Posted by KC Elbows on August 14, 2002 at 12:17:05:
In Reply to: Re: Humility and Respect. posted by Ex-Instructor on August 14, 2002 at 10:31:20:
'However, I think that it is, again, a very human need to explain what it is that we can't explain. If there's a God that is controlling evolution (or guiding it), then we're not the most powerful things in the universe, and we can't have that!'
You know, two old friends of mine are physicists, and neither look at science as the personal power of man. We've talked about this a number of times. Physics can be seen as phenomenon reduced to mathematical formuli. Physicists do not generally attribute specific cause to that formuli, much as their detractors seem to think they do.
Example: going back to gravity. Why is gravity? The answer, to some in physics, appears to be because of mass. What is gravity? My friends don't claim to know. They can give you all sorts of formuli that relate to gravity and have held true in all known circumstances, that is what they work with, but the what is elusive, and so, unexplained.
Scientists are people. Some approach it in a more centered way than others.
Here's how I see things. I do not fundamentally disgree with your belief system, though I feel there are more paths to the same end result, and from what I have read of the very early christians, some of them felt the same way(specifically what is known of gnosticism).
Using the prototypical scientist as an example, let us say that she seeks out answers, and finds them wherever she looks, to phenomenon that serve as the backdrop of existence. And so she pursues lead after lead, until she has them all defined. If she discovers that there is nothing more, no trace of a prime mover, just endless cycles of galactic upheaval and calm, then she at least knows what reality is and what it is not. Then she defines the formuli for things that reality is not, an endless chain of problems and equations.
Meanwhile, she lives a good life, she is loved by her family, she is selfless and full of compassion, not out of a need to be loved, but in being true to her character. She holds her own personal spirituality, for she is deterred from organized religion by the shortcomings of the hundreds of religions she can choose from, and so she goes on her private spiritual journey, step by step.
Then one day, she dies, and while maybe someday she would have discovered an understanding of christ in her spirituality, as of that day she had not, though she was a better person than most of the christians she met, maybe all of them. She spent her days looking at the creation of god, the very universe, and loving it in a way that no one else had, admiring it's every subtlety, in awe of its masterful symettry. And then the creator of that work, because she had not included one thing in her spiritual quest, took her and cast her down like a rotten piece of fruit, because, out of all the gods she had heard of in her life, he turned out to be the real one, and for some reason, he wanted her to go to hell.
Now, my question is this. You yourself manage to live a good life, follow christ faithfully, are good and devout and such, and you die and discover that she has gone to hell, whereas you are free to go to heaven. Are you a better person than her, or merely lucky that you happened to hear about christ from people worth listening to?
No disrespect meant. I respect all of your beliefs except jesus' exclusive rights over salvation. It seems to me that there is a person somewhere out there in the world who has not really heard anything good about jesus, or who has not met any good christians, or has met mostly bad christians. I cannot believe that a god of compassion would send such a person to hell because his bestseller is not readily accessible in their language. Nor do I believe that the people's who occupied the world before christ would be so treated by such a god.
*; =qq(