Here’s a great post on the topic du jour

And All These Things: Genesis and Evolution
The Church upholds a series of absolutes that Catholics are required to believe about creation:

The Church's declarations say nothing of whether or not God used evolution as the tool to produce the Universe in its current physical order. Therefore in the absence of further declarations Catholics are free to use their own prudence to determine what is true regarding this controversial issue.
(tags: evolution cosmos)

This series describes how Evangelical Christianity in the USA has lost its way. The essay on Eschatology is particularly striking.

The Fire and the Rose: The Heresies of American Evangelicalism
The intention of this series was to examine the essential dogmatic loci as they are popularly articulated or implicitly understood in American evangelical churches. By no means have I exhausted every facet of the problem in each locus; instead I stuck to one major issue that seemed readily apparent. For example, I discussed the doctrine of the Trinity in Part II, but not the attributes of God or the doctrine of election, to name two other areas of importance. Much less have I have examined all of the loci worth addressing in such a series.

* Part I: Introduction
* Part II: The Doctrine of God — a less-than-fully triune God
* Part III: Christology — a docetic Christ
* Part IV: Soteriology — a pelagian soteriology
* Part V: Holy Scripture — a docetic-propositional Bible
* Part VI: Eschatology — a gnostic eschatology
* Part VII: Ecclesiology — nationalism, or depoliticized discipleship
(tags: church error)

Not really

He Lives: No schism here. Nothing to see. Please move along.
"Movement atheists" are in fact identified by dogma, at least by any other name. Among the credal claims:
* Science and religion are incompatible
* Science is the only way we know things
* Religion has a net negative impact on society
* Atheists should be outspoken
* Atheists are persecuted

Furthermore the movement atheists have requisite pejorative names for the apostate: Accomodationists. Appeasers. And Coyne's muddleheaded faitheists.

A set of core beliefs that distinguishes plain atheists from movement atheists. Name-calling—and even contests (such as Coyne held) to come up with a suitably derogatory term (faitheist) for atheists in the opposing camp. And a huge corpus of writings casting aspersions on those who challenge the creed.

Call it what you like–except schism. Because it's nothing like that.

Quack.
(tags: atheism)

Three cheers for the bus drivers | John Minto
It’s 2009 annual report proudly states “over the 15 years since its formation Infratil’s average return has been 18 percent per annum…”
Let’s put that in some perspective. This year Infratil is paying out just over $32 million to its shareholders while the increase offered to drivers would be less that an additional $4 million in payments after three years.
The company can afford to pay the drivers more – it’s just become too used to thinking about them as a distant second to its greedy shareholders, despite the fact it’s the drivers who do the work that creates the profits.
The shareholders have had it too good for too long – it’s time for a bit more to trickle down from Infratil’s top table. Instead the company showed its contempt for its employees by locking out the drivers last month in an attempt to starve them back to work.
(tags: justice)

Guest Post: Dan Brown’s History of Science | MandM
The Da Vinci Code launched the literary careers of a whole faculty previously-obscure professors of New Testament Studies. Admittedly, they had good reason for wanting to put the record straight about Brown’s distortions of early Christian history. This time, it’s historians of science who might be upset by Brown’s misrepresentation. Because his contention that the Catholic Church has spent the last two millennia holding back the advance of science is as wrongheaded as the story that Mrs Jesus retired to the south of France with her kids.

It’s true that the Church did make a single significant mistake in 1616, when it banned Copernicus’s opinion that the earth orbits the sun. But in the subsequent trial of Galileo, the Catholic Church was siding with the scientific consensus of the time. Still, you can’t manufacture an eternal conflict from a single example, so proponents of the hypothesis have had to resort to a different strategy – inventing the evidence.
(tags: error dawkins science)

UPDATE: There’s no denying that Catholic Church made errors in the past, but it’s tried to make amends. Many of its scholars hold to theistic evolution, so it certainly is not hostile to modern science, despite the claims of agenda-driven “New Atheists”.

UPDATE #2: Many arguments advanced at Catholic Encyclopedia “Science and the Church“; among them:

The conflicts between science and the Church are not real. They all rest on assertions like these: Faith is an obstacle to research; faith is contrary to the dignity of science; faith is discredited by history. Basing the answers on the principles explained above, we can dispel the phantoms in the following manner.

Read the rest of this entry »

Over at Open Parachute I’ve participated in some entertaining discussions, without wishing to preach or anything, out of pure interest in the faith/science interface. Religion and Science are both cultural artefacts, but there is an extreme form of atheism posing as ’scientific’ that wants to assess the ‘validity’ of all fields of human endeavour [ed: just religion actually] through a rationalist, empirical, materialist lens. This school of thought finds it difficult to admit that religion might actually be a worthwhile endeavour, making all sorts of moral judgements, thoughtless dismissals of history, and grandiose claims of superiority. This attitude is rightly critiqued in the following (lengthy) book review:

A Modest Plea for a Historically Responsible Atheism « The Dunedin School
We cannot ignore Christianity as a whole and the problematic of the Incarnation in particular, Žižek claims, because these things form an essential part of the intellectual world of modernity. Christianity achieves its unique position in history because it is an essential element of modernity itself, an essential piece of the dominant logic of a globalising capitalist modernity.

After the onslaught of ‘school-yard’ atheists, reactionaries like Hitchens and Harris as well as better-informed critics like Dawkins; in Žižek’s arguments, we find that ‘the supposition of naive atheists that the West can leave behind either Christology or ecclesiology is worthy to be greeting only with ironic laughter’ (181). One cannot blithely ignore the centuries of theological thinking that lies at the back of any assertion of atheism, … not if there is to be actual, productive debate – not just people shouting at each other or simply restating their own presuppositions over and over again.
(tags: atheism faith)