RE: God was behind Big Bang, pope says
January 11, 2011 at 5:43 am
(This post was last modified: January 11, 2011 at 6:05 am by Anomalocaris.)
I am aware of the Vatican Observatory and the excellent scientific work emanating from the Jesuit order. I also know many scientists who do excellent work while still beholden to many aspects of the Christian superstition. The noted evolutionary biologist Simon Conway Morris is one example. But none of these changes the purpose which the religious organizations to which they below really seek to advance, which is to reassert the dominion of superstition over science in the human mind.
As to the church not preventing its members from doing good science, nothing even in YEC prevents one becoming a good doctor or physicist so long as one keeps one's rational inquiries to a narrow field. The noted physicist Raymond Demadian, co-inventor of the Magnetic Resonance Imagine scanner, and was the odds on favorite for a Nobel prize in Physics around 2002, is a YEC of sorts. I know him personally. But that doesn't make a church that preaches YEC any less an obstructor of science. The same can be said for the Catholic Church. A church that preaches the hidden hand of god without evidence is preaching against the principle of science. The church may have learned through 5 centuries of defeats the unwisdom of waging pitched battle against the center and flanks of modern science. But while it may refrain from contesting the grounds on which science has set up main camp, it does not refrain from gleefully skirmishing with any forward guards of science; hoping at every juncture to prevent science from making any inroad into the parts of the domain of superstition it still commands. I have no doubt it is fundamentally biding its time awaiting better opportunities when it may yet make major gains for its own superstition at the expense of science.
As to the church not preventing its members from doing good science, nothing even in YEC prevents one becoming a good doctor or physicist so long as one keeps one's rational inquiries to a narrow field. The noted physicist Raymond Demadian, co-inventor of the Magnetic Resonance Imagine scanner, and was the odds on favorite for a Nobel prize in Physics around 2002, is a YEC of sorts. I know him personally. But that doesn't make a church that preaches YEC any less an obstructor of science. The same can be said for the Catholic Church. A church that preaches the hidden hand of god without evidence is preaching against the principle of science. The church may have learned through 5 centuries of defeats the unwisdom of waging pitched battle against the center and flanks of modern science. But while it may refrain from contesting the grounds on which science has set up main camp, it does not refrain from gleefully skirmishing with any forward guards of science; hoping at every juncture to prevent science from making any inroad into the parts of the domain of superstition it still commands. I have no doubt it is fundamentally biding its time awaiting better opportunities when it may yet make major gains for its own superstition at the expense of science.
