Saturday, February 18, 2006

A Reasonable Trust

Over on www.kcfs.org, there is a thread with a link to Hans Kung's reflections on science and religion.

In it, he states that he has a "reasonable trust" in God, but does not expect rational certainty. This is the fact about the world we live in. We can look at the beauty, the complexity, the overwelming abundance of living things around us, and be certain that God exists. Scientific proof, however, eludes us. This is not because God may not be real. Instead, it says something profound about the nature, uses, and limits of science.

Because of the very nature of science, only natural process can be detected and studied. As a result, when God uses natural processes, then God is "invisible." This does not mean that God does not exisit - only that his hand is hidden from "scientific" view.

ID is an attempt to detect his fingerprints by identifying things in nature that could not have occurred by any natural process. The problem with this approach is that it is an argument from ignorance - at the end of the day, a successful ID argument only demonstrates that we don't know how something was done - we still can't say that God "did it" (although we may find it REASONABLE to think that he did).

This means that we are still required to live by faith. A reasonable faith, yes; but one that has been scientifically demonstrated to be true? God could have, but did not, make it so.

Moral Relativism / Absolutism

I suppose the opposite of moral relativism is moral
absolutism - some group, usually religious, telling us
exactly how we ought to think and live. Christians
used to defend slavery and the disenfranchisement of
women on absolute moral grounds. Most Christians
today read their bible differently. Have the moral
absolutes changed?

We also live in a secular democracy. The founding
fathers knew from close-up what happens when one
religious group imposes their view of the truth on the
broader society. This is why we have constitutional
protections in place to separate church and state.
Whose religious laws govern us? And when the
population shifts, and another religion is dominant,
do we change our laws?

As far as moral relativism, we have atheists defending
a Christian's right to pray in school, and Christian
clinic bombers. Usually, the same Christians who decry
the decline of personal morality make no comment on global
injustice, grossly unfair business compensation and
profiteering, and endemic political corruption. Is this
moral relativism? Instead of sloganeering, we need to
find ways of engaging our community and elected leaders in
substantive discussions about justice, ethical
behavior and how to address issues, like genetic
engineering, that have come up after the world's moral
codes were written.