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Edited on Thu Oct-13-05 03:53 PM by KCabotDullesMarxIII
central to its practice". But in Christ's description of the Last Judgment, he makes it clear that belief may be such that the believer is not even aware of his belief; in fact, observance of the Second Commandment, love of one's fellow man as an expression of the love (in spirit and in truth), however unconscious to the person concerned, of God (who, alone, inspires it), is pivotal to Judaeo-Christian belief qua religious faith - not conscious credence or adherence to a formal religious credo, desirable as this is, also, generally speaking, as a supplementary aid for the person in good faith.
I believe it is in St James' Epistle that we are reminded that the devils/fallen angels believe in God "and tremble". It is explicit in the accounts of Christ's exorcisms - the Gadarene swine story, for instance.
As sentient creatures, we live in a secular faith/knowledge continuum, a world in which there is a confusion of the concepts of secular faith(credence) and secular knowledge. I turn on a switch, and expect the sitting room light to come on. Though the bulb could have blown.
As human beings, we also inhabit a transcendental continuum of secular faith/knowledge-religious faith/knowledge. Even in physics, certainties are proper to the shallower, mechanistic, clockwork level. Although, apparently, even in physics, all knowledge that is not "a priori", is essentially statistical. And in the field of quantum physics, absurdities seem to proliferate the deeper it is penetrated. And why wouldn't it?
Einstein's discovery and proof that, uniquely in our universe, the speed of light is absolute, irrespective of the regular speed of the motion on the same path of the observer measuring it, indicates that light, unlike the rest of our universe of space-time, is a stand-alone reality, even as it penetrates our cosmos.
This, in turn indicates that, for example, all the raging arguments for and against Evolution, (in the latter case, to "prove" the sovereign status of secular science as the ultimate paradigm of all human knowledge), are a joke - since our wee universe is evidently a very subsidiary reality.
When even the wisest scientific thinkers identify what appears to them to be an absolute epistemological cul-de-sac, as far as the current development of their world view is concerned, they refrain from giving any further consideration to the matter, however perfunctory. It's normal.
But it does mean that lesser scientific thinkers will seek to defend the limited vision, which precludes considerations of the apparent implications of such a discovery as the sovereign stand-alone status of light, simply on the grounds, that they are very comfortable with the sovereign prestige they currently enjoy.
Although most of mankind keenly appreciates the benefits of science, it has learnt from bitter experience that it is never going to be the cure-all and substitute for religion as the respository of all truth that the worlds of business and politics, now so viciously entwined, would have them accept.
In the West, certainly, insofar as welfare states have been vitiated, science is prostituted to its pimp, big business, which allows its "faithful servants" to keep some of their earnings and share a little of their own status.
As regards light, many religions, from the earliest sun-worshippers to the mainstream religions of our day, have understood the pre-eminence of light in their faiths. Ironically, it was and is through the spiritual light of the Holy Spirit, which seems to be one of the poles of a "spiritual light/(quasi)material light" continuum, that its teachers were able to intuit it.
So, physical light/spiritual light acting in space/time informs our interacting secular faith/knowledge-spiritual faith/knowledge.
But in all considerations of knowledge and understanding, both spiritual and secular, the role played by the will of the human individual cannot be overstated (the functions of the human soul being memory, will and understanding). The deepest truths have to be taken on faith, if at all, whether it be secular or religious. And only in that way could God know the dispositions of our hearts. What does he care about a man's IQ! He knows that some of the biggest fools in creation are hot-shots at logic, but pitiful in their blindness to the fundamental truths, and hence the assumptions upon which they build their grand edifices.
In short religious devotees can no more prove the truth of their beliefs than secularists can disprove them; although Einstein's discovery of the stand-alone primacy of light over our universe of space-time and its contents, including the manifold interactions of light with and within in it, indicates that our secular knowledge doesn't amount to diddly squat, and it's high time the more benighted scientismificists piped down with their pet anti-religious manias, and gave some thought to the primacy of inductive reasoning over deductive reasoning - as the great innovative scientific thinkers acknowledged, and indeed were bound to. Certainly, Einstein and Newton.
The treatment of Galileo by the Roman Catholic Church of his day, was monstrous, as Pope John Paul II was pleased to publically acknowledge; yet ironically, in the final scheme of things, religious truths are sovereign (however frail the vessels to which they are, at least, in essence, entrusted), transcending secular knowledge/information, as the heavens above the earth.
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