Awe and beauty are owing to the mystery. The Christian says aw, that’s God but the literalist says I have a whole Bible’s worth of information about God. But the true believer along with the atheist just marvels at the new instance of mystery and wonders at how much greater the world is than what we know. For all of us God is a mystery and we have no way to rank or categorize the mysteries unless we are ruled by doctrine.
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The stars and moon because I’ve seen they’re not real. I saw the moon explode before…it is just light…and the stars are not that far away.
Like I said, I tried to answer your initial question, and I was then asked 4 or 5 more questions. One of which referenced objective demonstrability. I then recalled your position on post-modernism, which is not a small thing, and so I would like to know if there is anything objectively demonstrable to you.
If you please, who are Gould and what’s-'is-name, and would you sum up their arguments you mentioned?
Perhaps he is referring to Stephen Jay Gould whose sentiment below I applaud. If so wiki says:
In a 1997 essay “Non-overlapping Magisteria”[3] for Natural History magazine, and later in his book Rocks of Ages (1999), Gould put forward what he described as “a blessedly simple and entirely conventional resolution to … the supposed conflict between science and religion”,[1] from his puzzlement over the need and reception of the 1996 address of Pope John Paul II to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences “Truth Cannot Contradict Truth”.[4] He draws the term magisterium from Pope Pius XII’s encyclical, Humani generis (1950), and defines it as “a domain where one form of teaching holds the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution”,[1] and describes the NOMA principle as “Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts. Religion, on the other hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings, and values—subjects that the factual domain of science might illuminate, but can never resolve.”[1] “These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for example, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty).”[1]
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Thank you, Mark. What you quoted is what I’ve held to be the case since youth. I like the term “entirely conventional resolution” in the segment you posted from Wikipedia.
I sometimes question my own thinking on this, though. Not in any formal kind of way; I’m not a formal, organized thinker. It feels (that’s a deliberate choice of words) that some things we learn about the natural world at least challenge things I believe by faith. Part of the issue for me is understanding what makes the idea or information seem like a challenge. What are my rational or nonrational expectations that make it feel like a challenge. And to what degree do those matter in this situation anyway?
Thanks for bringing this in.
I may never know what HeyMike3 had in mind.
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I can’t claim to have seen it this clearly from as early an age as you but I do now. On the other side I find non believers who exhibit scientistic tendencies often have the exact same magisterial confusion. Good luck distilling values, morals or the meaning of beauty in a laboratory. But there are those whose faith in the ability of science to do all things is every bit as great as the faith some believers have in their ability to gauge God’s power and limits based on their reading of the Bible. Both sides lack appropriate epistemic humility and so miss Gould’s entirely conventional resolution.
Gould wisely noted that there can be overlap between the non-overlapping magisteria, or rather it’s not easy to define the border between them. I’ve always viewed NOMA as a metaphor or analogy that isn’t meant to be taken to extremes. If understood in this sense, I think NOMA is a good way of viewing the issue.
“This resolution might remain all neat and clean if the nonoverlapping magisteria (NOMA) of science and religion were separated by an extensive no man’s land. But, in fact, the two magisteria bump right up against each other, interdigitating in wondrously complex ways along their joint border. Many of our deepest questions call upon aspects of both for different parts of a full answer—and the sorting of legitimate domains can become quite complex and difficult.”