindless dreck posted by random nobodies on YouTube and elsewhere on the Internet, then perhaps one would find that many or most of these debates were being argued among amateur interlocutors out of their intellectual depths. But the larger, public debate is very well-known and being waged rather vigorously among a sizeable group of very smart experts.

I tend to disagree. Cooperation may or may not develop in the distant future; what should be done first is conceptual separation.
A noble wish but one I doubt will ever come to pass. Many of the most ardent theistic followers make relgiously-based truth claims about the material world which are falsifiable (as well as demonstrably false).

I'm not confident that either side will cease encroaching upon the turf of the other, but I have much less confidence in the theistic side.

God is not a material entity, and attempts to refute God's existence by performing scientific experiments are not appropriate. The same is true for attempts to refute scientific claims, such as the age of the earth, on the basis of disagreements with holy books.
While I might agree, in principle, your second sentence ignores the fact that oftentimes the theistic person making the incorrect claims in the second sentence are also making claims which set up the types of arguments discussed in the first sentence. Theistic proponents often make truth claims about the material world which are falsifiable.

Claims of an interventionist god (e.g. miracles) can be tested because an intervention in the natural world would leave evidence.

Truth claims regarding the age of the universe, Earth, how or even whether species evolve, etc. are all testable and are all claims which mainstream theists (at least in the US) make on a daily basis and make from the perspective of their religious dogma or doctrine.

Theology is like mathematics, not science. Mathematicians start with axioms (initially accepted truths) and use logical derivation to justify consecutive claims, called theorems. Once proven, a theorem cannot be rejected, unless a logical error is found in the derivation.
That's incorrect. Mathematics invokes first-order and other higher order logics. Theology (as well as the philosophy and science claims related to the discussion), due to its presuppositional nature, employs zeroth-order logic.

Theology's truth claim defenses, at least these days, come mainly via modern apologetics (from Tertullian, to Aquinas, to William Lane Craig today) which is an area heavily rooted in zeroth-order-logic-based propositional philosophy, not in the higher order logic of mathematics.

So, it seems to me that the first several paragraphs supporting your opening thesis are based on a false premise, as you seem to have confused these two systems of logic and misapplied higher order to theology, where it most certainly doesn't belong.

As I stated earlier, holy books contain pronouncements about the physical world. Such pronouncements are rooted in the incorrect beliefs of our ancestors, who lived when faith and science were not yet separate disciplines.
Quite true. However, several of those pronouncements are often asserted by fundamentalist theists as truth claims about the modern physical world. As I stated earlier, such truth claims tread into the realm of science because they are falsifiable (in the Popperian sense, not necessarily the Kuhnian).

That is the mistake of many theists; making truth claims about the material world based on Bronze Age fiction, thus overlapping into the magesterium of science.

The story of creation, the world being created in one week, for example, is no longer taken literally, even by many theologians.
Absolutely factually incorrect. Given that this article was written for a US site, I'll point out that currently, over 40% of the US population believes the Biblical creation myth is literally true.

Indeed, the champion of modern apologetics, William Lane Craig, asserts this very position and has a sizeable fan-base among Christians who follow the "religion versus science" debate.

Informal cooperation between the two camps will always exist; many scientists are also theologians and many theologians are also scientists.
As that is presented in your article as a truth claim, I'd like to see a citation or evidence of its veracity, because it contradicts modern polling results.

In fact, the majority of leading scientists are atheist or agnostic:

http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/news/file002.html

60% of leading American scientists do not believe in any god (I use that statistic because your article was written for an American site):

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus...f?acceptTC=true&acceptTC=true&jpdConfirm=true

A famous theologian-reformer, Baruch Spinoza, excommunicated as a heretic by his contemporaries (in17th century Holland), wrote: "By God's direction I mean the fixed and unchanging order of Nature ... so it is the same thing whether we say that all things happen according to Nature's laws or that they are regulated by God's decree and direction. " Why was such a philosophical position considered heretical? Probably because it implied that God is not as omnipotent as described in the Bible.

It likely had more to do with the fact that de Espinoza rejected a personal god in favor of a more cosmic interpretation of god, thus establishing the modern incarnation of pantheism (as described by John Dewey).

That's all I have for now. The rest of the article strays a bit from the original thesis stated at the beginning (of the debate between science and theism) and seems to red herring into an exploration of Judaism, which I don't feel qualified to address.
 
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RichardGarfinkle

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One point about the discussion of mathematics and theology. The two are not similar. A mathematical system will use a set of axioms to deduce theorems from those axioms.

The existence of a mathematical system is not a claim of truth for the axioms. It is a claim that if the axioms were true then the theorems derived from them would be true. Therefore what mathematical systems demonstrate are contingent truths.

If Axioms A are true then theorems T are true.

Most forms of theology make claims of absolute, not contingent truth for their axioms.
 
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