Response to Tom Gilson and Carson Weitnaur.

[rug]

March 27, 2014
By JT Eberhard

Hemant posted an excerpt from the authors of True Reason: Confronting the Irrationality of the New Atheism. That’s quite the title. Anyway, Tom Gilson and Carson Weitnaur had promised to respond to criticisms/critiques from readers of the Friendly Atheist.

I’d like to respond to their responses.

Another great question came from Dave Wildermuth, who asked, “how does one justify the claim that science and Christianity are compatible when so many Bible stories have been shown by science to be false or impossible?” We would say that God makes himself known through both Scripture and nature. (This is an age-old understanding of God’s self-revelation, by the way, and not an ad hoc addition thrown on Christianity since Lyell and Darwin.) My view of creation and the Flood are informed by both Bible and science, and at this stage of my understanding, I personally believe in an old earth and a regional flood. There is nothing there that is inconsistent with science. If you consider biblical miracles also to be “shown … to be false or impossible,” that’s the consequence of philosophical naturalism, a metaphysical position, not a finding of science.

Away we go with this one:

We would say that God makes himself known through both Scripture and nature.

I believe the whole point of the question is how you justify it when the scripture contradicts nature. God can’t make himself known through both when one contradicts the other. So when the book of Genesis paints a picture of the universe where the earth was made before the stars, you must choose either scripture or nature. Science, of course, sides with nature. Do you? And, if you do, why do you hold to those scriptures?

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/wwjtd/2014/03/response-to-tom-gilson-and-carson-weitnaur/

[MisterP]

1. Wiki has the list everyone's fighting over

list (though Copernicus was actually an unambitious canon first, a warlord second, and a fertile hypothetist third)

and as to Bruno--nobody's even mentioned Yates, so I presume they're all still operating on a romantic "heroic science" paradigm that no post-1940 historian has even come close to--and yet all the myths persist!

the goal of college, of course, is to make you dissatisfied with the scraps of one subject they teach you while teaching another subject: basic astronomy classes bring up Ptolemy and Copernicus, then move on; European history classes bring up multiple cosmological hypotheses, and then keep going

http://armariummagnus.blogspot.com/2009/05/agora-and-hypatia-hollywood-strikes.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_Flat_Earth
http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1987/PSCF9-87Lindberg.html
http://www.bede.org.uk/conflict.htm

[Jim__]

2. Your first link doesn't work for me.

It takes me to a page with this message:

List of Roman Catholic cleric

Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ...