It also takes away the power of people like the Vatican screwing over the poor for larger cathedrals, and more power of more people. Ever wondered what makes it right for a poor family in Phillipines giving their last Pesos to the church to bury a family member, whilst the Pope sits in a palace that dwarfs any king's palace. Now that's morals for you.
Have you ever actually looked into what the pope does? Yeah it's a great job, you get to spend most of your time praying, being swarmed by crowds, sermon after sermon after sermon, being made to travel here and there to visit this and that group, and you even get the joy of having people bash you without having a clue what you do or how you live. Yeah the pope lives in a big building, but does that mean he actually gets to enjoy it? Who cares if you live in a castle if you live like a peasant? Sure he gets a vacation once in a great while, but I'm pretty sure I have more days off than him. So if he's scamming people out of their money, it isn't a very profitable scam. He's got a stupid looking car, a boring life that lacks entertainment beyond church music, and a lot haters.
Besides that, Catholics only donate to the Holy See once a year, the regular donations go to the local diocese (which are generally very ostensibly poor, anyway). All such donations are optional, too, and no one can be denied any service for not donating. A whole world of donations even once a year is a lot of money, but it's nothing after you pay for all the upkeep of the medieval and Renaissance churches and the operating cost of the governing body of a worldwide organization.
Seriously, do some research before you bash someone.
If God is unknowable, then what you say makes perfect sense. "the highest order of blasphemy" is exactly what it is to preach "God's will."
But Christianity doesn't say God is wholly unknowable, only that God eludes full conception. It means that the more that God is known, the more also God becomes a mystery. God is the horizon of human understanding, which whenever you approach it, recedes all the more. There is always something more to know. Generally the way of describing God, then, hinges largely upon "negative theology," which basically means describing what God is not. Even in places where it's impossible to really positively say what God is, we can have some idea of what God is not. However, Christianity still relies upon some positive knowledge of God, and yet that knowledge cannot be just deduced, as if God were an object within our experience to be analyzed. It relies then upon God revealing God's own self to human beings, revelation.
There is an analogy with human persons: a close friend reveals herself to you, but you can never know another person's inner depths to the fullness, because you cannot be her, you cannot exhaust her mystery. Even more, God opens the depths up to humans, but by the very nature of these depths they cannot be exhausted, cannot be known in entirety.
Of course, it can hardly be proven through neutral inquiry that God has revealed God's own self. Still, a large problem does occur among those who believe in revelation, because it's too easy to think one's own whims are part of that revelation. Just because there is revelation does not mean it is easy to determine for sure the boundaries of that revelation, but the whole of revelation cannot be thrown out for that reason.
People too often conceive of a personal, immanent God concerned with the world in terms of temporality that, as you say, makes it seem as if God has to continually fiddle with the world to make it go. But God continually eludes human conception, and if God in some sense stands outside of time, then from the viewpoint of time the eternal act of creation appears to be either strung out throughout all time, or repeated continually. In reality, however, if God stands outside of time then the only real way to describe God's action with regard to creation is according to eternity. Hence it becomes nonsense in a certain way to speak of God as creating the world and then letting it be (because there would have to be separate moments in God, a moment of creation and then a moment of perpetuation). Rather, there is only one moment, with creation and perpetuation united into one eternal act (eternal != continuous). Hence it is possible to conceive of creation as inexorably leading toward the endpoint conceived by the deity not because it's a row of dominos set up from the beginning to fall exactly where planned, but because the plan takes place under the same act in which it is begun. To understand this it is necessary also to realize that God did not create the world and then it just existed, of its own, as if it no longer needed God. Only God exists of necessity, and hence there is no reason that the world need remain in existence. Thinking of Ockham's razor, it is just as simple for the world not to exist at all. It must be then that the world needs to be perpetually held into existence by God, and this not by a separate act (like refueling a car after building it), but by one eternal act of creation.
Mexico is run by a culture and people primarily descended from the people who killed off the Aztecs. Yes, there are plenty of Indians in Mexico today, but they're pretty much at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. The Mexican government is the heir of the Spanish Empire.
Uh, no. It's not that simple.
First off, "Aztec" is a broad and external moniker generally given to the empire dominated by the Mexica, a specific tribe. Scholars these days tend to refer to the people of Mexico widely as Nahuas, that is, people who speak Nahuatl. With that in mind, descent should not be considered simply from the Mexica, because many of the people who still exhibit a strongly indigenous culture are non-Mexica Nahuas.
Second, nobody killed off the Aztecs. That's purely a myth. Yes, many were killed, but they didn't just all die. They had children, and the children had children, etc. Through intermarriage, fornication, or rape, the Spaniards and the Nahua mixed. This process was is called mestizaje. Hence a monument in Mexico city marking a key battle reads, "Neither a victory or a defeat, but the painful birth of a mestizo people." The intention of the Spaniards had surely been to completely erase and replace Nahua culture, but they didn't succeed; they couldn't succeed. In such an encounter there tends to be some continuance with what came before, especially inasmuch as the culture before had some connections with the conquering culture that helped the new culture to take root. Mexicans today are not purely Spanish. We don't just fit-in in Spain. The irony is that the cultures that still carry on many indigenous practices, likewise, are not purely indigenous, but they often have taken on many traits from the Spaniards but apparently preserved more traditional elements than the majority of the conquered. Mexico is not as simple as saying that the Spaniards conquered, killed, and replaced; really it's more of a complex, evolutionary situation, where both sides formed something new.
Of course, some troll will probably insist that there's no native culture remaining because most don't speak Nahuatl and don't worship the sun or use the calendar, but it's not as simple as that. I recommend reading Louise Burkhart's The Slippery Earth, Viviana Diaz Balsera's The Pyramid Under the Cross, or pretty much anything by Jaime Lara.
Ironically, I agree with you that this is "science catering to religion." It's science making up an answer to a question that it is entirely unfit to answer. However, I disagree with your implied statement that this question is not worth asking.
You are right that it is natural for an intelligent being to ask questions about its own existence. And if it is not at all possible for an intelligent being to even touch upon the answer which it has not and cannot witness, then it is a futile investigation. But if we consider that it is of the nature of an intelligent being to ask the question precisely because this intelligence is not a mere capability of calculation, but an actual self-transcendence, and if we recognize that every question already implies the person having stepped outside of himself or herself and reached toward an unreachable horizon, then it seems that perhaps the quest is not futile after all. By reason of the self-transcendence of the human being, for example, in every thought the acting subject is also known by the one thinking. With this in mind, it is not only possible to ask about ourselves but necessary. "Meaning" is not some made-up mythology impressed upon a faceless world, but is the right ordering of contingent events that places our own contingency in the sphere of actuality.
Humanity, by nature, can and must ask the question. But science, because it can only rightly deal with what actually is and not inasmuch as it might not be, can hardly be twisted into answering the question. This is not a devaluation of science, but a recognition that its true dignity lies in doing what it does, not in trying to do what it doesn't. Positing multiple universes is a ridiculous assumption that confuses possibility with actuality. It hardly makes sense that even one universe exists. The simpler explanation is most likely the correct one, but it is far simpler for one universe--and far simpler more for there to be no universe. Because of our experience, we must posit that there is one universe, but we have no experience to indicate the existence of multiple universes. Just because the universe could be different, does not mean that it actually exists differently as a different universe. It is much more reasonable to argue that it is just a random occurence that the universe produced life than to argue that multiple universes made this possibility certain.
Nevertheless, we are still faced with the unreasonable existence of a universe at all. We take the universe for granted simply because it is forced upon us by experience. But the realization that it need not be as it is forces us to reckon with the contingency of that which is most certain to our experience. If the universe need not be as it is, it can hardly be certain that it need be at all. And if it need not be at all, then why does it exist? I will not argue that experience can prove here the necessity of a creator, but Christianity never learned such a thing apart from revelation.
You mention theology, so I figure as a theologian I should give you a reply. To start, I do not have a stance on "creationism" or "intelligent design" as such because these considerations are ultimately secondary to the fundamental question of the ultimate origin and ground of being. I assume this is why you say that "theology is a much more diverse (and interesting) subject than the Creationists and IDers would have you believe."
While you are correct that the natural propensity for DNA or RNA to promote organization, replication, and thus complexification should be somewhat measureable, the problem is that this can ultimately have little bearing on the fundamental question of the origin of all being. By definition the ultimate origin is the answer to a question that answers it own question. It is the only answer that does not give way to an unanswered question. It is the fundamental horizon of questioning that, as a horizon, always recedes as we move toward it. What I mean by this is, granted that DNA or RNA may have a natural propensity for evolution, this propensity begs the question of why there is a propensity at all. Why is there DNA or DNA at all, why is there nitrogen at all, why do atoms and molecules have their respective natural properties? Why is there a universe at all, when it is much simpler (think Ockham) for there not to be a universe? Granted that things exist, and there is no identifiable reason that they should exist, we are pressed with the reality of a contingent existence: a reality that we have no claim on existence that strong-arms it into letting us exist. We are, and yet we could just as well not be. And if things could just as well not be, then the only answer to the question of everything is something that absolutely cannot not be.
As long as people are content to answer questions only so far--only far enough to say that the molecules have a propensity for life, or that atoms have a propensity to be molecules--without answering why such propensities exist at all, then the fundamental question is ignored and will find no answer. Many theologians have shown well how an evolutionary mindset is not impossible or absolutely contradictory to the scriptural witness rightly understood (not according to a fundamentalist hermaneutic), but what ultimately will be affirmed by a Christian because of the creation account is that it is a creation ex nihilo (out of nothing). All of the world, then, has a beginning and an origin, and a contingency in that it might as well not exist. But God is not something of the world, not among the world, not bound by its contingencies. Theology, then, ultimately affirms that God, as the fullness of being, the one being that actualizes himself in existence, the only being that must exist and cannot not exist, confirms in existence everything else that is contingent, because everything contingent is contingent upon being itself. Thus, the necessities of natural law are only necessities given that nature exists. And this given is not an absolute given, but contingent upon creation by the absolute being.
It is interesting to consider religion and thought in light of the increase in "leisure" among a species that has obtained dominance over the others and a society that provides confort and elevation from more fundamental necessities of survival. It must be pointed out, though, that religion in no way is a shield against "distraction", but it IS that distraction itself. It is that questioning.
When faced with the average church-goer who doesn't give much thought to God or heaven or hell any more than e thinks about physics, biology, or chemistry, it's easy to think that religion is something that answers difficult questions in a simple way to keep humans from being distracted from fundamental survival.
Yet if you read ancient literature, and understand that religion and the questions therein were the greatest things that the greatest minds loved to discuss for centuries, and if you understand that Greek philosophy was directly tied to religious inquiry, then it does not seem that religion is so. As long as there are people who accept religion without thinking about it much, there are also as many people who accept it because they think about it endlessly. It is because religion is perhaps better understood not as an answer to these questions, but a mindset, a language, a protocol, that allows these questions to be investigated.
Perhaps the reason is because by our very nature the question cannot be put off. It is part of the human's very nature to need to question on some level. But religion is not purely a mental activity either. It is something that erupts into the entirety of life and allows the human to perceive meaning in otherwise mundane things.
A good scholar on the topic is Mircea Eliade, a major name in the Philosophy of Religion (the philosophical study of the human religious inclination and its general forms and structures). In "The Sacred and the Profane" he studies numerous tribal religions and outlines their symbolic depth and significance, which to some extent rules out the various theories that conclude that religion is merely a placebo.
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It also takes away the power of people like the Vatican screwing over the poor for larger cathedrals, and more power of more people. Ever wondered what makes it right for a poor family in Phillipines giving their last Pesos to the church to bury a family member, whilst the Pope sits in a palace that dwarfs any king's palace. Now that's morals for you.
Have you ever actually looked into what the pope does? Yeah it's a great job, you get to spend most of your time praying, being swarmed by crowds, sermon after sermon after sermon, being made to travel here and there to visit this and that group, and you even get the joy of having people bash you without having a clue what you do or how you live. Yeah the pope lives in a big building, but does that mean he actually gets to enjoy it? Who cares if you live in a castle if you live like a peasant? Sure he gets a vacation once in a great while, but I'm pretty sure I have more days off than him. So if he's scamming people out of their money, it isn't a very profitable scam. He's got a stupid looking car, a boring life that lacks entertainment beyond church music, and a lot haters.
Besides that, Catholics only donate to the Holy See once a year, the regular donations go to the local diocese (which are generally very ostensibly poor, anyway). All such donations are optional, too, and no one can be denied any service for not donating. A whole world of donations even once a year is a lot of money, but it's nothing after you pay for all the upkeep of the medieval and Renaissance churches and the operating cost of the governing body of a worldwide organization.
Seriously, do some research before you bash someone.
If God is unknowable, then what you say makes perfect sense. "the highest order of blasphemy" is exactly what it is to preach "God's will." But Christianity doesn't say God is wholly unknowable, only that God eludes full conception. It means that the more that God is known, the more also God becomes a mystery. God is the horizon of human understanding, which whenever you approach it, recedes all the more. There is always something more to know. Generally the way of describing God, then, hinges largely upon "negative theology," which basically means describing what God is not. Even in places where it's impossible to really positively say what God is, we can have some idea of what God is not. However, Christianity still relies upon some positive knowledge of God, and yet that knowledge cannot be just deduced, as if God were an object within our experience to be analyzed. It relies then upon God revealing God's own self to human beings, revelation. There is an analogy with human persons: a close friend reveals herself to you, but you can never know another person's inner depths to the fullness, because you cannot be her, you cannot exhaust her mystery. Even more, God opens the depths up to humans, but by the very nature of these depths they cannot be exhausted, cannot be known in entirety. Of course, it can hardly be proven through neutral inquiry that God has revealed God's own self. Still, a large problem does occur among those who believe in revelation, because it's too easy to think one's own whims are part of that revelation. Just because there is revelation does not mean it is easy to determine for sure the boundaries of that revelation, but the whole of revelation cannot be thrown out for that reason.
People too often conceive of a personal, immanent God concerned with the world in terms of temporality that, as you say, makes it seem as if God has to continually fiddle with the world to make it go. But God continually eludes human conception, and if God in some sense stands outside of time, then from the viewpoint of time the eternal act of creation appears to be either strung out throughout all time, or repeated continually. In reality, however, if God stands outside of time then the only real way to describe God's action with regard to creation is according to eternity. Hence it becomes nonsense in a certain way to speak of God as creating the world and then letting it be (because there would have to be separate moments in God, a moment of creation and then a moment of perpetuation). Rather, there is only one moment, with creation and perpetuation united into one eternal act (eternal != continuous). Hence it is possible to conceive of creation as inexorably leading toward the endpoint conceived by the deity not because it's a row of dominos set up from the beginning to fall exactly where planned, but because the plan takes place under the same act in which it is begun. To understand this it is necessary also to realize that God did not create the world and then it just existed, of its own, as if it no longer needed God. Only God exists of necessity, and hence there is no reason that the world need remain in existence. Thinking of Ockham's razor, it is just as simple for the world not to exist at all. It must be then that the world needs to be perpetually held into existence by God, and this not by a separate act (like refueling a car after building it), but by one eternal act of creation.
Mexico is run by a culture and people primarily descended from the people who killed off the Aztecs. Yes, there are plenty of Indians in Mexico today, but they're pretty much at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. The Mexican government is the heir of the Spanish Empire.
Uh, no. It's not that simple.
First off, "Aztec" is a broad and external moniker generally given to the empire dominated by the Mexica, a specific tribe. Scholars these days tend to refer to the people of Mexico widely as Nahuas, that is, people who speak Nahuatl. With that in mind, descent should not be considered simply from the Mexica, because many of the people who still exhibit a strongly indigenous culture are non-Mexica Nahuas.
Second, nobody killed off the Aztecs. That's purely a myth. Yes, many were killed, but they didn't just all die. They had children, and the children had children, etc. Through intermarriage, fornication, or rape, the Spaniards and the Nahua mixed. This process was is called mestizaje. Hence a monument in Mexico city marking a key battle reads, "Neither a victory or a defeat, but the painful birth of a mestizo people." The intention of the Spaniards had surely been to completely erase and replace Nahua culture, but they didn't succeed; they couldn't succeed. In such an encounter there tends to be some continuance with what came before, especially inasmuch as the culture before had some connections with the conquering culture that helped the new culture to take root. Mexicans today are not purely Spanish. We don't just fit-in in Spain. The irony is that the cultures that still carry on many indigenous practices, likewise, are not purely indigenous, but they often have taken on many traits from the Spaniards but apparently preserved more traditional elements than the majority of the conquered. Mexico is not as simple as saying that the Spaniards conquered, killed, and replaced; really it's more of a complex, evolutionary situation, where both sides formed something new.
Of course, some troll will probably insist that there's no native culture remaining because most don't speak Nahuatl and don't worship the sun or use the calendar, but it's not as simple as that. I recommend reading Louise Burkhart's The Slippery Earth, Viviana Diaz Balsera's The Pyramid Under the Cross, or pretty much anything by Jaime Lara.
Ironically, I agree with you that this is "science catering to religion." It's science making up an answer to a question that it is entirely unfit to answer. However, I disagree with your implied statement that this question is not worth asking. You are right that it is natural for an intelligent being to ask questions about its own existence. And if it is not at all possible for an intelligent being to even touch upon the answer which it has not and cannot witness, then it is a futile investigation. But if we consider that it is of the nature of an intelligent being to ask the question precisely because this intelligence is not a mere capability of calculation, but an actual self-transcendence, and if we recognize that every question already implies the person having stepped outside of himself or herself and reached toward an unreachable horizon, then it seems that perhaps the quest is not futile after all. By reason of the self-transcendence of the human being, for example, in every thought the acting subject is also known by the one thinking. With this in mind, it is not only possible to ask about ourselves but necessary. "Meaning" is not some made-up mythology impressed upon a faceless world, but is the right ordering of contingent events that places our own contingency in the sphere of actuality. Humanity, by nature, can and must ask the question. But science, because it can only rightly deal with what actually is and not inasmuch as it might not be, can hardly be twisted into answering the question. This is not a devaluation of science, but a recognition that its true dignity lies in doing what it does, not in trying to do what it doesn't. Positing multiple universes is a ridiculous assumption that confuses possibility with actuality. It hardly makes sense that even one universe exists. The simpler explanation is most likely the correct one, but it is far simpler for one universe--and far simpler more for there to be no universe. Because of our experience, we must posit that there is one universe, but we have no experience to indicate the existence of multiple universes. Just because the universe could be different, does not mean that it actually exists differently as a different universe. It is much more reasonable to argue that it is just a random occurence that the universe produced life than to argue that multiple universes made this possibility certain. Nevertheless, we are still faced with the unreasonable existence of a universe at all. We take the universe for granted simply because it is forced upon us by experience. But the realization that it need not be as it is forces us to reckon with the contingency of that which is most certain to our experience. If the universe need not be as it is, it can hardly be certain that it need be at all. And if it need not be at all, then why does it exist? I will not argue that experience can prove here the necessity of a creator, but Christianity never learned such a thing apart from revelation.
You mention theology, so I figure as a theologian I should give you a reply. To start, I do not have a stance on "creationism" or "intelligent design" as such because these considerations are ultimately secondary to the fundamental question of the ultimate origin and ground of being. I assume this is why you say that "theology is a much more diverse (and interesting) subject than the Creationists and IDers would have you believe."
While you are correct that the natural propensity for DNA or RNA to promote organization, replication, and thus complexification should be somewhat measureable, the problem is that this can ultimately have little bearing on the fundamental question of the origin of all being. By definition the ultimate origin is the answer to a question that answers it own question. It is the only answer that does not give way to an unanswered question. It is the fundamental horizon of questioning that, as a horizon, always recedes as we move toward it. What I mean by this is, granted that DNA or RNA may have a natural propensity for evolution, this propensity begs the question of why there is a propensity at all. Why is there DNA or DNA at all, why is there nitrogen at all, why do atoms and molecules have their respective natural properties? Why is there a universe at all, when it is much simpler (think Ockham) for there not to be a universe? Granted that things exist, and there is no identifiable reason that they should exist, we are pressed with the reality of a contingent existence: a reality that we have no claim on existence that strong-arms it into letting us exist. We are, and yet we could just as well not be. And if things could just as well not be, then the only answer to the question of everything is something that absolutely cannot not be.
As long as people are content to answer questions only so far--only far enough to say that the molecules have a propensity for life, or that atoms have a propensity to be molecules--without answering why such propensities exist at all, then the fundamental question is ignored and will find no answer. Many theologians have shown well how an evolutionary mindset is not impossible or absolutely contradictory to the scriptural witness rightly understood (not according to a fundamentalist hermaneutic), but what ultimately will be affirmed by a Christian because of the creation account is that it is a creation ex nihilo (out of nothing). All of the world, then, has a beginning and an origin, and a contingency in that it might as well not exist. But God is not something of the world, not among the world, not bound by its contingencies. Theology, then, ultimately affirms that God, as the fullness of being, the one being that actualizes himself in existence, the only being that must exist and cannot not exist, confirms in existence everything else that is contingent, because everything contingent is contingent upon being itself. Thus, the necessities of natural law are only necessities given that nature exists. And this given is not an absolute given, but contingent upon creation by the absolute being.
It is interesting to consider religion and thought in light of the increase in "leisure" among a species that has obtained dominance over the others and a society that provides confort and elevation from more fundamental necessities of survival. It must be pointed out, though, that religion in no way is a shield against "distraction", but it IS that distraction itself. It is that questioning.
When faced with the average church-goer who doesn't give much thought to God or heaven or hell any more than e thinks about physics, biology, or chemistry, it's easy to think that religion is something that answers difficult questions in a simple way to keep humans from being distracted from fundamental survival.
Yet if you read ancient literature, and understand that religion and the questions therein were the greatest things that the greatest minds loved to discuss for centuries, and if you understand that Greek philosophy was directly tied to religious inquiry, then it does not seem that religion is so. As long as there are people who accept religion without thinking about it much, there are also as many people who accept it because they think about it endlessly. It is because religion is perhaps better understood not as an answer to these questions, but a mindset, a language, a protocol, that allows these questions to be investigated.
Perhaps the reason is because by our very nature the question cannot be put off. It is part of the human's very nature to need to question on some level. But religion is not purely a mental activity either. It is something that erupts into the entirety of life and allows the human to perceive meaning in otherwise mundane things.
A good scholar on the topic is Mircea Eliade, a major name in the Philosophy of Religion (the philosophical study of the human religious inclination and its general forms and structures). In "The Sacred and the Profane" he studies numerous tribal religions and outlines their symbolic depth and significance, which to some extent rules out the various theories that conclude that religion is merely a placebo.