The Holy Trinity

[mangerton]

This morning's "Sunday" on Radio 4 might be of interest. An item on the recent report on the possible detection of gravitational waves originating in the first femtosecond or so of the Big Bang begins 31'15" in. At 32' 46" a slight departure from the "Sunday" norm occurs.

Thanks, Bryn. I missed this morning's programme, but have just followed your link. Our Rector preached on this this morning. He's just been on the phone about an unrelated matter, and we had a brief discussion. We agreed that there's a lot for us to question God about, should we get up there, (I wonder if He's prepared an FAQ ) and that He's definitely got a GSOH.

Edit: I should of course have said that I have been following mag's and pab's discussion with great interest, especially pab's tour-de-force at 3.40 today. A fascinating debate, carried on with great politeness from both sides.

[Serial_Apologist]

Thanks, Bryn. I missed this morning's programme, but have just followed your link. Our Rector preached on this this morning. He's just been on the phone about an unrelated matter, and we had a brief discussion. We agreed that there's a lot for us to question God about, should we get up there, (I wonder if He's prepared an FAQ ) and that He's definitely got a GSOH.

Edit: I should of course have said that I have been following mag's and pab's discussion with great interest, especially pab's tour-de-force at 3.40 today. A fascinating debate, carried on with great politeness from both sides.

Yes all that erudition meant my third side barely got a look-in. But prozelytising isn't really our way - and as Magnificat implied at one stage, multiple viewpointing can't really figure in such a debate - so never mind.

[Magnificat]

Another Hawking quote, which elaborates on his thinking:

"If you believe in science, like I do, you believe that there are certain laws that are always obeyed. If you like, you can say the laws are the work of God, but that is more a definition of God than a proof of his existence."

Bryn

I'm not sure that I follow Stephen Hawking here.

If we understand, because we have highly developed brains as a result of evolution, that it is possible for an intelligence to create a universe governed by the laws of physics/Nature and we are aware that we inhabit such a universe isn't that indeed proof that a creator ( God ) exists?

No doubt Pabmusic will enlighten me if you can't!!

Professor Hawking #117 believes that the universe we inhabit is governed by the laws of science and these laws may have been decreed by God but that God does not intervene to break the laws. Exactly what I have said all throughout this discussion although, of course, I believe we can request Him to intervene through prayer as taught by Jesus Christ.

VCC

[Bryn]

That little word "may" in the Hawking quote is rather important. It plays a role similar to that to the "probably" in the well known bus advertisement. He pointedly rejects the concept of heaven, but is carefully equivocal in his statements re. the existence of otherwise of a 'God'. That does not make him necessarily an atheist, a theist or an agnostic. It looks more like a case of wary equivocation in public statements, no more, no less. It is that view that leads me to seriously doubt the credentials of the YouTube clip I posted.

[Pabmusic]

Bryn

I'm not sure that I follow Stephen Hawking here.

If we understand, because we have highly developed brains as a result of evolution, that it is possible for an intelligence to create a universe governed by the laws of physics/Nature and we are aware that we inhabit such a universe isn't that indeed proof that a creator ( God ) exists?

No doubt Pabmusic will enlighten me if you can't!!

Professor Hawking #117 believes that the universe we inhabit is governed by the laws of science and these laws may have been decreed by God but that God does not intervene to break the laws. Exactly what I have said all throughout this discussion although, of course, I believe we can request Him to intervene through prayer as taught by Jesus Christ.

VCC

I should hate the responsibility of ‘enlightening’ anyone. I’ll say this, though. If Steven Hawking ‘believes’ then he’s disingenuous about it. He makes it quite clear in A Brief History of Time that, if a god exists then he or she is irrelevant. Here’s something from an interview at the time in Der Spiegel (1989):

What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary.

Then there’s his most recent book, which drew this from the Telegraph:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/7979211/Has-Stephen-Hawking-ended-the-God-debate.html

Perhaps he believes only in a ‘deist’ sense – that is, a god created the universe, set up the rules and then retired, never to be heard of again – but I rather doubt it. I suspect he is just naturally poetic, rather like Einstein (who was avowedly a non-believer, but who came out with things like “Did God have a choice in how the universe is?” the result of which has been that religious fundamentalists try to claim him for their own even still.

What you seem to believe in is an interventionalist god – one who listens to prayers (and answers some), who performs miracles, who appears on Earth in human form and the like. Belief in suchlike is often called ‘theism’ rather than ‘deism’. That does not seem to me to be what Steven Hawking believes at all.

But – what does it matter what Steven Hawking believes? There are some genuinely theistic scientists, the Catholic Ken Miller for instance, who was the main expert prosecution witness in the Kitzmiller –vs- Dover trial in America in 2005 (the last creationist attempt to teach the Bible as science, masquerading under Intelligent Design, in American schools. It failed miserably, with outright accusations from the judge that creationists had lied.)

What anyone says or believes about anything can never have evidentiary value. Thomas Aquinas (whom you have cited) has plenty to say about how succubi collect semen from sleeping men and use it to create demons. It doesn’t make it true - or even more believable - because it comes from an ‘authority’.

However, authority figures can stimulate our thinking and lead us to new ideas. And someone who has been proved right (or almost right) many times is someone to listen to.

Here’s a short address (25 minutes or so) by Richard Dawkins to an audience of mainly science-literate people in Oxford in 2005. It seems to cover many of the things we have explored in this thread (and I truly wasn’t aware of this at the time!):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1APOxsp1VFw

[Pabmusic]

Yes all that erudition meant my third side barely got a look-in. But prozelytising isn't really our way - and as Magnificat implied at one stage, multiple viewpointing can't really figure in such a debate - so never mind.

SA, it is a fact that Buddhism travels along a route approximately parallel to 'science'. Not reincarnation, but many other aspects.

Indeed. Thank heavens (ahem) Pabs survived that typhoon. Evolution had something to do with that, no doubt.

No, not evolution - just luck. ("Pure chance" no less.)

[Pabmusic]

Yes: anyone who's been watching Ben Garrod's series The Secrets of Bones on BBC4 will have heard last week of the remarkable changes in the human jaw over the past three hundred years - resulting from our changing diet. Evolution can be a remarkably rapid process when spurred by the requisite environmental stimulae!

Quite right, though 300 years is truly fast, so it might yet prove to be misguided. But there've been things that have happened as quickly (lactose tolerance among northern Europeans, for instance). Our brains ballooned in only about 10,000 years, but the record for a truly major change must lie with the 8,000 years for a small water-loving, deer-like creature called Hyracotherium to evolve into a large family of the biggest creatures ever to have existed - whales (we have an extraordinarily complete fossil record). [Incidentally, did you know that the closest living relative of the whales is the hippopotamus?]

In general, evolution works very gradually. The reason is obvious, really - a leap into the dark is less likely to be dangerous if it's very small. Large leaps carry much more risk.

Our modern understanding of evolution dates from the 1930s, when Darwinian natural selection was merged with genetics (in something called the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis). Darwin had always been perturbed that he couldn't explain how traits were passed from one generation to the next (he did posit something a little like genes, but he had no evidence at all, even though Gregor Mendel was growing peas on Brno at exactly the same time). Later, when the study of genetics began in earnest (around 1900) Mendel's data was used as 'proof' that natural selection was wrong!

Darwin's rehabilitation began in the 1920s, when it became obvious that he'd correctly predicted that evidence of ancient human ancestors would be found in Africa, not in Asia as everyone thought. The combining of natural selection and genetics into the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis was down mainly to a trio from Cambridge - R A Fisher, J B S Haldane and Julian Huxley (brother of Aldous).

Fisher once explained the gradual nature of natural selection like this. Imagine a microscope that is almost, but not quite, in focus, but that you don't know which way to turn the dial in order to focus it. If you turn it in one direction a very small amount indeed, you will have a 50% chance of improving the image. But if you turn the dial by a large amount, you will achieve a worse focus in either direction, and run the risk of plunging the lens through the glass slide in the bargain. As Richard Dawkins has written, there are many more ways to be dead than to be alive.

The speed at which evolution operates is dependent on environmental pressures. Camouflage presumably develops quite quickly. However, if evolutionary pressure is low, little happens. Crocodiles haven't changed much in millions of years, presumably because they've been doing much the same things in much the same conditions.

[verismissimo]

Over several decades I must have listened to a dozen or so sermons on the meaning and nature of the Holy Ghost. What always strikes me when they turn up is that the preacher always uses metaphor to explain what is, in effect, a metaphor...

[Miles Coverdale]

If we understand, because we have highly developed brains as a result of evolution, that it is possible for an intelligence to create a universe governed by the laws of physics/Nature and we are aware that we inhabit such a universe isn't that indeed proof that a creator ( God ) exists?

I'm not sure that understand is the right verb here. I do not believe that it is possible that an intelligence to create a universe, and I'm not aware of any reputable scientist who believes it either.

Professor Hawking #117 believes that the universe we inhabit is governed by the laws of science and these laws may have been decreed by God but that God does not intervene to break the laws. Exactly what I have said all throughout this discussion although, of course, I believe we can request Him to intervene through prayer as taught by Jesus Christ.

The Bible says (John 14: 13–14) that 'And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it.'

Note that it doesn't say 'that might I do if I'm in a good mood', it says 'that will I do'. Except, of course, that this is not the case, so either that passage of the Bible is untrue, or, at best, it's only true sometimes. Yesterday we had a splendid example of the cognitive dissonance this belief in prayer can cause. Having first waded through the litany with its 'That it may please thee to preserve all that travel by land, air or water', we then prayed for all those missing on the Malaysian Airlines flight. Am I the only one who this strikes as bizarre?

I'm frankly surprised that no one yet has claimed the typhoon was as a result of The Gays. After all, Hurricane Katrina was. Wasn't it?

[Vox Humana]

That little word "may" in the Hawking quote is rather important. It plays a role similar to that to the "probably" in the well known bus advertisement. He pointedly rejects the concept of heaven, but is carefully equivocal in his statements re. the existence of otherwise of a 'God'. That does not make him necessarily an atheist, a theist or an agnostic. It looks more like a case of wary equivocation in public statements, no more, no less. It is that view that leads me to seriously doubt the credentials of the YouTube clip I posted.

Isn't it rather that Hawking is just being a clear-headed scientist? The way I have always understood it is that, because neither the existence nor non-existence of God can be scientifically proved, Hawking is avoiding making any assumption either way. (I am, of course, making an assumption here!)

[Alison]

Fair points Miles but why do you persist in riding on the back of Christianity by your participation in acts of worship?

Where's the intellectual rigour there ?

[ardcarp]

Oh dear, Alison, the C of E might be a bit empty if all the agnostics cleared out.

[Serial_Apologist]

SA, it is a fact that Buddhism travels along a route approximately parallel to 'science'. Not reincarnation, but many other aspects.

Yes indeed Pabs - and many ascribers to Zen do not take reincarnation literally, as I expect you knew.

No, not evolution - just luck. ("Pure chance" no less.)

[Miles Coverdale]

Fair points Miles but why do you persist in riding on the back of Christianity by your participation in acts of worship?

Where's the intellectual rigour there ?

Because I enjoy singing, I get to work and socialise with some very nice people and it pays some bills.

[Alison]

Because I enjoy singing, I get to work and socialise with some very nice people and it pays some bills.

Ok, having considered the matter I will let the matter rest and thank you for your honest answer