Pope Francis Supports Science While Having Faith In God.

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Hi nerdygirl, I always felt that Creationism and Evolution were subjects best left alone. I think we can tend to get stuck in a way of thinking and miss the writers intention.

In general, I agree. I have come to my beliefs from mostly a philosophical direction, not a scientific one. But it seems that does not satisfy most people who want to dismiss Christianity on a scientific basis.

I personally know four professors of philosophy (two now retired, two currently teaching), all conservative Christians, all teaching (or taught) at secular schools. I have no idea what their views on origins is, and I don't really care.

Ultimately, how can humans fully understand the mind of God? We didn't watch the world form. If God exists, it's his prerogative to choose the method of bringing the world into existence, whichever it is. Our understanding is limited.

The question gets down to: Is there a God? Or not? If there IS a God, then we have to understand that as finite creatures we cannot know everything. But the question of the existence of God is not a scientific one, in my opinion.

There are many, many, many things in this world that cannot be observed using the senses. Yet, we believe they exist.

Can you name a few of those things?

Wind. We only see the effects of wind, and it's action upon things, but we do not see wind itself.

Love. Other emotions. We see the effects, not the thing itself.

Mathematics. We see math at work, but it itself is not tangible.

We see the effects of all sorts of things all the time and believe in their "source" even though we cannot tangibly sense the source by sight, sound, hearing, touch, smell.

Scientists seem quite certain that dark matter exists but who can prove it?

What exactly do you mean by perceiving something, as opposed to its effects?

It seems a rather arbitrary distinction to me, with no clear boundaries. I could argue you don't actually see an orange--- you just sense there is a particular pattern of light hitting your retinas you've learned to associate with an abstract concept you call an orange. Similarly, you can't taste it---you just can tell something is activating the chemical receptors in your tongue in the particular way you associate with the orange abstraction.

Conversely, air may not be visible in everyday circumstances, but this isn't always the case. For example, every time you see the blue background of the daily sky, you're seeing the thin air of the upper atmosphere illuminated by the sun, in the same sense you see any other visible object. If there were no air up there, the sky would be pitch black at day, just like at night.

You can also tell by sight there's a layer of hot air just above a car roof heated by the sun, for example, because the refraction effects are very visible, and you can even see how it moves as its buoyancy continuously pulls it upwards to mix with the cooler air above, creating intricate and rapidly changing patterns. You may think noticing mere refraction and reflection effects isn't really seeing the source, but where do you draw the line? With this criterion, water in small amounts is as invisible as air, but you don't have to stop there. For example, milk is made of tiny, transparent droplets of proteins and fat surrounded by an also transparent water solution. Neither absorbs any significant fraction of incoming light, so, after countless reflections and refractions, almost all the light comes out in haphazard directions---hence, white. Is milk invisible, too?

And this is only sight. It's a bit tricky to guess precisely what you mean by perceiving wind. Wind is air in motion. Air, by itself, can certainly activate our sense of touch when we feel how cold or how hot it is, and we can also sense its motion by touch.

The sense of hearing seems particularly liable to the universalization of your reasoning. Is there any tangible object you can hear, rather than hearing its effects? You hear the effects of wind exactly in the same sense you hear the effects of the sticks hitting a drum.

Love and other emotions are chemical reactions in our brains, and can be detected and measured with the proper instruments, which convey the information to us through our senses.

Math is an abstraction by definition, so of course we can't perceive it through our senses; however, what is ill-defined to me is what it means for math to exist, let alone for us to believe it does. If we're thinking of a mathematical problem, we know we are because it's part of our thoughts, so we don't need any information from the outside world to reach such conclusion.

I don't see a problem questioning things asking as the questioning makes a person no longer believe in God.

I hate parables. Every time I read the Bible I take it literally and my friend Julia says I'm wrong. She says that you are supposed to pray before you read the Bible that you will receive the correct wisdom. She said the parables were used because they mean different things to a person depending what is going on in that persons life at that time.

I don't see a problem questioning the Bible for clarifying what Jesus was trying to say.

So, you see, it's all very philosophical. How do you know that we have just not yet learned how to measure what we cannot see in regards to the existence of God? Just a short while ago, we could not measure light or sound waves, let alone other types of rays which opened up a whole new field of study. Today people are studying the smallest particles that we could not have even believed existed 50 years ago.

People say God does not exist because we cannot perceive him. Yet, there are many things we cannot perceive directly, but can only measure their effects. People who believe in God experience "miracles" and attribute them to God because there is no explainable cause. We believe that we are seeing the effects of God working in our lives, though we cannot see him directly. People who don't believe in God say those "miracles" must be due to some other explanation which they also cannot explain. But why must those things be not God?

We can feel an orange, taste it, see it. But philosophers could argue about it's real existence, sure.

So, why do we put so much emphasis on our senses for telling us what is REAL?

We put so much trust in mathematics and that the formulas we have discovered will actually work...yet it remains abstract. So why not God?