Monday, 28 February 2011

Vatican attempts accommodation, but is there an ulterior motive?

Via HumanistLife I became aware of this article over on BBC News:


I posted the following comment on the HumanistLife blog:
“If the Big Bang was the start of everything, what came before it?”

Silly question (or at least very poorly worded). If the Big Bang was the start of "everything" then obviously nothing came before it. If something came before it, it couldn't have been the start of "everything". If the purpose of the website is "greater understanding" and this is the best it can come up with, it's doomed.

"But there was a time when the Church was hostile to those who challenged orthodox teachings."

Aren't we still in that time?

"Where there are scientifically proven explanations for things, the Church says they should be accepted. Where there are not, then faith may have a role."

God of the gaps.

"The Church says it is about parallel realities, not competing ones."

NOMA nonsense.

I'm highly suspicious of any attempts to "reconcile" religious teaching with science, because religion is fundamentally at odds with what science tells us. The core tenets of religion — souls, afterlife, supernatural beings, supernatural occurrences, claims that the universe was created by a deity — are all counter to what science increasingly reveals to us as how things actually are. Such attempts may be superficially intended as an accommodation between incompatible disciplines, but at root they are simply aiming to slow the inevitable: the dwindling power of the church.

Doomed.
This is accommodationism, not by "faitheists" but by the religionists themselves, and therefore — call me cynical — not to be trusted.