What it’s all for

[jammycakes (James McKay)]

@Kguess

I’m disheartened, baffled and put off by the bickering you guys don’t seem to tire of. Isn’t following Jesus about becoming like Christ, bringing others to Christ and building up the body of Christ in love? How does bickering over theology serve either of those aims? Discussion, yes, but ongoing bickering and insulting one another?

I couldn’t agree more.

I’ve been looking over my own contributions to this forum over the past few days (mostly late at night when I couldn’t sleep) and for my own part I’ve been disheartened, baffled and put off by the extent to which I’ve been getting caught up in all the bickering you speak of here myself.

Science is supposed to be something that you do, not something that you argue about. It’s something that’s done in laboratories, not in debating chambers. It’s hands-on and practical, not airy-fairy and philosophical.

I’m sick of waffle about methodological naturalism. I’m tired of endless arguments about operational versus historical science, assumptions, interpretations, presuppositions, worldviews, Kant, Popper and so on. I’m fed up of talking round and round in circles with people who talk the hind legs off a donkey about the philosophy of science but who never post a single equation, graph, laboratory experiment or measurement.

I recently acquired a book titled “Turning Science into Things People Need” by David M Giltner. It’s an interesting book that reminded me in a fresh way what science is all about. After I’d read it, I decided to revive my interest in electronics that I’d had as a teenager and in the first few years after I left university. Actually tinkering, doing experiments and making things is a far better and more fulfilling use of anyone’s scientific knowledge and understanding than trying to talk sense into people who give the impression that they don’t know what an oscilloscope is and can’t tell one end of a soldering iron from the other, but who nonetheless think that they are somehow qualified to teach in their churches about the subject.

@adamjedgar

Im not a believer in the idea that God gives “ongoing” visions/special revelations to anyone any more.

For what it’s worth, my view of Christianity and the Bible is pretty much the same as my view of science. I view it as a very hands-on and practical faith. That’s why I’m a continuationist and not a cessationist. To me, believing the Bible means putting it into practice, seeing what I can learn about how to live my life and relate to others and to God and how to walk by faith in the same way that people of Bible times did. It’s not a matter of having the right doctrines about the distant past; it’s about how you live your life and walk with God in the present.