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[.....]

Buttiglione was no where near Brussels today, and has nothing to do with any of the EU institutions. But in 2004 he was appointed by the Italian prime minister to be Italy’s European Commissioner, and was in line for the justice portfolio. Then after parliamentary hearings he was forced to withdraw from his nomination because of an attack by the parliament’s left-wingers and Greens. The BBC couldn’t resist going over this defeat of a conservative European, saying he was forced to withdraw because ‘MEPs objected to Mr Buttiglione’s opposition to gay rights.’

That is a smear by the BBC. Buttiglione never opposed anyone’s rights.

[.....]

Here is what he actually said to the MEPs (as opposed to what the BBC wants you to believe he said): ‘I may think of homosexuality as a sin, but it has no effect unless I say it is a crime. The state has no right to stick its nose in this area…The rights of homosexuals should be defended on the same basis as the rights of all other European citizens. But I don’t accept that homosexuals are a category deserving of special protection.’

In other words Buttiglione was saying that he believes all men are created equal, and so all men should have equal protection of the laws of the land. Sounds perfectly right to me. Indeed, sounds like an expression of classical liberal thinking.

[.....]

What the MEPs were doing was demonstrating their intolerance of anyone who does not share their anti-Christian views. Buttiglione is an academic, a man who has studied the ancient philosophy and moral laws of his Church, and who chooses to live his own private life by those moral laws. That he also chooses to protect the right of other men to live their own private lives by their own moral laws was irrelevant to the intolerant mob at the parliament: no devout Christians are to be allowed in the Commission — or anywhere else, if the Jacobins of the Strasbourg Gravy Train can help it.

And right along side the intolerant mob runs the BBC, twisting the truth.

Read all

This is worrying news. Click here for a profile of this fearless Christian man.

Economist

Has brave Gao Zhisheng been “disappeared”?

GAO ZHISHENG is, or now more likely was, “one of China’s ten best lawyers”, and that was the judgment of the Chinese government, his nemesis. For courage, he ranks at the top. Mr Gao, self-taught in law after being discharged from the People’s Liberation Army, took up the cases of dispossessed farmers, persecuted Christians and members of the Falun Gong cult whom few lawyers were brave enough to represent. After documenting in great detail the state’s barbaric persecution of Falun Gong practitioners, in 2005 Mr Gao wrote an open letter to President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao calling for an end to practitioners’ detention, torture and humiliation. He then quit the Chinese Communist Party, calling it “the proudest day of my life”.

That was when his own persecution intensified. His Shengzhi law office in Beijing was shut down. State goons attempted to run him down. He was taken into custody, beaten and charged with subversion. One torture session lasted 50 days, with police revelling in his pain and applying electric batons to his genitals. Mr Gao later published the details of this session in another open letter.

And

ChinaAid

Police Officer Says Human Rights Attorney Gao Zhisheng “Went Missing on a Walk”

Since mid-December, 2009, ominous rumors have circulated about Gao Zhisheng, hinting that he has died after brutal torture in prison. However, no reports have been confirmed, and the Chinese government continues to refuse comment on his condition and whereabouts.

A friend of ChinaAid in New York recently notified us about a serious development with Gao’s daughter, Gege. Gege had been reportedly “pale and tired-looking” for months, fearing her father would be killed in prison. After hearing a rumor of Gao’s death just before Christmas, Gege became so emotionally distraught, she was forced to be hospitalized. She remains fragile and under medical care in a New York hospital.

On Thursday, January 14th, Gao’s brother Zhiyi said he had gone to Beijing searching out the policeman who originally detained Gao Zhisheng back in February, 2009. The policeman told him that Attorney Gao allegedly “got lost and went missing while out on a walk” on September 25, 2009.  Gao’s wife has refused to comment, but was reported to be extremely upset when she heard the news.

This is the first time a Chinese government official has hinted that they no longer have Gao Zhisheng in their custody, leading ChinaAid to believe Gao’s condition has taken a turn for the worse.

“It is totally unacceptable for the Chinese government to lose track of their own prisoner,” said President of ChinaAid Bob Fu. “It is absolutely clear that he was forcibly taken from his home in February 2009. Nearly a year later, the Chinese government now says they do not have him.”

Gao Zhisheng was last heard from via a phone call to Gao Zhiyi in early September, 2009. He was able to say “I’m ok” before the line went dead.
Though the rumors of death cannot be confirmed with no public statement from the Chinese government, Bob Fu remains extremely concerned. “We have every reason to suspect that the Chinese government has something very serious to hide. Gao’s family has every right to know what happened to him. It is unbelievable that a high security prisoner would go missing while “out on a walk,” without suspecting that there is a major cover up of his condition.”

ChinaAid calls on the international community to hold the Chinese government accountable for their treatment of Gao Zhisheng. To join ChinaAid’s efforts to make the truth about Gao Zhisheng know, visit www.FreeGao.com.

Just before that letter came out, nearly a year ago, Mr Gao disappeared for the last time. His brother has tracked down the policeman who detained Mr Gao back then. This cop has told him that Mr Gao “went missing while out for a walk” in September. If Mr Gao has indeed been “disappeared”, may Mr Hu and Mr Wen be held to account for it.

Previous post here.

Cross-post from The Point of no Return blog:-

The shocking news that the Iraqi authorities have or are planning to erase the Jewish character of the ancient shrine of Ezekiel at al-Kifl, Iraq, first broken on Point of No Return, has reached the ears of Jerusalem Post. Ksenia Svetlova spoke to Professor Shmuel Moreh, who says that millenarian Hebrew inscriptions are now hidden by plaster:

For centuries Jews, Christians and Muslims came to Al-Kifl, a small town south of Baghdad, to visit the tomb of the Prophet Ezekiel and pray.

The distinctive Jewish character of the Al-Kifl shrine, namely the Hebrew inscriptions and the Torah Ark, never bothered the gentile worshipers. In the 14th century a minaret was built next to the shrine, but the interior design remained Jewish. The vast majority of Iraq’s Jewish community left some 60 years ago, but Shi’ites took good care of the holy site.

Until now.

Recently “Ur,” a local Iraqi news agency, reported that a huge mosque will be built on top of the grave by Iraq’s Antiquities and Heritage Authority, while Hebrew inscriptions and ornaments are being removed from the site, all as part of renovations.

Prof. Shmuel Moreh of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, winner of the 1999 Israel Prize in Middle Eastern studies and chairman of the Association of Jewish Academics from Iraq, speaking to The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday, confirmed the report.

“I first heard the news of tomb desecration from a friend of mine who is a German scholar. After visiting the site he called me and said that some Hebrew inscriptions on the grave were covered by plaster and that a mosque is planned to be built on top of the tomb*. He told me that he found the changes at the tomb disturbing and warned me that I’d better act quickly, before any irreversible damage will be inflicted,” Moreh said.

“I had contacted Mr. Shelomo Alfassa, US director of Justice for Jews from Arab Countries, and told him about this situation. Then I saw the report from the Ur news agency, mentioning the decision of the Antiquities and Heritage Authority to build a mosque and to erase the Hebrew inscriptions and ornaments,” Moreh said.

He asked friends to check out the developments at the site. The most recent to visit the shrine said that some of the inscriptions are now hidden by a layer of plaster.

Iraqi press reports claim that the building must be destroyed because of its poor condition. However, Alfassa believes that Iraq’s Antiquities and Heritage Authority “has been pressured by Islamists to historically cleanse all evidence of a Jewish connection to Iraq – a land where Jews had lived for over a thousand years before the advent of Islam.”

According to the Baghdad-born Moreh, many of the Muslims who visit the tomb today are unaware Ezekiel was a Jew.

* Pictures circulating on the Internet show that loudspeakers to call the Muslim faithful to prayer have been attached to Ezekiel’s tower.

Read article in full

Protest to the Iraqi embassy: if what is happening to Ezekiel’s tomb disturbs you, please register a protest here. Only international pressure might persuade the Iraqi authorities to stop altering the Jewish character of the shrine.

The whole idea of a ‘Doomsday’ clock makes me smile, but the statement that the decision to move the clock back one minute because of a more “hopeful state of world affairs”, made me laugh my socks off.

BBC

The Doomsday Clock – a barometer of nuclear danger for the past 55 years – has been moved one minute further away from the “midnight hour”.

The concept timepiece, devised by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) now stands at six minutes to the hour.

The group said it made the decision to move the clock back because of a more “hopeful state of world affairs”.

The clock was first featured by the magazine in 1947, shortly after the US dropped its A-bombs on Japan.

The clock had been adjusted 18 times before today since its initial start at seven minutes to midnight.

Most recently, in January 2007, the clock moved to five minutes to midnight, when climate change was added to the prospect of nuclear annihilation as the greatest threats to humankind.

The concerns then included Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the inability to halt the international trafficking of nuclear materials such as highly enriched uranium and plutonium.

Read More

The laughter goes on. NewsRealBlog has done a piece on this entitled: How Barack Obama has Saved the World From Apocalypse. Here is an excerpt:-

It is six minutes to midnight…for the first time since atomic bombs were dropped in 1945, leaders of nuclear weapons states are co-operating to vastly reduce their arsenals and secure all nuclear bomb-making material…for the first time ever, industrialized and developing countries alike are pledging to limit climate-changing gas emissions that could render our planet nearly uninhabitable…[with the election of Barack Obama] a change in the US government’s orientation toward international affairs [have brought] a more pragmatic, problem-solving approach than his predecessor.

Read More

Unbelievable! Doomsday is further away than ever because of the Saviour President, Barack Obama!

A look at the church delegation from the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) that recently visited China and yet shockingly remained totally silent on the subject of the Chinese Communist regime’s persecution of religious believers and other human rights abuses.

FrontPageMagazine

Just like President Obama’s first state visit to the People’s Republic of China, the mid-November 2009 visit of a delegation of international church leaders to the state-approved church in China began in Shanghai and ended in Beijing. Obama’s visit was heavy on diplomacy, but he did raise some general concerns about human rights and religious freedom. Shockingly, it was the church delegation from the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) that remained silent on that subject.

Press releases from the church delegation could have passed for White House/State Department media statements. Written in glowing terms, the WEA’s statements were free of criticism of the Chinese Communist regime’s persecution of religious believers and other human rights abuses. One release noted how the WEA delegation was “warmly received” by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the Communist regime’s ministry for monitoring and controlling churches. Another said that they had developed a “warm and open relationship of dialogue” with the state-approved China Christian Council. What was missing in the delegation’s reports was mention of any meetings with the vast majority of Chinese Christians that worship outside the confines of state-approved churches. In fact, the reports failed to even mention the existence of China’s 80 million or more house church Christians.

It has long been true that the left-leaning World Council of Churches (WCC) ignores vast swaths of the world’s persecuted Christians while “prophetically” defending the “victims” of America and Israel. They have more often seen Christians – particularly evangelical ones who insist embarrassingly on sharing their faith – as the persecutors, not the persecuted. But the WEA delegation, which met with China’s state-approved churches, and only state-approved churches, is part of an international organization created to give “worldwide identity, voice, and platform to more than 420 million evangelical Christians.” Yet eighty million Chinese house church Christians, evangelical Christians, were left without identity, voice, or platform in the WEA’s China report.

Read More

Bill Muehlenberg

When the great earthquake of 1755 rocked Lisbon, it raised all sorts of questions about God and faith. The quake, along with a devastating tsunami and massive fires, resulted in anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 deaths in Lisbon alone.

The current quake and aftershocks in Haiti may be responsible for a similar number of deaths. And like the Lisbon disaster, questions are already being asked about how such calamities can be squared with the notion of a good God.

The Lisbon quake provided further fuel for the Enlightenment thinkers who were already seriously questioning God and his goodness. French philosopher and writer Voltaire used his novel Candide to attack the concept of this being “the best of all possible worlds”.

That phrase goes back to the German philosopher Leibniz, who had sought to develop a theodicy (a justification of the ways of God). Voltaire and other Enlightenment figures argued that events such as the Lisbon quake radically challenged the notion of divine benevolence and the optimistic beliefs held by such thinkers as Leibniz.

Of course in the 250 years since the Lisbon disaster, the Western world has gotten a whole lot more secular, with the scepticism and negative criticism of the Enlightenment having done so much thoroughgoing damage. But the issue of theodicy still arises.

Atheists will simply use this most recent tragedy as another attempt to say, “See, I told you so – of course there is no God”. They will seek to offer this disaster as more evidence that the biblical conception of a benevolent deity is untenable and must be utterly rejected.

This of course is an age-old debate, and it is unlikely that either side will willingly cede any ground here, or offer any new insights or arguments. And one can rightly ask whether either side should be seeking to score cheap points here in the face of such unmitigated human suffering.

But like the earlier quake, such disasters inevitably bring out profound questioning, from both believers and non-believers alike. Thus we have an obligation to try to make sense of all this, at least on the basis of our own particular worldview.

Obviously an issue like this has been tossed around for millennia, and huge oceans of ink have been spilt on all this. I certainly have nothing new to offer on the debate, even though I have penned nearly 200,000 words on this topic for my PhD dissertation.

And even Christians themselves have differing takes on all this. Those promoting the openness of God, (or free-will theism) will seek to argue that God is almost as surprised about all this as we are. They argue that future events are not realities, and therefore even God cannot know them.

Thus according to this school of thought, God does not have divine foreknowledge. They are keen to promote such a concept because they feel it offers a better account of the problem of evil and suffering. They think a morally-superior Christian theodicy can be offered by arguing that God has nothing to do with such tragedies, and he is not responsible for such suffering.

Of course that is a very controversial theological position to take, given that there is so much biblical data affirming both God’s sovereignty and his divine foreknowledge. But this is not the place to enter into that particular debate. I simply raise it to point out how believers can and do differ on how we might think biblically and theologically about such disasters.

Getting back to the Leibnizian argument about this being the “the best of all possible worlds”, a perhaps more accurate Christian response might be to say that this world might be the best possible way to the best world. That is, if we want to accept certain goods, such as human freedom, then a sovereign God must somehow make that possible.

Much evil in the world comes from human choices. But human significance presupposes some kind of free choice. That means we can abuse our freedom and make wrong choices, resulting in evil and suffering.

But that only deals with moral evil. What we have here is a case of natural evil. How do we account for that? Well, some natural evil is caused by human activity. We have certain influence on our planet, and we can pollute rivers, for example, resulting in the poisoning and/or death of fish, and so on.

This is too complex a topic to properly discuss here, but even non-believers have to account for physical or natural evil. The same water that brings life to the thirsty can also become a source of death – by drowning. The possibility of evil will always exist in such a world.

The question is, can God redeem such evil, or work a greater end out of such suffering? If we believe the biblical data that God is too loving to be unkind, and too wise to make a mistake, then we can answer such questions in a positive fashion.

We may not know the whys behind every evil, but we can know the who. We know that we serve a God who loves us so much that he even took the death we deserve so that we do not have to suffer the punishment we all rightly should face.

If it is complained that innocent people died in Haiti, then the Christian has to reply with at least two thoughts: one, there really are no innocent people – we are all sinners; and two, Jesus was innocent – totally and completely – yet he suffered so that we might benefit.

Still, pictures of grieving fathers holding their dead sons demand some sort of response. Again, the believer would argue that God knows all about losing a beloved son – indeed, his only son. God is not immune from our suffering, nor is he distant from our cries.

Of course for those who are now in the midst of tremendous grief, theological replies may well offer little comfort. What these poor souls need now is all the help, compassion and assistance that we can give them. And already many dozens of Christian organisations are into full swing in this regard.

Indeed, many Christian groups have been working with the poor and marginalised in Haiti well before this earthquake struck. We may not be able to answer all the why questions right now, but we can show in practical terms the compassion of Christ in this dark hour.

And to say that we may not have all the answers now is not to suggest that there are no answers. There may well be good answers, but we may not be privy to them all just now. We do know that God is deeply concerned with everyone of us, and that he weeps when we weep.

Atheists and other ideological sceptics will find nothing convincing here. I don’t expect them to. But I certainly do not find them offering any solid answers here themselves. In the atheist worldview, crap just happens – end of story. The biblical version of events tells us that God has acted in human history and that this is not the end of the story.

One day very right will be rewarded, every wrong judged, and every tear wiped from our eyes. That may just seem like pie in the sky in the sweet bye and bye to our atheist buddies, but it seems to offer a far lot more than their picture does: crap now, and then nothing.

Jesus offers us very real comfort now in our troubles, and he also offers us a hope and a future. Both moral and physical evils will one day came to a complete end. That, it seems to me, is worth banking on, and not the hopeless and despairing creed of naked materialism.

But I have only scratched the surface here in what is one of the most complex, vexing and difficult issues around. Believers have their take on the issue, as do non-believers. Which one is in fact true, and which one offers the most concrete help to sufferers I leave for others to decide.

Rome (RNS/ENI) Pope Benedict XVI has called on Turkey to give legal recognition to the Roman Catholic Church in the Muslim-majority but politically secular nation, which has been criticized for its treatment of religious minorities as it seeks to join the European Union.

Receiving Kenan Gursoy, the new Turkish ambassador to the Vatican last week (Jan. 7), Benedict said Catholics appreciated the freedom of worship, “guaranteed by the constitution” in Turkey. However, he added that “civil juridical recognition” would help the church, “to enjoy full religious freedom and to make an even greater contribution to society.”

About 99 percent of Turkey’s 77-million people are Muslim. The Catholic Church there has about 32,000 members.

A November 2009 “progress report” by the European Commission on Turkey’s possible membership in the European Union said that “non-Muslim communities — as organized structures of religious groups — still face problems due to lack of legal” recognition.

Non-Muslim religious communities in Turkey have also reported “frequent discrimination and administrative uncertainty” regarding places of worship, according to the commission’s report.

Last April, Bishop Luigi Padovese, the president of Turkey’s Catholic bishops conference, said that local parishes faced “great difficulties” in the some parts of the country.

“Officially, the Catholic Church does not exist here since we are not recognized as a minority,” Padovese said. “We have insisted that legal recognition would not in any way endanger the secular character of the Turkish republic, but there are many things still to be done before Turkey can be said to ensure religious freedom and pluralism.”

In his address to Turkey’s new ambassador to the Vatican, Benedict said, “As a secular democratic state that straddles the boundary between Europe and Asia, Turkey is well placed to act as a bridge between Islam and the West, and to make a significant contribution to the effort to bring peace and stability to the Middle East.”

In 2006, during a visit by the pope to Turkey, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan reported that Benedict supported the idea of Turkey joining the EU. Before becoming pope, Benedict opposed EU membership for Turkey.

I know I’ve said this before, but the irony of comments like this (We recently had similar from Lord Carey) is that According to the IPPR’s “faith map” of the UK immigrant population, around 4.5 million of the UK’s foreign-born residents claim to have a religious affiliation. Of these, around a quarter are Muslims while more than half are Christian. So effectively immigration already favours Christianity!

Telegraph – All new immigrants should accept Britain’s traditional Christian values and be willing to adapt to them, according to a prominent clergyman.

A good friend of mine (Polycarp) who runs a superb blog, has just made the following comment on his blog, responding to Pat Robertson’s recent comment on the Haiti Earthquake and I think this is worth sharing:-

TheChurchofJesusChrist

‘Our sins’ are individual now, not national. For the earthquake to hit men, women, and children, and call it a wrath of God against sin would be to judge them.

The ‘pact with the devil’ is a colonial reason for slavery. For more on the ‘pact’ see here:

The satanic pact allegedly took place at Bois-Caïman near Cap-Haïtien on August 14, 1791 during a meeting organized by several slave leaders, under [Dutty] Boukman’s leadership, before launching what would become Haiti’s Independence War. This brutal period lasted 13 years until the last survivors of the French expeditionary forces, dispatched to Saint-Domingue with the sole purpose to re-establish slavery, were allowed by Dessalines to leave the island and return to Napoleon. Those who made it safely to France wrote and reported about the utmost bravery and supreme courage of Haiti’s indigenous army.

Obviously, the idea that Haiti was dedicated to Satan prior to its independence is a very serious and profound statement with potentially grave consequences for its people in terms of how they are perceived by others or how the whole nation is understood outside its borders. One would agree that such a strong affirmation should be based on solid historical and scriptural ground. But, although the satanic pact idea is by far the most popular explanation for Haiti’s birth as a free nation, especially among Christian missionaries and some Haitian Church leaders, it is nothing more than a fantasist opinion that ultimately dissipates upon close examination.

Pat said ‘It’s a true story.’ Really? Based on what? The defeated Catholic French trying to reclaim dignity and attempting to shun the Haitians by creating a myth? Further, considering that it is often attributed to voodoo, does that then make voodoo powerful? Hardly. Not only does Pat make stupid statements, but he lies now.

Further, considering the examples which Christ gave us in the New Testament, when the relationship between God and humanity changed, we know that sometimes, things just happen, as I quoted above. Further, according to John 9, sometimes, things happen to showcase the power of God. What was the power of God in John 9? It was compassion on the weak, healing, and the spreading of the Gospel.

Also, we know that a similar earthquake happened 240 years ago, and that the capitol city of Haiti sits on a fault line. Further, the island is mountainous. Given the fact that the earthquake happened 10 miles off the coast, no, the Dominican Republic would not feel it.

Isaiah and Jeremiah were talking to the People of God – Israel/The Church. Jonah was sent to the Gentiles, but he was sent.

To sum up, in the New Testament, we are told about a change in God’s relationship with Humanity, and given several rebukes to not seek some mysterious meaning of why bad things happen. We are told not to judge. Further, we know that this has happened before. We also know that the pact is urban myth, but Pat is lying. ‘It’s a true story.’

His ‘calls to repentance’ is repeating a racist tale and playing God. Hardly what I would think of as Christian.

3rd Part of a Cross-post by Mariano over at the Atheism is Dead blog, Part 1 can be found here and part 2 here.

In that which follows I will 1) agree with Richard Dawkins, 2) point out his “faith” based adherence to atheistic materialism and 3) answer his ultimate question.

In part 1; I explained that atheists who claim to base their atheism on science are actually admitting to purposefully employing a method, the scientific method, that was intelligently designed to only explore the material, which observes and experiments upon the material and does so in order to come to material conclusions and then claim that the material is all that there is.

In part 2, we saw how Massimo Pigliucci explained the difference between science and philosophy and elucidated that science is premised upon philosophy. That is to say that science, methodological materialism, and atheism (of which ever sect) is based on metaphysics: intangible, immaterial, unobserved, un-experimented upon, not proved nor evidenced but assumed—first principles, axioms, propositions, presuppositions, which are intuited.

Richard Dawkins has made various statements about how religion, theism, etc. are really irrelevant since 1) he is an atheist and such is what follows but more specific to our point 2) “science” (by which he means methods meant to prove his view of atheism) will ultimately answer all and every question or they will be left unanswered as “religious” answers are to be rejected—he is a big fan of answering question by appealing to the scientists-are-working-on-it of the gaps.

This means that, in this view, evidence of creation via Intelligent Design is not only lacking but is impossible since not matter what is being evidenced the answer will be that someday, oh someday, we will surely find a God-free materialistic explanation—this is “faith”; thy kinglessdom come.

My interest is in his statements, a mere couple which I reproduce here, to the affect of if science cannot explain it religion cannot either (or, as a convenient byproduct if religion does explain it, it is not science):

the deep questions — why do we exist, why does the universe exist, how big is the universe, how old is the universe, how old is the world…They are the questions that I suppose historically have been answered by religion — or have attempted to be answered by religion.[1]

I am tempted to parse the deep question considering that we must ascertain what sort of answers we seek. For example, one could answer “why do we exist” by claiming that nothing caused an eternal and uncaused piece of matter to explode for no reason and made everything. Or, that lightning struck a swamp and life came from non-life. Or, God created the heavens and the Earth and human beings in His image.

When asked “What about the old adage that science deals with the ‘how’ questions and religion deals with the ‘why’ questions?” Richard Dawkins responded:

I think that’s remarkably stupid, if I may say so. What on earth is a “why” question?…They mean “why” in a deliberate, purposeful sense…Those of us who don’t believe in religion — supernatural religion — would say there is no such thing as a “why” question in that sense. Now, the mere fact that you can frame an English sentence beginning with the word “why” does not mean that English sentence should receive an answer…[2]

If you have read the transcript of the 1948 AD debate between Bertrand Russell and F.C. Copleston you know that this is a paraphrase of Russell who seemed to think that if he claims that a question or statement is meaningless then can simply sidestep the issue—“the universe is just there and that’s all” was stated during this exchange.

Dawkins also stated:

There are core questions like, how did the universe begin? Where do the laws of physics come from? Where does life come from?…Those are all perfectly legitimate questions to which science can give answers, if not now, then we hope in the future. There may be some very, very deep questions, perhaps even where do the laws of physics come from, that science will never answer. That is perfectly possible. I am hopeful, along with some physicists, that science will one day answer that question. But even if it doesn’t — even if there are some supremely deep questions to which science can never answer — what on earth makes you think that religion can answer those questions?[3]

Also:

Consciousness is the biggest puzzle facing biology, neurobiology, computational studies and evolutionary biology. It is a very, very big problem. I don’t know the answer. Nobody knows the answer. I think one day they probably will know the answer. But even if science doesn’t know the answer, I return to the question, what on earth makes you think that religion will? Just because science so far has failed to explain something, such as consciousness, to say it follows that the facile, pathetic explanations which religion has produced somehow by default must win the argument is really quite ridiculous. Nobody has an explanation for consciousness. That should be a spur to work harder and try to understand it. Not to give up and just say, “Oh well, it must be a soul.” That doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t explain anything. You’ve said absolutely nothing when you’ve said that.[4]

Sadly, Richard Dawkins and others in his school of thought have concocted and promulgated this false dichotomy; that it is either an atheistic scientific explanation or else a claimed act of God.

Certainly, stating something like, “God created life” is only one category of explanation. For example, it does not explain “how” God did it but could explain “why.” The point of asking “how” versus “why” questions is an attempt to narrow down what sort of answers we seek.

Claiming that God did it, “why,” does not preclude seeking to explain “how” God did it. In fact, the people who established methods and fields of science believed that God was a rational being and created a rational creation which functions according to material cause followed by material effect and that this creation and its functions could be discerned, repeatedly experimented upon and that thus, we could learn about the material realm and its creator.

The bottom line of the point which I seek to make is Dawkins’ ultimate question/statement, “what on earth makes you think that religion can answer those questions?”

Well, science functions within certain parameters whilst philosophy (theology being a branch of philosophy) is not bound by those same parameters. This is why “religion” can answer questions that science cannot. It can also answer the questions in a different way. For example, “religion” can claim that “In the beginning [time] God [a preexisting being outside of the universe] created [volitionally carried out a plan] the heavens [space] and the earth [matter]” and via the scientific method we can then discern how universe expanded, is fine tuned, etc.

By understanding that there are different levels of answers to be offered and different disciplines which function under different rules we answer the question as to how and why “religion” answers certain question in certain ways that science cannot and how and why science answers certain question in certain ways that “religion” cannot.

[1] Edward Keenan, “Richard Dawkins – The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution,” Eye Weekly, September 29, 2009
[2] Steve Paulson, “The Flying Spaghetti Monster,” Salon, Oct 13, 2006
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.

This essay is copyrighted by Mariano of the “Atheism is Dead” blog at http://atheismisdead.blogspot.com.

It may be republished in part or in its entirety on websites, blogs, or any print media for whatever purpose—in agreement or in order to criticize it—only as long as the following conditions are met:

1) Give credit to “Mariano of the ‘Atheism is Dead’ blog at http://atheismisdead.blogspot.com”

2) Inform me as to which essay is being reproduced and where it is being reproduced via the comments section at this link