I had the same issue in my church. Here’s how I dealt with it. First, I leave no doubt by my devotion to the Triune God and my behavior that I am as sincere in my belief as they are in theirs. Second, I make sure they agree with me on the 12 fundamental principles of Christianity. These principles were jointly compiled years ago in collaboration with of one of my dearest spiritual mentors, Rev William Wick, who is now the Chaplain of Norwich University.
God created the universe.
God is Holy.
Humans are morally unholy.
Holy and unholy do not mix.
God is Love.
Love for His creation inspires God to want us humans to know His Love now and experience it with Him for eternity.
2-6 create a conundrum.
1 gives God the right to solve that conundrum as He sees fit.
God the Father, requires us to become Holy by assuming the Holiness of God the Son (Jesus) through the action of God the Holy Spirit in our lives.
He does this by enabling our unholiness to die with Jesus on the Cross, thereby entombing it, and replacing it with Jesus’ Holiness, which permits us to rise through His resurrection as a new, Holy creation
We can know this is true through the revelation of Himself in His creation, His inspired Holy Word, His incarnate Son, and His involvement in our lives through the Holy Spirit.
All the above combine to form a logical and consistent worldview.
If we agree on these 12 (and we should if we claim to be Christian), these 12 seal our current and eternal relationship to the loving, Lord God Almighty, Creator of the universe! ALL ELSE PALES IN COMPARISON!
Thus, if our churches and more importantly, our people, could realize the singular, overwhelming significance of these 12 principles, the divisive differences that arise within and between churches and the people that they consist of would be seen much more clearly for what they really are – TOTALLY petty and UNimportant. As my first Adult Sunday School teacher, Michael Masoian, taught me, “We should agree to disagree agreeably.” Or, as Richard De Haan states in his entry for Our Daily Bread on July 19th, 2004, “As believers, we need an awareness of our spiritual unity with other Christians. We need to focus on the fundamentals on which we agree–such as our love for the Savior who died for us–rather than bicker about lesser issues.” Let’s face it, this is NOT happening. John 17:20-23 is not what we are showing to the world, which is why the world is not showing interest in us or our message of truth.
Like I said, it’s an interesting and somewhat predictable reaction.
“The question of whether space and time are discrete or continuous, and whether there’s a smallest possible length scale, is still unanswered. However, we do know that below the Planck distance scale, we cannot predict anything with any accuracy at all.”
The problem with Friedlander’s list is not that it is ambitious, but that it takes the wrong approach. It’s mainly a laundry list of facts that candidates would have to learn by rote. Science isn’t about what we know; it’s about how we know what we know. I note that the list doesn’t say anything about either mathematics or measurement, and that is a big omission.
The reason I say that any science course in seminaries needs to include lab work is because there are six facts that repeatedly get overlooked in debates about science and faith, time and time again. These are they:
Science is a very hands-on and practical endeavour.
It works by measuring things.
It is very mathematical and technical.
It requires close attention to detail.
It is easy to get wrong and difficult to get right.
Getting it wrong has consequences.
Just about every bad argument and falsehood that I see being spouted in discussions about science and faith is a breakdown of understanding of these six essential facts.
I think that if I had just one day to spend with Bible College students teaching them about science, I would spend it getting them to do an experiment that I did in my first term at university: measuring gravitational acceleration to five significant figures. It is a really good exercise because it gives you a feel for these basic facts. It gives you a hands-on demonstration of how science actually works in practice, where errors can creep into your measurements, and how to account for them and take steps to minimise them.
And guess what necessarily happens if space is confirmed to have a discrete particularity?
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
90
True. Which is astounding. That science can be seen as the liberal enemy of true faith. Whereas true faith without science and liberality (note I didn’t say liberalism) is… meaningless.
Yes, it starts with a list of terms the applicant should be able to define. All disciplines require some memorization. But before the list of terms it says,
Define the following terms and explain their importance:
And after the terms, there is much, much more. (Close attention to detail!)
For example:
Distinguish conjecture, hypothesis, theory, fact, opinion, and knowledge. Explain why we say that all scientific knowledge is tentative. Recognize the basic methods of science, and how to recognize pseudoscience. Explain why a public debate is the wrong format for examining scientific questions.
And in all of the material there is the idea that the student be able to
The next step would be to design some experiments that a bible college could put together.
The class could go through everyone’s data, analyze it, and then write up their conclusions. If it were me running the class, I would then impishly ask, “Can anyone show me how they included the supernatural in the experimental design, results, and conclusions?”.
One of the claims I often hear from believers is that science excludes the supernatural from the start. I don’t think this is true. Rather, there is no meaningful way that the supernatural can be included within the scientific method. If the supernatural could be empirically measured then the supernatural could be included within the scientific method. Science also doesn’t care about the labels we put on something. If I said gravity was supernatural it’s not as if all scientists would have to stop studying gravity. The first question is, “Can you empirically measure it?”. The second question is, “What observations should we and should we not make if your idea is true?”. If you can cover those two questions you are well on your way to doing science.
Speaking of seminaries, I was doing a search on “General Theological Seminary” (that’s the name of the place), and some evangelical schools come up (Liberty, Regent) in the search results before the General Theological site! So they are using Search Engine Optimization to be very deceptive. Such a fine practice for a Christian seminary!
That’s why the supernatural is excluded from scientific inquiry. Science is agnostic, in that it looks for natural explanations only, even if supernatural ones might exist.
If the supernatural could be empirically measured and tested then the supernatural could be included in science. Of course, some would define the supernatural as that which can not be empirically measured or tested, so there is that. As I stated above, calling something supernatural does not automatically exclude it from science.
I would also like to add that it’s usually a career ending move for scientists to study the paranormal.
However good people still exist who study consciousness and life after death like Sam Parnia or people like Jim Tucker who study reincarnation cases in children.
Doing bad science is a career ending move for scientists. If there were good scientific studies demonstrating the paranormal then their scientific careers would take off, not end.
The merit would be to shed more light on existential questions one of them being “does consciousness exist after death”?
They seem to reason that something exists after death.
Scientific merit has to do with the experimental setup, the quality of the data, the quality of the data analysis, and how the data supports the conclusions. Scientific merit is not related to whether someone likes the topic they are looking into.
This doesn’t seem like very good reasoning to me because this means that we shouldn’t go to Mars because we simply like to go to Mars.
Why build CERN at all? Because we like to see what’s at the “bottom” of matter?
Yes with this reasoning, we go back to my original argument that sometimes it’s not a good career move for a scientist to study the paranormal because there aren’t a lot of peers to review the material and there isn’t a lot of money to be made out of it.
Despite having good intentions and applying the scientific method including a filter which those doctors apply to filter out fake cases from real ones.
