IC writes: The renaissance of Christian philosophy has been accompanied by a resurgence of interest in natural theology – that branch of theology which seeks to prove God’s existence without appeal to the resources of authoritative divine revelation – for instance, through philosophical argument.
iambiguous wrote: ↑Sun Oct 30, 2022 2:03 amNatural theology. Where here are the dots connected between philosophical language and the sort of things that scientists might do in grappling with the existence of a God, the God? How far removed is it from defining or deducing God into existence?
Natural theology: theology or knowledge of God based on observed facts and experience apart from divine revelation.
Though I have not studied the issue in any real depth, the 'intelligent design' argument is not unsound. For example, there is
this conversation among scientists and mathematicians about the impossibility of random events achieving the complexity of the cell's structures. So, they hypothesize a 'designer'.
What then happens is that religionists of all sorts latch on to that argument (that there was a designer) and employ it to justify their own religion's creation myths, which of course are cultural models and are un-similar one to the other.
When one examines their arguments it really only amounts to a declaration, a logical inference, that 1) complex structures could not (according to mathematical probabilities) have arisen spontaneously. Seeds works with the same general argument when she uploads the images of static and then the *ordered world* in which we live. How could any of this have come about out of a flurry of random happenings?
The 2) is really just a repeat of the 1). If there is a 'creator god' and that god created the world (the cosmos, literally the entire manifestation of everything) that is simply a declared possibility but no specific religion or religious ethical system is thereby supported from the intuited assertion. One is left with the same puzzlement and wonder at the entire manifest universe. And one has no clear way to explain or to understand how any of this came about.
In fact nothing is explained. If there is a god that created the Cosmos, and certainly our natural physical and biological world, it is a very very strange sort of god indeed. If The World is a reflection of that god, that god has none of the qualities projected onto IC's *absolutely perfect and absolutely good* god. The real god would be far more like a demonic-divine deity. There is no morality of the sort we envision and long for in the god of the natural world! It is an utterly cruel world where beings feed on other beings relentlessly.
"As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport."
Our moral systems are
anti-world impositions, it seems to me. They do not arise naturally (out of the natural world) but are
invented and
imposed. By invented I mean contrived through intuited processes, or idealism's imposition.
Religionists however, like IC, make the leap in assuming (a sort of forced belief) that it was their own god-image Yahweh who created everything
ex nihilo. He separated the water, created land, animals, and finally man. But Yahweh did not begin as a creation-god he began strictly as a tribal god. Only later was it necessary to assert that he had created everything. And that is how the Genesis story came to be. In fact, long long ago, Yahweh had a feminine consort and the *picture* was similar to that of other god-images and creation stories.
As I say religionists of all sorts latch onto the Intelligent Design argument (a sort of logical-intuitional assertion) and employ the science-based inference (mathematical improbability in arriving at an Ordered World with extremely complex biological forms) to revivify old-style mythological arguments (really
pictures) of how things came to be.
It does not surprise me, given IC's fanaticism that he would imbibe as it were the Intelligent Design supposition and then wed it, through an act of his will, to the Hebrew creation mythology. It is thoroughly contrived however and is really a simple extension of the faith-based position. It is used to bolster the collapsing mythologies upon which all or most religious stories are based.
I have concluded that what is done (in the mind of people like IC) is a forced blending of two radically different epistemological systems. The best example of this is IC's declaration about Adam & Eve as an original mating pair! There, he cobbles together a way to salvage the former Creation Myth by *seeing* it through a modern scientific lens. As if the Genesis myth is really a sort of proto-scientific assertion.
"Hey, now it all makes sense and is tied together!"
Obviously, this is a necessary pastime for Christian (and religionists of course) trying to salvage their myth-pictures. They look for evidence of *the flood* in the geological record and, through astounding illogical leaps, try to retrofit the ancient myths by redescription of them in *modern terms*.
Similarly, Attofishpi displays a similar *manoeuvre* in his ultra-creative but rather hallucinated *pictures* of a virtual-reality *world*:
Thus, our conscious perception is a construct of 2D flat-plane information from the sub-atomic 3rd party intelligence that processes the information from the 2D plane such that you and I can perceive the world - in the 3D normal perception. If you can imagine that all information exists on the plane of a super-super-super massive black hole - the event horizon - the actual king of all information - indeed, the ultimate universe construct in_form_at_ion base, then you are part way to comprehending this intelligence that is the backbone to what you perceive.
No offense of any sort meant, yet my endeavor is to point out that the religious mode is always *intuitive* and what is intuited always has to do with a *reality beyond the actual reality* which of course means the metaphysical. This view, this vision, this understanding, is then imposed onto the world in a creative act.
I do not assert that what is *imposed* is thereby wrong. But the act of assertion, and imposition, is man's own divine action (if you will). Man projects images outward and *the world of man* is created. But it is not unreal. It is reality of a different sort. That is what I take Richard Weaver's "metaphysical dream of the world" to mean.
He quotes Carlyle:
But the thing a man does practically believe (and this is often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest. That is his religion; or, it may be, his mere scepticism and no-religion: the manner it is in which he feels himself to be spiritually related to the Unseen World or No-World; and I say, if you tell me what that is, you tell me to a very great extent what the man is, what the kind of things he will do is.
