Much of this discussion falls into the gray area of human knowledge, and I think many may fall onto either side by faith. The question as I see it from the OP is whether John Shelby Spong is falling so far outside of the Bible that he invalidates the work itself. As I had said, if you search the Bible for the meaning of Christ, then you are a Christian. If you search the Bible for your own meaning, or simply to discredit it as a source, you are not. Based on what Polycarp has said about Spong, having met the man and prayed with him, I’m inclined to see him as being a Christian.
Whether he is a heretic, or a visionary, is really met out by his work, and the result of his observations providing a concrete prediction for the future. Spong, like all Christians, will predict an outcome and then test it with their own passing. We’ll allknow whether he’s right or wrong eventually.
Oh, and Diogenes, we don’t have any verifyable evidence that the Big Bang occured either. Just observations that match the theory.
Diogenes, from your answer it seems clear to me your attitude is fatalistic. I once read a comment by one scientist who said that natural selection, in particular, is “nothing but…blind mortality which selects nothing at all.” (I’ll give you a citation for this later).
More and more I sense that discussing this issue with you is a pointless exercise; I would be hard put to trust you if you told me the sun was going to come up tomorrow morning.
(As an aside: your conclusion that heaven must be metaphysical if it is not physical–if that makes sense–is too restricted; I maintain it is within the limits of the spirit world. (John 4:24.)
And walking–or driving–onto the freeway blindfolded becomes a more attractive idea all the time… 
Have I said something that was dishonest? 
Does non-fundamentalist equal liar in your mind? You can say I’m wrong, you can say I’m off my rocker, you can say I’m a Hellbound heathen, but why would you say I can’t be trusted?
Are “spirits” made of atoms? If not, they can’t be physical. I’m starting to wonder what you think the word “metaphysical” means. It’s not an insult, it just means supernatural. It’s anything outside of the observed physical universe. If there is a “spirit world,” then that world, by definition, is metaphysical.
Diogenes: Don’t you know filthy scientific hellbound heathens are untrustworthy?
he he he
I was trying to show that the word is applied to so many things that it is semantically and academically worthless.
A lot of so called “New Age” stuff has not been “recycled” at all. Buddhism, for instance, is the same as it’s always been. Why don’t you tell me what you mean by New Age and we can have a more coherent discussion about it.
Why should I presume a “creator” without evidence? Can you cite anything in the universe which is contingent on a supernatural creator? If nothing in the universe requires a creator, then why postulate one?
Science does not require "faith.’ I don’t want to have faith in anything, anyway. I want to know.
Well the theory is based on the observations, not the other way around, and the empirical support for the big bang is pretty sound. You can argue, if you want, that the big bang has not been conclusively proven beyond all doubt, but the theory is at least a real theory. It can make predictions which can be observed. It acn be tested, it can be falsified. There is no supportable theory of a “creator,” because nothing in the observable universe suggests such a theory. Certainly nothing in the universe points to anything like the Genesis scenario, and in fact, much of Genesis has been completely dispelled by scientific observation.
So, your skepticism is worn thin when a theory is a real theory? Really? So if there were a real theory of a creator, and it had future predictions that could be falsified by observation you would be on the bandwagon?
I’m not sure if you know what the word “theory” means in science. It does not mean a hypothesis, it does not mean unproven. It is an explanation to a question which is based on and can be supported by available observable evidence. The atom is a theory. Gravity is a theory. Scientific theories must have a tremendous amount of support before they are accepted.
There is no theory of a creator in the scientific meaning of the word. A creator is, at best, a hypothesis, and a completely unsupported one. If it were possible to use this hypothesis to make any predictions, or if it were possible to falsify it any way (what coneivable test could “prove” that God does not exist?) then it would be a theory. It is not.
Saying this, however, is not the same as saying that God cannot exist. It only says that the existence of God has, so far, not been, and perhaps, cannot be, detected by science.
It may be incumbent on us to define “metaphysics” here – I think Dougie is suggesting that “the spirit world” is something distinct from “metaphysics” – a worldview that I don’t quite grasp but would like to understand better.
Of course I know what a theory is Diogenes. What I’m asking is, if there were one for the creator, would that do it for you?
In other words, would such a theory be enough to convince you of the existance of God? Or, would it take something like a photo, or whatever?
There’s a problem with subjecting God to the scientific method, though, Copa. How do you devise a hypothesis and then test it? What would make it falsifiable? If you’re working from a rebuttable presumption of His absence, what would be sufficient evidence of His existence, given that even the most improbable sequence of coincidences would be logically preferred over concluding His existence? If, on the other hand, your rebuttable presumption is His existence, what would be sufficient grounds to determine His absence?
Like you, I think it can be done – but I don’t think we have the intellectual “tools” to work with any degree of rigor in that realm of discourse at present. I’ve mentioned this several times in the past (before you joined the board, Copa), and asked what might be the right tools for the job – with no useful answers forthcoming.
Copa,
A scientific theory of a creator would have to presuppose some physical evidence which supported it. There would have to be something in the universe which would be explained by a creator but could not be explained by any other naturalistic theory. As Poly said, you would also have to devise a way to test for the validity of this theory, and the results of the test would have to support the theory of a creator and/or exclude naturalistic ones.
So, in essence, your hypothetical would have to presume that something in the universe could best be explained by an intelligent creator as opposed to anything naturalistic. You’re asking me, in effect, if there were evidence for a creator would I believe in a creator, or at least take the creator theory seriously? The answer is yes, of course I would take the theory seriously under those circumstances but at present, a creator scenario has yet to get off the ground even as a good hypothesis.
It’s not as hard as you think, Polycarp. We’re sitting here on this little rock in space, in a galaxy, in a universe, and yet we can determine through guidelines the beginning, middle, and end of the known universe. Physicists can postulate on the boundaries and shapes of things they can’t even verify are there and things that are so complex as the nature of time. If there is a God, and He is out there, then I think He must be provable to an extent. I’ve been reading Hawking’s works, and I’m finding him more and more interesting. He seems to be pushing the boundary of the physical and the metaphysical all the farther out to sea.
Copa, the physicists can determine a lot of things about our four-dimensional bubble of spacetime, including a rather precise estimate of its birth.
But the cause of that birth is forever out of reach, because if there’s a ‘cause’ per se, it lies outside of spacetime. And we don’t have any evidence that there is anything besides spacetime. We don’t even have a referent for a direction that will lead us to the border, the geometry of spacetime being what it is.
It all comes down to the question of what one regards as more fantastic to imagine:
a) that the Big Bang happened of its own, without any ‘where’ or ‘when’ for it to occur in;
b) that an intelligent Creator said, “Let there be a Big Bang,” and there was a Big Bang;
c) there’s some hyperphysical universe or milieu within which Big Bangs occur from time to time, for reasons that are explainable by the laws of that milieu (though this begs the question of where that milieu in turn originated); or
d) whatever other explanation one can come up with.
Which alternative one regards as most believable seems to depend a lot on one’s own belief systems.
[sub]Nice play on words in your username, btw. :)[/sub]
Well, one thing that has always intrigued me, but I don’t have the maths to do it appropriately, is to use the transform equations in relativity, determine what the characteristics of the various things they represent would be as V tends to infinity, and treat that as a quasi-physical description of God’s state of being. You will, RT, perhaps be familiar with the ones that I’m speaking of, describing tau time, mass, energy, etc., in terms of rest value and SQRT(v[sup]2[/sup]/c[sup]2[/sup]) – if not, a Doper with a physics background may take mercy on us and post them.
RTFirefly: Thanks, BTW about my username. I think the mistake most people make in their understanding is the idea that the area which ‘came before’ the Big Bang is the origination of a deity. Unless God was killed(And completely destroyed.) in the explosion, He’s still ‘out there’. You could presuppose that He has mass, intelligence, ect. and use those presuppositions for your hypothesis like any other scientific endeavor. As each set of suppositions are exhausted, you would at least be narrowing the definition of what God could be, where and how He might exist. I think, for example, that the presupposition that God must exist outside of spacetime, would not be too risky an endeavor, since His existance would have to pre-date(I know it’s inaccurate) the Big Bang. I think that an additional presupposition that God does not have mass, and does not exhibit a gravitational pull(In and of Himself), might also be warranted.
I find the example of the Big Bang rather amusing here. It was only a few years ago that it was discredited.
Well, sort of. Filippenko’s Nova charting group discovered that the rate of exapansion of the universe is increasing, not decreasing. The Big Bang was postulated to explain why all stellar groups appear to be receding from us (and hence from each other), why background radiation appears to be uniform in all directions, and why the universe wasn’t collapsing together at all from gravity. The Big Bang fits the bill–however we now know (and have known for several years) that something is pushing the universe apart more than gravity is pulling it together. That was never even guessed at.
Because of that, we don’t have a clue how the universe is going to end. All bets are off. IMHO the Big Bang is in doubt, and a steady-state theory seems more plausible (else the BB would have thrown the universe apart too fast for galaxies to form–if even gravity wasn’t holding things together).
So out of the beginning, middle, and end of the universe, we have a rough idea of the middle, and our past ideas of the beginning and end are up in the air.
emarkp: As I understand it, there are many areas of ‘psuedoscience’ that are used to explain complex occurances in a simpler manner for the puposes of practical work. The theory of gravity was also shown to be false, and Einstein’s general theory of relativity replaced it in ‘real’ science. Most astronomers still use the theory of gravity when plotting and charting, because it produces a reasonably accurate result and is easier to work with than general relativity. The Big Bang is still in the picture, but under relativity and quantum mechanics it has been fleshed out a bit more. As I understand it, relativity and quantum mechanics disagree on some points, and thereby one of the two is false, hence physicists trying to discover a Grand Ultimate Theory that would explain the entire universe. This would presumably include a quantum theory of gravity to replace general relativity. Oh, and Spong is still a Christian in my view. . .ahem.
Without totally hijacking the thread, the Newtonian gravity theory is correct to a certain approximation. We can measure it. GR handles the more complex issues (but it doesn’t square with QM, so it will have to be refined further).
The Big Bang is not a theory we can test (the best verifiable prediction was the near-uniform background radiation). My point is that Filippenko’s study shows serious problems with the primary assumptions about the Big Bang, and as I stated presents the problem that the initial inflation from the BB would never have slowed down, but rather have sped up. Hence matter would have separated too quickly to form the galaxies, etc. A simple refinement of theory is insufficient–it must be rethought from the beginning.
Anyway, to bring the discussion back on topic, GOM claimed that “science cannot explain everything about this amazing creation we live in.” Which is true if the creation we live in contains elements which are fundamentally not testable (as I believe it does). To believe that there is no aspect of the universe which cannot be tested by science requires just as much faith as believing in a creator.