The time has come, the Walrus said.... (long)

[Geoff Bannister]

"The time has come,' the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes -- and ships -- and sealing wax --
Of cabbages -- and kings." 
(Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking Glass)

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, 
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
(Hamlet: Act 1 Scene V)

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and 
certain of what we do not see 
(New Testament, Paul's letter to the Hebrews chapter 11 verse1)

I have wanted to comment at length on some of the issues which arose 
in the "Harry Potter and God" thread. Because of family circumstances, 
my time during the day is very limited so it has taken a considerable 
time for me to put together this post. It is long. If the thread doesn't 
interest you, please leave it
. If you do read, I hope it will provoke 
some thought.

No.Limberger wrote:
As a species, humans are highly inquisitive. Our minds seek to 
understand as much as possible. Our ancient ancestors could not 
explain life, death, their existence, why some people get sick and 
some don't, etc. Their minds then created the notion of deities
.

Now, as to specific religions, who's to say that one is better than 
another, or that a particular sect withinone religion is better than 
other sects within the same religion?
******
One important point is that Christianity is not based on ancient 
deities but on a person who lived on the earth at a specific time. 
Christians believe that he was God in human form.

No.Limberger also wrote:
Unlike science, no religion or religious sect can demonstrate the 
validity of its beliefs,..
******
There are many concepts which cannot be quantified:  faith, hope, 
conscience, love and so on. But that does not deny their existence. 
I quoted Paul's definition of faith at the heading of this post. 

Everyone, in same way, exercises faith if only in small ways. When 
I drive my car, I have faith that the engineer who assembled or 
serviced my car constructed the braking system correctly so that 
when I press the brake pedal, they work. I exercise faith when a 
close friend or relative promises to do something, it will be done 
and I go ahead working in that assumption. Christians hold faith 
in the promises of Jesus Christ that eternal life exists. Atheists hold 
faith that it doesn't. If, when I leave this life, I and millions of other 
Christians are wrong, we will not know. On the other hand, if 
atheists have backed the wrong horse, they may find themselves 
facing some probing questions at the pearly gates

:-)

And some time ago, in post 39349 md wrote:
I could of course argue that Christians have never been truly 
introduced to logic and reason because faith clouds their minds. I 
don't,
.
******
At the time, I missed the last two words and commented that there 
were leading scientists in the world who were logical and also people 
of faith. Although md responded that he had written "I don't", I feel 
on reflection that in writing that originally, he had in fact made that 
argument.

In the following quotes, I believe that part of them shows that 
although Science may demonstrate the validity of its beliefs, they do 
not encompass the entirety of knowledge and would like to offer the 
following three examples of noted scientists at the very top of their 
profession who hold to Christian faith:
******
Francis Collins is the director of the Human Genome Project. Formerly 
an atheist, he is now a Christian and explained in a recent interview 
how this came about:
"I am a scientist and a believer, and I find no conflict between those 
world views. As the director of the Human Genome Project, I have led a 
consortium of scientists to read out the 3.1 billion letters of the human 
genome, our own DNA instruction book. As a believer, I see DNA, the 
information molecule of all living things, as God's language, and the 
elegance and complexity of our own bodies and the rest of nature as a 
reflection of God's plan.

I did not always embrace these perspectives. As a graduate student in 
physical chemistry in the 1970s, I was an atheist, finding no reason to 
postulate the existence of any truths outside of mathematics, physics 
and chemistry. But then I went to medical school, and encountered life 
and death issues at the bedsides of my patients. Challenged by one of 
those patients, who asked "What do you believe, doctor?", I began 
searching for answers. I had to admit that the science I loved so much 
was powerless to answer questions such as "What is the meaning of life?" 
"Why am I here?" "Why does mathematics work, anyway?" "If the universe 
had a beginning, who created it?" "Why are the physical constants in the 
universe so finely tuned to allow the possibility of complex life forms?" 
"Why do humans have a moral sense?" "What happens after we die?"

I had always assumed that faith was based on purely emotional and 
irrational arguments, and was astounded to discover, initially in the 
writings of the Oxford scholar C.S. Lewis and subsequently from many 
other sources, that one could build a very strong case for the plausibility 
of the existence of God on purely rational grounds. My earlier atheist's 
assertion that "I know there is no God" emerged as the least defensible. 
As the British writer G.K. Chesterton famously remarked, "Atheism is the 
most daring of all dogmas, for it is the assertion of a universal negative."

To save space I have not quoted Francis Collins' full article. If you wish to 
read it in full, this link should take you to it:
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/04/03/collins.commentary/index.html
****** 
Sir John Polkinghorne (usually known as Dr.or Rev.) is one of the most 
noted of UK scientists. For 25 years, he was a theoretical physicist working 
on theories of elementary particles and played a significant role in the 
discovery of the quark.  From 1968 to 1979 he was Professor of 
Mathematical Physics at Cambridge University, and he was elected a 
Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1974. In 1982, he stepped back 
from being at the cutting edge of science to train as a Christian minister 
and to spend time publishing books and articles on God and Science.

He suggests that God is the ultimate answer to Leibniz's great question 
"why is there something rather than nothing?" The atheist's "plain 
assertion of the world's existence" is a "grossly impoverished view of 
reality," he says, arguing that "theism explains more than a reductionist 
atheism can ever address."

He recently appeared on a BBC TV progamme in which he made the 
following observation: "Science is enormously successful in answering 
the questions that it chooses to address: how things happen but there 
are lots of other things happening in the world, lots of other ways of 
looking at things. There's a meaning, there's a value, there's a purpose 
going on and Science just brackets that out, doesn't pretend to answer 
those questions.

So, the kettle's boiling: the scientific answer is because the gas is 
burning and it heats the water. But there's also a possible answer `The 
kettle's boiling because I want to make a cup of tea and would you like 
to have one?' And we know that we can ask and answer both those 
questions – the how and why if you like – about the same thing but 
Science only answers one of them."
******
Dr.Owen Gingerich was at one time Research Professor of Astronomy 
and History of Science at Havard University and has several books on 
astronomy and its history to his credit. In the same programme, he 
said: "There are very interesting unanswered questions.  Science makes 
its great progress by very carefully  choosing questions that will have 
answers.

`Why is there something rather than nothing?' `Why is the universe c
omprehensible?' These are all metaphysical questions, literally `meta-` 
beyond, physics. I think these are important questions and worthy of 
philosophical reflection but they're just not the kind of questions that 
Science is capable of answering so we have to keep in mind that Science 
is very good at doing its own thing. That's not the totality of human 
thought or human appreciation."
******
Christian faith does not deny the existence of Science and there is a 
considerable body of scientific opinion which does not deny the 
existence of faith.

Each scientific step forward reveals more questions. I was highly 
amused last year when the Large Hadron Collider was started up in 
Switzerland . On the BBC news, one of the science reporters had been 
enthusing  how the machine would simulate conditions near the Big 
Bang and then rounded off the report by commenting "Even if we know 
all about the Big Bang, we may never unravel what caused it."

Yes, well
..