INTERESTINGLY ENOUGH, the accusation that I'm in favor of explaining religious faith by using science is one thing that I think isn't only dishonest but also is perilous because if you do that and the science you depend on turns out to be less durable than you had believed, you're no better off than if you hadn't done it. In that I agree with Fr. Georges Lemaitre, the person who discovered what his major scientific opponent, Fred Hoyle derisively called "The Big Bang" in order to use ridicule in a method not that far removed from what you accuse me of. There was an incident when Pope Pius XII was to address some scientists in which Fr. Lemaitre asked him, specifically, not to use his scientific findings to support the general Biblical claim that the universe had an absolute beginning in time and that it had been created out of what would informally be considered "nothing". He thought it would be best to not tie religious thinking to it too tightly.
Hoyle on the other hand explicitly used science to support his atheist ideology, something that, when you look at the genesis and the history of his scientific counter to Lemaitre, is remarkable as an instance of the ideological domination of the scientific community, and so of science, itself. Something that isn't supposed to happen according to the rules of science that are not at all infrequently violated ideologically by atheists for the purpose of supporting their ideology. The history of science, increasingly, from the 16th century has been used that way, in the area I've researched the most in depth, Darwinism, that use BY ATHEISTS WITHIN SCIENCE and outside of it started almost immediately and continues till today. And not only in modest ways but in ways insisted to be universally potent, an acid that destroys everything from the virtue of charity to the concept of human freedom and, indeed, the very concept of meaning and truth, something which made the Trumpian version of that far less startling to me because I've read the atheist-materialist ideological claims regarding that which have had an enormous effect, especially in the areas of philosophy and in claims surrounding neo-Darwinism. That vulgar economic materialism shares that with elite peer-published academic materialism isn't surprising, once you have, for yourselves and your peers, negated the truth of morality, the concept of freedom of thought, when your ideology forces you to reduce all human activity, including our thoughts to being the meaningless interactions of "particles and forces" literally nothing remains, it is no more shocking to me that those claims by a Brian Greene or a Richard Dawkins are made flesh in the likes of Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin or Rupert Murdoch or Matt Gaetz rife with hypocrisy than it would be that so many of the neo-atheists of the 00s were revealed to have flown with Jeffrey Epstein to his pleasure island and that he and his pimpess girl friend were the money behind the ScienceBlogs. And I do think that all of those things are intimately tied to the ideology of materialism, both in its academic, elite form and in its Trumpian-Putinesque vulgar form. They are the same.
There are two interesting articles that I read in thinking about your comment to me, one by Adam Curtis is an old one about how Fred Hoyle came up with and developed his "steady state" alternative to Lemaitre's and his colleagues model of the universe which is too complex for me to write about right now. The problem is I can see I've got to do a lot more reading to really deal with it. I have to say that the relationship between Hoyle's ideological insertion that dominated physics for two decades in the post-war period and how the dark, sour, dismal work of the Ealing Studios director Robert Hamer helped inspire it is an interesting thing to think about but I really don't want to have to go back and watch any of his movies.
Another one is a new article from Fr. Richard Rohr that presents the opposite conclusion from science to the one Brian Greene and atheist-materialism presents.
Nothing is the same forever, says modern science. Ninety-eight percent of our bodies' atoms are replaced every year. Geologists with good evidence over millennia can prove that no landscape is permanent. Water, fog, steam and ice are all the same thing, but at different stages and temperatures. The preface to the Catholic funeral liturgy says, "Life is not ended, it is merely changed." Science is now giving us a very helpful language for what religion rightly intuited and imaged, albeit in mythological language. Remember, myth does not mean "not true," which is the common misunderstanding, but it actually refers to things that are always true!
But God could not wait for modern science to give history hope; people just needed to believe that Jesus "was raised from the dead" so that the hope and possibility of resurrection could be planted in our deepest unconscious. Jesus' first eternal life, his "necessary" death, and his resurrection into the ongoing Christ life is the archetypal model for the entire pattern of creation. He is the microcosm for the whole cosmos, or the map of the whole journey, if you need or want one. Nowadays most folks do not seem to think they need that map, especially when they are young. But the vagaries and disappointments of life's journey eventually make you long for some direction, purpose or goal beyond getting through the day.
Anybody who holds any kind of unexplainable hope believes in resurrection, whether they are formal Christians or not, and even if they don't believe Jesus was physically raised from the dead. I have met such people from all kinds of backgrounds, religious and non-religious. I do, however, believe in the material resurrection of Jesus because it affirms what the whole physical and biological universe is also saying — and grounds it as something more than a mere spiritual belief. It must also be a material belief!
A trust in the physical resurrection of Jesus frees believers, if we let it, from the stripped-down belief in a Christ who came merely to "save souls for heaven" instead of liberating and healing bodies in this world. If matter is inhabited by God, then matter is somehow eternal and when the Creed says we "believe in the resurrection of the body," it means our bodies too and not just Jesus' body! As in him, so also in all of us. As in all of us, so also in him. So I am quite "conservative" and orthodox by most standards on this important issue, although I also realize it seems to be a very different kind of embodiment from all of the Resurrection accounts in the Gospels.
The Christian narrative is saying that reality's true story from the very beginning has always been Incarnation, that God's hiding place and place of epiphany is the physical world. Resurrection is, therefore, not a one-time anomaly in the body of Jesus, rather the Jesus pattern is revealing the pattern of everything that God has created.
Easter is not one day, but Easter is apparently every day and everywhere.
Fred Hoyle, as he inserted his ideology into science, interestingly, accused his colleagues, some of them atheists, who accepted Lemaitre's worked out and supported theory of unconsciously doing exactly what he and his supporters were, in fact doing.
"The reason why scientists like the "big bang" is because they are overshadowed by the Book of Genesis. It is deep within the psyche of most scientists to believe in the first page of Genesis"
From what I gather it was one of those witticisms that the BBC loves to air from prominent Brits, especially of an atheistic mindset. It's especially interesting because, as things developed, the science supported his opponents point of view, so it was clear that the influence of "Genesis" may have aided the advance of science. Or maybe not, as that quite fickle branch of scientific speculation Hoyle and Lemaitre were both engaged in may well change its mind, again. I do think that by the "there's no reason to believe" standard that is one of those other unevenly applied rules of thumb so often used by atheist ideological assertion, today there isn't any to believe Hoyle was right.
The extent to which the self-destructive, alcoholic and repressed gay and pretty nasty director Robert Hamer was an inspiration to Hoyle, according to the first article, it might be worth considering that Hamer's goal in film making was, "I want to make films about people in dark rooms doing beastly things to each other." That is something that he was hardly alone in doing, it was pretty much the aestheic of modernism then and now. That aspect of atheist-materialist-scientism strikes me as a better reason to reject it than whether or not the absolute beginning of the universe stands up to future scientific evidence - assuming there will be any more of that. These days the most nifty physicists and cosmologists seem to want to get by without that. I'd suggest that's not much different from what they accuse religious believers of.
Which makes me think that that choice has its definite alternative in what John Lennox said when he was asked about Stephen Hawking's accusation that religion was a "fairy story for people who are afraid of the dark," He countered with "Atheism is a fairy story for people afraid of the light"
If I choose to not be afraid of the light, I don't see how you can hold me to blame for that as, by your own ideological faith, I have no choice in the matter. I'd rather take the chance on me being right than on you being wrong. If you're right the end is as final and dismal for you as it will be for me.
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