Science is constantly evolving and improving on itself.
I AGREE. The same as our understanding of God is constantly evolving and improving?
If that's really the case, then please let us list some of the new things we've learned about God in the past few hundred years:
And all we can come up with would be some vague and mystical deepities about how "God and heaven exist within each of us," and an insistence that "the primary path to building a personal relationship with God is Prayer, Meditation, Silence".
Ooops! this is essentially identical to the beliefs of the desert hermits of the first century. Some progress!
If all that scientists had accomplished since the Enlightenment was a continual stream of reiterated assertions that skepticism and peer review are necessary to gain knowledge, we'd be right to disregard them. Instead, science has proved its worth with a tangible record of accomplishment. In just a few hundred years of empirical investigation of the natural world, we've gone from wooden sailing ships to orbiting space stations; from carrier pigeons to fiber-optic cables; from water clocks to supercomputing clusters. We've learned to modify the human body through organ transplants, tissue engineering, genetic manipulation. We've unraveled the roots of heredity, peered down to the roots of matter, enumerated the principles that bind the universe together at all scales from the fall of an apple to the whirl of a galaxy, and made many more breakthroughs as well. Science wins because it works.
And where is religion after all this - what comparable progress have the theologians made in this time? The answer is that they're still standing exactly where they've always been, reciting the same empty proverbs they've been handing down for thousands of years. In fact, some of them are determinedly marching backwards, based on the assumption that only old beliefs can be true and human knowledge can only decay, not increase, over time - therefore, the best thing we can possibly do is look to our most distant and superstitious ancestors.
What advances have come about in two millennia and more of prayer and theology? More potent faith healing? More effective prayers, with a markedly improved response rate? More and better prophets like T.B Joshua who can do more and better miracles of telling us who will take the Champions League Cup? Forgiveness for sins that could not previously be forgiven? No, religion is in the same place it always was...
I AGREE. The same as our understanding of God is constantly evolving and improving?
If that's really the case, then please let us list some of the new things we've learned about God in the past few hundred years:
And all we can come up with would be some vague and mystical deepities about how "God and heaven exist within each of us," and an insistence that "the primary path to building a personal relationship with God is Prayer, Meditation, Silence".
Ooops! this is essentially identical to the beliefs of the desert hermits of the first century. Some progress!
If all that scientists had accomplished since the Enlightenment was a continual stream of reiterated assertions that skepticism and peer review are necessary to gain knowledge, we'd be right to disregard them. Instead, science has proved its worth with a tangible record of accomplishment. In just a few hundred years of empirical investigation of the natural world, we've gone from wooden sailing ships to orbiting space stations; from carrier pigeons to fiber-optic cables; from water clocks to supercomputing clusters. We've learned to modify the human body through organ transplants, tissue engineering, genetic manipulation. We've unraveled the roots of heredity, peered down to the roots of matter, enumerated the principles that bind the universe together at all scales from the fall of an apple to the whirl of a galaxy, and made many more breakthroughs as well. Science wins because it works.
And where is religion after all this - what comparable progress have the theologians made in this time? The answer is that they're still standing exactly where they've always been, reciting the same empty proverbs they've been handing down for thousands of years. In fact, some of them are determinedly marching backwards, based on the assumption that only old beliefs can be true and human knowledge can only decay, not increase, over time - therefore, the best thing we can possibly do is look to our most distant and superstitious ancestors.
What advances have come about in two millennia and more of prayer and theology? More potent faith healing? More effective prayers, with a markedly improved response rate? More and better prophets like T.B Joshua who can do more and better miracles of telling us who will take the Champions League Cup? Forgiveness for sins that could not previously be forgiven? No, religion is in the same place it always was...
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