Great Books Discussion -- The Wednesday Virtual Urantia Book Global Study Group

by The Cosmic Citizen

Airdate: Wed, Mar 3, 2010 05:00PM UTC

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archived

Guest: Phil Calabrese
Science and Religion, Reason and Faith, a mathematician considers the issues. All science is expressed in the language of mathematics. Although the postulates of all science are mental (ideas), mathematics is the only science whose experiments (examples) are also totally mental, not based on sensory measurements as are the experiments of other sciences.
As such, mathematicians are in a good position to grasp just where reason & science end and faith & religion go on without them.
Too often, materialistic scientists and philosophers have gone over the line by either claiming a philosophical or religious position is scientific, or by claiming that a scientific position is inconsistent with their religious beliefs. For example, physicist Carl Sagan would routinely attribute the "emergence of life" to "purely random events", but that is a philosophical assumption not an implication of the theory of evolutionary, which does not deal with the origin of living things, just their evolution. Today we hear about how life is expected to spontaneously "emerge" with a spark from a mixture of hydrocarbons. We hear that people are completely subject to antecedent causation, that we are just intelligent machines, that "free will" is like a train whistle making a lot of noise but amounting to nothing. This kind of materialistic philosophy masquerading as science gives science a bad name.
On the other hand we hear of all too many religious teachers claiming that their religious beliefs need not conform to scientific discoveries where the two domains overlap. For example, recently several prominent candidates for president of the United States proudly denied biologic evolution apparently because The Bible says the world is only several thousand years old not about 4.5 billion years old as discovered by scientific methods. This gives religion a bad name, as though it is anti-intellectual, anti-scientific.

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Great Books,
Study Group,
The Urantia Book,
Interfaith,
mathematics

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