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RE: Atheist Professor vs. Student - A (not so) Brilliant Conversation
Thanks for sharing your thoughts here.
I think a major problem with criticizing religion is that there is so much bad religion, and it can be easy to ignore the good.
I personally believe there is one true religion. It has millenia of philosophical AND scientific study and encourages both.
If you look more carefully at Dante's Inferno, the first circle of hell was not a painful one. (It is not church doctrine either) It was a place for the unbaptized but noble pagans...so Dante was giving a place of respect to those philosophers, not saying they were naughty people for not believing in God (how could they? They preceded Christ!).
Happy to continue the conversation. :)
And what religion would that be?
Good points about Dante's Inferno. I shouldn't have used the book to try and make the point that I was making.
I am Roman Catholic.
And yes, I am very aware of the Galileo affair, but I would like to also point out that while it is an embarrassing stain on the Church's long history of scientific support and leadership (going back to at least Albertus Magnus and continuing today with the Vatican observatory), there is more nuance in the story than is generally addressed in popular articles. Church figures were quite supportive of theories of heliocentricity before Galileo.
I'd also like to comment that I agree with many of your points above, the Einstein story is silly, it is cheap "red meat" that is probably forwarded by well meaning grandmothers to their friends and children. No theologian takes that argument seriously.
Most Americans have not been well educated-many don't understand basic economics, basic statistics, grammar, logic, etc. Is it any surprise that many can't argue their religion effectively? But their inability to debate effectively does not make it untrue (or true).
You mention "If the concept of divinity were to exist, it would not be within the confines of a single metaphysical plane".
I agree. The difficulty then is, are we able to measure such a being using the tools we have available? Can a cockroach assess and measure a man?
Since the answer is obviously no, we can come to one of two conclusions: one, be agnostic and accept it is impossible to know; two, to continue the search exhaustively.
That search begins for the non believer with philosophical truths that may not be able to be empirically proven, but can be understood nevertheless. Your mention of the ancient Greek philosophers leads me to believe you have a high view of philosophy.
It is with this starting point-not science-that you'll find more difficult to answer questions.
Faith and reason go hand in glove. With respect to my fundamentalist brothers and sisters, their approach to "Bible only" religion has resulted in the anti intellectualism too common in the US.