Thursday, April 29, 2010

God's Latest Press Release




INNER DISK, ANDROMEDA GALAXY—Thanking the spiral-shaped celestial body for its 6.8 billion years of tireless service, Our Lord and Divine Creator announced Thursday His "very difficult decision" to close down the Andromeda galaxy for good. "Nobody ever wants to have to do something like this, but operating Andromeda on a daily basis has grown impractical and I can't in good conscience keep it going," God said of the incomprehensibly massive nebula, which is home to more than 1 trillion stars and an untold number of planetary objects. "So much has changed since I brought it into being, and to be honest, it's just not working out the way I'd hoped." A spokesman for the Supreme Being issued an apology to Andromeda's 750 quadrillion resident life-forms, who as of midnight Eastern Time on May 15 will cease to exist.

source: http://www.theonion.com/articles/god-shuts-down-andromeda-galaxy,17335/

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Critique of Dawkins, rebuttal

The theologian John F. Haught strongly criticizes the "new atheism"-movement of Dawkins et cetera. All his main points seem to look at the perception of faith that Haught claims the new atheism-movement to have; a clear-cut rejection of all faith and ignorance towards their own hypotheses based on faith.

I claim this to be false and a distortion of what the new atheism actually proposes. To be a thinker at all, one has to realize that thinking basically begins with faith or the concept of “I know that I don’t know anything.” The faith that new atheism rejects is not the faith in science, thought, or knowledge but rather only the faith in a God. 

I really do not understand what Haught (or most truly in-depth religious people that are not part of the extremist/fundamentalist agenda) means when he talks about self-surrender, being carried away, or another dimension of reality. I wish – particularly for the sake of argument – that I would understand his concept of the faith of new-age theologians. Maybe someone here (Blogger/Facebook) can explain? 

Due to my lack of understanding of this form of religious faith I am only left with pointing out that science does not claim that the multiverse is finite. Haught claims that atheism is a narrow corridor without the grand themes of infinity and divinity religion seems to "possess." Science actually has to conceive of the concept of infinity, as many math equations proof. To reduce the realm of atheistic views to a “squeezing” into a small frame of two dimensions is an incorrect, ignorant, and quite frankly a fairly arrogant proposal by Haught that lacks just as much tolerance and open-mindedness as he claims the new atheism to be lacking.




Above is a slightly edited part of a homework I just finished. It made me so riled up, I just had to share on my diary/Bloggidy-Diggidy (even if no one else understands what I am writing about OR what I am mad about). :)