Wow, you don’t think ideology is “intellectual”?! That’s curious, since many, if not most ideologies, are developed / invented at universities.
I agree with you that there’s often an “activist engagement” by ideologues, but not always. Both worldview and ideology are “personally” held, the way I define them. Your “more personal” meaning doesn’t really hold sociologically, which is the proper field of assessment.
Would it be accurate to suppose that you likewise don’t consider “creationism” as an ideology, but rather as a “worldview”? Does that reflect your linguistic preference re: “creationism”?
No discipline is more rife with ideology than sociology, with a set of beliefs no less culturally defined than the people groups they love to study.
Creationism is a broad term, so I hesitate to make a general statement, but in terms of YEC the state of denial goes beyond worldview and that may be characterized as ideology.
With that, I am done parsing worldview and ideology. Pedantic discussions over word definitions cannot be resolved, so the last word is yours if you wish.
No worries, Ron. We’ve crossed paths before and you weren’t then ready to fairly face the sociological realm, from what I remember. The country where I did my PhD in sociology actually shut down the field of sociology for 70 years. No sociology at universities, can you imagine that!
In the USA, sociological evolutionism is a serious problem, just look at the “state of the union” nowadays.
Yes, indeed, we are on the same page that “no discipline is more rife with ideology than sociology.” Psychology is a close second, but still second. Yet there are some sociologists, a rare few - can you imagine that, Ron? - who have studied ideology intently over many years, in a way that seeks balance and proportion, instead of allowing sheer and utter abandon, which is how “theistic evolutionism” and “evolutionary creationism” appear as ideologies.
Similarly, I reject the ideological IDism you hold as a twisted and unnecessary ideology for any Abrahamic monotheist to accept, so we’ll have to agree to disagree on that, right?
“in terms of YEC the state of denial goes beyond worldview and that may be characterized as ideology.”
Uh, Klax, seriously, Cernan —the last man to walk on the moon? — uh, I think he saw something from a perspective that you and I have not. And as for Collins’ “genius as a geneticist and his personal religious requirements about the insignificant universe” — hmmmm…as I said, Klax, you will need to read him…and we are going to have to agree to disagree…
Yea, I actually have a bit of trouble entirely buying all this too. However, I still try to force myself to be open since things can easily transform quickly like I wrote about previously and what I’ve seen even if in cosmic time it is less than a drop in the ocean or a grain of sand from a large beach.
First and foremost, God is not equated with God’s Creation by most theologians, except by pantheists and panentheists, who though not mainstream have always been part of this discussion.
Second, if you separate God from the universe then you have the huge question of from whence does the universe originate? Okay, science cannot say that it originate in God, but also it cannot say that it does not originate in God. I think that it can say that it did not produce itself. If nature did not produce itself, the from where did it come. Do you say that it came from the noGod of the Gaps?
Third, science has used language that has had very different meanings in the past.
Fourth, when people think of science, they usually think of the physical sciences, but there is much to science than this. There are the physical sciences, which conform to the interactions you put forward, but there are also the “life” sciences and the human sciences, which do not.
When a scientist calls biota, including humans, “survival machines” he is denying the ability of biota to react to and learn from their environment. Life sciences are different from in content from the physical sciences. Please stop trying to make them the same.
Science is no procrustean bed where one size fits all whether it does or not.
Fifth, this is too important a question to argue about We need to sit down and work out a solution that most everyone can live and work with.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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Yeah Robin, seriously. American astronauts taking their… culturally distinctive religion to space will most likely have it powerfully reinforced by the higher than mountain top experience. As would happen to you. And me for 50 years. But not me now, or any European, or Russian, or Chinese astronaut to date. Not that ANY have said. Why is that? In my 50 years of doubtlessness, of never questioning the absolute immanent personal reality of God, everything I experienced was seen through that lens, even as I rationalized away from fundamentalism, often against my will. Until the lens… scales fell from my eyes. That’s the ‘danger’ of thinking, of having no no go areas. Nothing Collins or anyone else has written can possibly change that. Certainly no apologetic, no testimony. Apart from the unsparingly intellectually honest writings of McLaren, Bell, Held Evans, Chalk, Rohr, Rollins, Tickell, Kierkegaard.
Again, we have no basis of disagreement. You’ve read none of these people, let alone met any, talked with them in your echo chamber.
You haven’t felt the implacable sufficiency of the Earth beneath your feet.
I still yearn for meaning.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
257
I like the cut of your jib Sir. Real. I push back in to your openness nonetheless. I accept that we may achieve staggering orders of magnitude more in computational power that will facilitate ever better simulation of climate, weather, aviation and all engineering at every scale; medical imaging and diagnostics, practical telepathy and generally make it easier for trillionaires; we’ll end up with our own Turing test passing desktop counsellors. educators, doctors, companions, friends. None of which can address inequality including AGW and the other appalling legacies of imperialism.
Thanks, Klax. You have an interesting story, I am sure. That story – after “50 years”-- is, I am sure, a complex one. But don’t think that others have not “been there, done that.” Or not read what you have. And so on … “Scales fall from our eyes” from time to time…and from time to time all of us find ourselves in an echo chamber.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
259
So which emergent Christian writers have you read?
Sometimes the echo chamber is in our own head, thoughts stuck in a loop from telling ourselves the same things over and over. Then it becomes habitual thinking long practiced and next to impossible to change, even when we have been given excellent evidence that something is rigged and that God is sovereign over time and place, timing and placing, and that we should reevaluate our presuppositions.
Yes, unfortunately it is only going to make the rich get much richer and probably everyone else not so much. It also offers the possibility of a a small global elite controlling everything (if they don’t already). This is not conspiracy theory because we can extrapolate how much power different scales throughout history have had and it has tended to increase.
I actually hope we don’t get these things as we are already are too powerful for our own good and capability of managing. I’ve followed these things closely for quite awhile as I was in IT for many years and studied the social implications as well. dystopia here we come.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
264
I’m a cockeyed (IT2!) optimist. If there is no God, then the Godless gospel is still the greatest human achievement. As Dr. MLK quoted Theodore Parker, ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice’. If God is, then it’s fully achieved even in the transcendent.
I believe Moltmann book on creation does one of the best jobs of equating god’s creation with himself without it falling into being a typical pantheist or panentheist explanation. I recommend you read it. Pantheist has been mainstream but not in the western mainstream.
There is no current reason for why the universe cannot originate from some type of multiverse type scenario and/or have always existed. As I said before, any explanation that hints or states a god/gods as the origin is a “god of the gaps” explanation. Paradox tends to surround these origin questions no matter which solution you adopt - god/gods, something from nothing (and I’m not talking about vacuum fluctuations or some type of esoteric quantum effects, but the old fashion understanding of nothing) or universe always existing.
Third - agreed
Physical Science is foundational to all other Science. However, the descriptions of more complex systems (chemical, biological etc.) cannot use precise mathematical formulations as say some physics can. It may be possible at some future date to reduce all chemistry and biology to physical and mathematical descriptions but not into the foreseeable future. Even relatively simple chemical interactions cannot be described exactly with math and physics.
There is a trade off between more accurate descriptions used in Physical Science and complexity of a system. The more complex the system the less capable the math and physics is at describing it because of its complexity. Other less accurate but more macroscopic methods are needed such as biological.
With less accurate not mathematical solutions there are always a lot of questions left unanswered.
“human psychology and cultural anthropology. However, scientists would say that we do have an adequate understanding for both of these from a Evolutionary perspective (currently Evolutionary Psychology does seem to provide adequate and acceptable explanations). I would say the third is, as of yet, unresolved.” - @brianwhite1066
Which “scientists would say”? On what basis do you claim this “adequate understanding” in human psychology and cultural anthropology using an “evolutionist” (exaggerated) ideology? Could you please indicate which scholarly work by which authors you believe provides “adequate and acceptable explanations” in (the field of) “evolutionary psychology”?
Evolutionary psychology is nowadays seen by many people as both corrupt, often not replicable, and pretty much fully drenched in materialistic ideology (lone exception: BioLogos-affiliated Justin Barrett). The entire basis of eVopsych was called into doubt by philosopher Subrena Smith in 2020. Doesn’t this give you reason to pause @brianwhite1066 with false flag eVopsych triumphalism “to provide adequate and acceptable explanations”?
Psychology that does not suffer from or try to profit from a “matching problem” like the “evolutionary” variety does. Human developmental psychology, for example, does not suffer from such a problem as eVopsych, the latter which looks much more like ideology than science.
eVopsych can be compared with the “nature fakers” controversy; they both fabricate(d) details about the natural world. The nature fakers lost in the end. Nature fakers controversy - Wikipedia
The other party in the conversation.