What are the non-negotiable claims of the Christian?
I'd say that these four demands as basic:
- A creator God exists.
- There is a purpose to it all.
- We humans are special.
- We have obligations . The question we must now ask is: Does science block or deny these claims? It is not whether they are true, but whether science shows them untrue.
What do you think?
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9 comments
Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.The first two are scientifically unprovable. There is no evidence to prove the third. The fourth only leads to further questions: What obligations do we have? Who says so? What are the grounds for those purported obligations?
wordywalt
Level 9
Aug 13, 2019
0
Gmak:
Nothing is scientifically provable. All we have is evidence and interpretations of that evidence. And Michael Tomasello spent his career carefully looking at the evidence for the third claim. But the evidence for the third claim is rather obvious, really. One only has to look at the current state of technology to realize that we’re the only species that is able to transfer culture, know-how, and knowledge from generation to generation. And we’ve done it with great hubris, haven’t we? It’s lead us all the way to the cliff of our self-made global warming.
I think there is a scientific perspective from which those claims are arguably true, but I don’t think they are the deepest, most authentic claims of Christianity. Rather they are the popular assumptions of Christians.
When understood in the deeper, esoteric (metaphoric) sense, Christian mythology is saying:
- The natural human is born in need of redemption.
- That redemption is available.
- Christ is the role model for, and teacher of the path to that redemption.
- That path includes a voluntary death, resulting in a rebirth.
These can all be interpreted as known and scientifically accepted phenomena of human psychology, when deciphered from symbolic language into descriptive prose.
There is only one reality, but many ways to express our experience of it. There is no conflict in what we are experiencing; only in how we express those experiences.
skado
Level 9
Aug 13, 2019
0
I think Christianity will still uphold these concepts for as long as Christians exist and anti-Christian sentiment is a puerile waste of energy when one could be concentrating in uplifting one’s own community without bothering what others are up to.
Geoffrey51
Level 8
Aug 13, 2019
2
Although we can not disprove the that there is a creator, we can disprove the circumstance that the world came to exist in the bible, bringing into question the validity of the whole book. With a few exceptions most Christians agree the creation story is metaphysical which kind of seems like a cop out to me.
We can in theory, scientifically test the last 3 because they are really all declaring the same thing. All we have to do is prove that humans can go extinct. If this is true, there can be no purpose or obligation without a mind capable of understanding that purpose or obligation, thus proving it was an abstract idea with no real consequence. This would also prove that we are not special, just another group of atoms that happens by chance to be capable of knowing what an atom is, but can be reorganized into other forms that can't.
Happy_Killbot
Level 7
Aug 13, 2019
0
Those four claims might apply to other religions besides Christianity. Just ordinary people who are not associated with a religion might make those claims.
The traditional Christian churches that I am familiar with demand BELIEF in some rather unbelievable things. They are unbelievable from my perspective but scientific methods can not be applied to such a subject.
If people want to belong to churches, that is their right. We should not judge them harshly IMO. You could think of religion as a collection of artistic expressions, meaningful only in an emotional context and not subject to intellectual scrutiny.
No, the four demands are not disproven by science, but I do think that science points toward creation as being a shallow and meaningless human concept. None of the demands have any meaning outside our little human reality dream, but they might still be useful. If you are in a chess game you have to go by the rules of chess.
WilliamFleming
Level 8
Aug 13, 2019
1
Actually, I think science has ample evidence to both support and refute the third claim. A whole college undergraduate course could be designed around that question. A couple of books come to mind, which I will post below:
Gmak
Level 7
Aug 13, 2019
0
Gmak:
Becoming Human by Tomasello:
Beyond Words by Safina:
There is no evidence for any of these things and science doesn’t have to prove a negative.
Killtheskyfairy
Level 9
Aug 13, 2019
1
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