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The vital influence of Christian Weltanschaaung in the birth of Western science!

Thread ID: 14949 | Posts: 9 | Started: 2004-09-10

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Petr [OP]

2004-09-10 11:44 | User Profile

Attention, this is intriguing!

I hereby present you a long excerpt from Rodney Stark’s “For the Glory of God” (2003, Princeton University Press), pages 147-158:

[url]http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0691114366/qid=1094816853/sr=1-8/ref=sr_1_8/103-5398434-4959034?v=glance&s=books[/url]

You will find out that Christian idea of omnipotent and benevolent Creator-God was an absolutely necessary ingredient in the origin of science as we know it.

You will also learn that the "Greek learning" of antiquity actually HINDERED the birth of modern science.

Christians, learn to appreciate your cultural heritage!

Petr

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[SIZE=4]THE CHRISTIAN DIFFERENCE [/SIZE]

My answer to this question is as brief as it is unoriginal: Christianity depicted God as rational, responsive, dependable, and omnipotent being and the universe as his personal creation, thus having a rational, lawful, stable structure, awaiting human comprehension.

As Nicole Oresme put it, God’s creation “is much like that of man making a clock and letting it run and continue it sown motion by itself.”(78) Or, in the words of Psalm 119:89-90: “For ever, O Lord, thy word is settled in heaven. Thy faithfulness is unto all generations: thou hast established the earth, and it abideth.” Among the scriptural passages most frequently quoted by medieval scholars is the line from the Wisdom of Solomon (11:20) “(T)hou hast ordered all things in measure and number and weight.”

In contrast with the dominant religious and philosophical doctrines in the non-Christian world, Christians developed science because they believed that it could be done, and should be done. As Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) put it during one of his Lowell Lectures at Harvard in 1925, science arose in Europe because of the widespread “faith in the possibility of science … derivative from medieval theology.”(79) Whitehead’s pronouncement shocked not only his distinguished audience but Western intellectuals in general once his lectures had been published: How could this great philosopher and mathematician, coauthor with Bertrand Russell of the landmark Principia Mathematica (1910-1913) make such an outlandish claim? Did he not know that religion is the mortal enemy of scientific enquiry?

Whitehead knew better. He had grasped that Christian theology was essential for the rise of science in the West, just as surely as non-Christian theologies had stifled the scientific quest everywhere else. As he explained:

[COLOR=Sienna]I don’t think, however, that I have even yet brought out the greatest contribution of medievalism in to the formation of the scientific movement. I mean the inexpugnable belief that that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles. Without this belief the incredible labours of scientists would be without hope. It is this instinctive conviction, vividly poised before the imagination, which is the motive power for research: - that there is a secret, a secret which can be unveiled. How has this conviction been so vividly implanted in the European mind?

When we compare this tone of thought in Europe with the attitude of other civilizations when left for themselves, there seems but one source of its origin. It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher. Every detail was supervised and ordered: the search into nature could only result in the vindication of the faith in the rationality. Remember that I am not talking about of the explicit faith of a few individuals. What I mean is the impress on the European mind arising from the unquestioned faith of centuries. By this I mean the instinctive tone of thought and not a mere creed of words./COLOR

Whitehead ended with the remark that the images of Gods found in other religions, especially in Asia, are too impersonal or too irrational to have sustained science. Any particular “occurrence might be due to the fiat of an irrational despot” God, or might be produced by “some impersonal, inscrutable origin of things. There is not the dame confidence as in the intelligible rationality of a personal being.”(81)

Indeed, most non-Christian religions do not posit a creation at all: the universe is eternal and, while it may pursue cycles, it is without beginning or purpose, and, most important of all, having never been created, it has no Creator. Consequently, the universe is thought to be a supreme mystery, inconsistent, unpredictable, and arbitrary. For those holding these religious premises, the path to wisdom is through meditation and mystical insights, and there is no occasion to celebrate reason.

In contrast, many central aspects of Christian theology were produced by reasoning. Thus did Tertullian (ca. 160-225), one of the earliest Christian theologians, instruct that “reason is a thing of God, inasmuch as there is nothing which God the Maker of all has not provided, disposed, ordained by reason – nothing which He has not willed should be handled and understood by reason.”(82) Several centuries later Saint Augustine (354-430) held that reason indispensable to faith: “Heaven forbid that God should hate in us that by which we he made us superior to the animals! Heaven forbid that we should believe in such a way as not to accept or seek reasons, since we could not even believe if we did not possess rational souls.” Of course, some Christian theologians accepted that God’s word must be believed even if the reasons were not apparent. Again Augustine: “(I)n certain matters pertaining to the doctrine of salvation that we cannot grasp by reason – though one day we shall be able to do so – faith must precede reason and purify the heart and make it fit to receive and endure the great light of reason.” Then he added that although it is necessary “for faith to precede reason in certain matters of great moment that cannot yet be grasped, surely the very small portion of reason that persuades us of this must precede faith.”(83)

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of these passages from Augustine is the optimism that one day the reason will triumph. In addition to regarding it as the duty of theologians to seek to understand God’s will, the weight of opinion in the early and medieval Church was that there was also a duty to understand, the better to marvel at, God’s handiwork. As Saint Bonaventure (1221 - 1274) explained, it is the purpose of science that “God may be honored.”(84)

Saint Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225 –1274) attempted to fulfill Augustine’s optimism that some of these “matters of great importance” could be grasped by reason in his monumental Summa Theologiae, which remains the definitive explanation of many points of Catholic doctrine. Aquinas argued that because humans lack sufficient intellect to see directly into the essence of things, it is necessary for them to reason their way to knowledge, step-by-step. Thus although Aquinas regarded theology as the highest of sciences since it deals directly with divine revelations, he advocated the use of the tools of philosophy, especially the principles of logic, in the endeavor to construct theology.(85)

The critical point in all of this is methodological. Centuries of meditation will produce no empirical knowledge, let alone science. But to the extent that religion inspires efforts to comprehend God’s handiwork, knowledge will be forthcoming, and science arises as “the handmaiden” of theology. And that’s precisely how not only the Scholastic scientists but also those who took part in the great achievements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw themselves – as in the pursuit of the secrets of the Creation. Charles Webster has summed up the consensus among the recent historians of science:

[COLOR=Sienna]Any truly historical account … must pay due attention to the deep penetration of scientific and religious ideas. It would seem perverse to deny the religious motivation in the numerous cases where this was made explicit by the scientists themselves, often with painful emphasis. No direction of energy toward science was undertaken without the assurance of Christian conscience.([/COLOR]86)

[SIZE=4]NEGATIVE CASES[/SIZE]

Before ending this discussion, however, I must demonstrate the negative – that the critical religious ideas were lacking in societies that seem otherwise to have had the potential to develop science but did not. Keep in mind that I am arguing only that a particular conception of a Creator was necessary for the rise of science, not that is was a sufficient cause. Were a Stone Age culture fully converted to Christianity, one would still not anticipate that they would evolve science anytime soon. Many other cultural and social developments were necessary for the rise of science. Hence negative cases are those in which, if religion is ignored, one might have expected them to become scientific. In my estimation there are three such cases: China, Greece and Islam.

[SIZE=3]CHINA[/SIZE]

Only three years before his coauthor Alfred North Whitehead proposed that Christianity had provided the psychological basis for the pursuit of science, Bertrand Russell found the lack of Chinese science rather baffling. From the perspective of his militant atheism, China should have has science long before Europe. As he explained, “Although Chinese civilization has hitherto been deficient in science, it has never contained anything hostile to science, and therefore the spread of scientific knowledge encounters no such obstacles the Church put in its way in Europe.”(87)

But despite Russell’s confidence that since it was not afflicted by the Church, China would soon far surpass Western science,(88) he failed to see that it was precisely religious obstacles that had prevented Chinese science. Although through the centuries the common people of China had worshiped an elaborate array of Gods, each of small scope and often rather lacking in character, the intellectuals have prided themselves on following “Godless” religions, wherein the supernatural is conceived as of an essence or principle governing life, but which is impersonal, remote, and definitely not a being. The Tao is an example of an essence; yin and yang represent a principle. Just as small Gods do not create a universe, neither do impersonal essences principles – indeed, they seem unable to do anything. Thus as conceived by Chinese philosophers, the universe simply is and always was. There is no reason to suppose that it functions according to rational laws, or that it could be comprehended in a physical rather than mystical terms. Consequently, through the millennia Chinese intellectuals pursued “enlightenment”, not explanations. This is precisely the conclusion reached by the Marxist historian Joseph Needham, who devoted most of his career and many volumes to the history of Chinese technology. Having exhausted attempts to discover a materialist explanation, Needham concluded that the failure of Chinese to develop science was due to their religion, to the inability of Chinese intellectuals to believe in the existence of laws of nature, because “the conception of a divine celestial lawgiver imposing ordinances on non-human nature never developed.” Needham continued: “It was not that there was no order in Nature for the Chinese, but rather that it was not an order ordained by a rational personal being, and hence there was no conviction that rational personal beings could would be able to spell out in their lesser earthly languages the divine code of laws which he had decreed aforetime. The Taoists, indeed, would have scorned such an idea as being too naïve for the subtlety and complexity of the universe as they intuited it.”(89) Exactly.

Several years ago my friend Graeme Lang dismissed the notion that the influence of Confucianism and Taoism on Chinese intellectuals was the reason that science failed to develop in China; his grounds were that all culture is flexible, and that “if scholars of China had wanted to do science, philosophy alone would not have been a serious impediment.”(90) Perhaps. But Lang misses the more basic question: why didn’t Chinese scholars want to do science? And, with Whitehead and Needham (and many others), I agree that it didn’t occur to the Chinese that science was possible. Fundamental theological and philosophical assumptions determine whether anyone will attempt to do science.

[SIZE=3]GREECE[/SIZE]

For centuries Greece seemed on the verge of achieving science. They were interested in explaining the natural world with suitably abstract, general principles. Some of them were careful, systematic observers of nature – although Socrates considered empiricism such as astronomical observations a “waste of time”, and Plato agreed, advising his students to approach astronomy through philosophy and to “leave the starry heavens alone.”(91) And, like the Scholastics, the Greeks formed coordinated scholarly networks – the famous “schools.” But in the end all they achieved was nonempirical, even antiempirical, speculative philosophies, atheoretical collections of facts, and isolated crafts and technologies – they never broke through to real science.

Three factors prevented Greeks from achieving science. First, their conceptions of Gods were inadequate to permit them imagine a conscious Creator. Second, they conceived of the universe not only as eternal and uncreated, but as locked into endless cycles of progress and decay. Third, they prompted by their religious conceptions, they transformed inanimate objects into living creatures capable of aims, emotions, and desires – thus short-circuiting the search for physical theories.(92)

To begin with their conception of the Gods – none of the numerous divinities of in the Greek pantheon was a suitable creator of a lawful universe, not even Zeus. As were humans, the Gods were subject to the inexorable workings of the natural cycles of all things. Some Greek scholars, including Aristotle, (384-322 B.C.E.), did posit a “God” of infinite scope having charge of the universe, but they conceived of this “God” as essentially an essence much like the Tao. Such a “God” lent a certain spiritual aura to a cyclical universe and its ideal, abstract properties, but being an essence, “God” did nothing and never had. Plato (ca. 427 –347 B.C.E.) posited a sort of Godly being called the Demiurge who was the personification of reason. The Demiurge attempted to construct a cosmos would fully achieve the ideals of the good, the true, and the beautiful, but insofar as this “being” had to work with already existing material having properties (especially defects) over which the Demiurge had no control, the results fell far short of the intended ideal.

Many scholars doubt that Plato really meant for the existence of the Demiurge to be taken literally.(93) But whether meant as the depiction of a real creator God or as a metaphor, Plato’s Demiurge pales in contrast with a God who is not only the master of but the Creator of all materials, having made the universe out of nothing. Moreover, Plato proposed that the universe had been created, not in accord with firm operating principles, but in accord with ideals. These consisted primarily of ideal shapes. Thus the universe must be a sphere because that is the symmetrical and perfect shape, and heavenly bodies must rotate in a circle because that is the motion that is most perfect.(94) Composed of a priori assumptions, Platonic idealism was a severe impediment to discovery. For example, the unshakable belief in the ideal shaped prevented Copernicus from entertaining the thought that planetary orbits might not be circular.

In many ways it is strange that the Greeks sought knowledge and technology at all, having rejected the idea of progress in favor of a never-ending cycle of being. Plato at least proposed that the universe had been created, but most Greek scholars assumed that the universe was uncreated and eternal. Aristotle condemned the idea “that the universe came into being at some point of time … as unthinkable.”(95) Although the Greeks saw the universe as eternal and unchanging, they did concede the obvious fact that history and culture were ever-changing, but only within the strict confines of endless repetition. In On the Heavens, Aristotle noted that “the same ideas recur to men not once or twice but over and over again,” and in his Politics he pointed out that everything has “been invented several times over in the course of ages, or rather times without number”; since he was living in a Golden Age, current levels of technology were at the maximum attainable level. As for inventions, so, too, for individuals – the same persons would be born again and again as the blind cycles of the universe rolled along. According to Chrysippus, (280-207 B.C.E.) in his now lost On the Cosmos, the Stoics taught that the “difference between former and actual existences of the same people will be only extrinsic and accidental; such differences do not produce another man as contrasted with his counterpart from a previous world-age.”(96) As for the universe itself, according to Parmenides, (born 515 B.C.E.) all perceptions of change are illusions, for the universe is in a static state of perfection, “uncreated and undestructible; for it is complete, immovable, and without end.”(97) Other influential Greeks, such as the Ionians, taught that although the universe is infinite and eternal, it is also subject to endless cycles of succession. Plato saw things a bit differently, but he, too, firmly believed in cycles: that eternal laws caused the Golden Age to be followed by chaos and collapse.

Finally, the Greeks insisted on turning the cosmos, and inanimate objects more generally, into living beings. Entirely in keeping with the animism that anthropologists of religion associate with “primitive” cultures, Plato taught that the Demiurge had created the cosmos as a living thing – writing in Timaeus that the world is “a single visible living creature.” Hence the world has a soul, and although “solitary,” it is “able by reason of its excellence to bear itself company, needing no other acquaintance or friend but sufficient to itself.” Indeed, as David C. Lindberg pointed out, “Plato assigned divinity to the world soul and considered the planets and fixed stars to be a host of celestial gods.”(98)

But if mineral objects are animate, one heads in a wrong direction in attempting to explain the natural phenomena – the causes of the motion of objects, for example, will be ascribed to motives, not to natural forces. The Stoics, particularly Zeno (490-430 B.C.E.), may have originated the idea of explaining the operations of cosmos on the basis of its conscious purposes, but this soon became the universal view. Thus, according to Aristotle, celestial bodies move in circles because of their affection to for this action. Stanley L. Jaki pointed out that it was only by rejecting Greek, and particularly Aristotelian, physics that Scholastic science could progress, by “achieving a depersonalised outlook on nature in which stones were not claimed to fall because of their innate love for the centre of the world.”(99)

It is very significant that Greek learning stagnated of its own inner logic. After Plato and Aristotle, very little happened beyond some extensions in geometry. When Rome incorporated the Greek world, it fully embraced and celebrated Greek learning – Greek scholars flourished under the Republic as well as during the reign of the Caesars. But possession of Greek learning did not prompt intellectual progress by Romans.(100) The decline of Rome did not interrupt the expansion of human knowledge any more than the “recovery” of Greek learning enabled this progress to resume. To the contrary, as it will be seen, Greek learning was a barrier to the rise of science! It did not lead to science among the Greeks or the Romans, and it stifled the intellectual progress in Islam.

[SIZE=3]ISLAM[/SIZE]

It would seem that Islam has the appropriate God to underwrite the rise of science. But that’s not so.(101) Allah is not presented as a lawful creator but has been conceived as an extremely active God who intrudes on the world a she deems appropriate. Consequently, there soon arose a major theological bloc within Islam that condemned all efforts to formulate natural laws as blasphemy insofar as they denied Allah’s freedom to act. That is, Islam did not fully embrace the notion of that the universe ran along on fundamental principles laid down by God at the Creation, but assumed that the world was sustained by his will on a continuing basis. This was justified by statement in the Qur’an: “Verily, God will cause to err whom he pleaseth, and will direct whom he pleaseth.” Although the line refers to God’s determination of the fate of the individuals, it has been interpreted broadly to apply on all things.

If God does whatever he pleases, and what he pleases is variable, then the universe may not be lawful. Contrast this with the Christian conception of God as stated who the early French scientific genius Rene Descartes (1596-1650), who justified his search for natural “laws” on grounds that such laws must exist because God is perfect and therefore “acts in a manner as constant and immutable as possible,” except for the rare occurrence of miracles.(102)

Whenever the subject of Islamic science and learning is raised, most historians emphasize that throughout the centuries when Christian Europe knew virtually nothing of Greek learning, that learning was alive and deeply appreciated in Islam. That is certainly true. It is even true that some classical manuscripts reached Christian Europe through Islam, especially as Christian and Muslim intellectuals had contact in Spain. But it is also true that possession of all this “enlightenment” did not prompt much intellectual progress within Islam, let alone eventuate in Islamic science. Instead, as the devout Muslim historian Caesar E. Farah explained:

[COLOR=Sienna]The early Muslim thinkers took up philosophy where the Greeks left off … Thus in Aristotle Muslim thinkers found a great guide; to them he became the “first teacher.”

Having accepted this a priori, Muslim philosophy as it evolved in subsequent centuries merely chose to continue in this vein and to enlarge Aristotle rather than to innovate. It chose the course of eclecticism, seeking to assimilate rather than generate, with a conscious striving to adapt the results of Greek thinking to Muslim philosophical conceptions, but with much greater comprehensiveness than was achieved by early Christian dogmatics.([/COLOR]103) (Emphasis in the original)

The result was to freeze Islamic learning and stifle all possibility of rise of an Islamic science, and for the same reason that Greek learning stagnated of itself: fundamental assumptions antithetical to science. It is very significant that the Rasa’il, the great encyclopedia of knowledge produced by early Muslim scholars, fully embraced the Greek conception of the world as a huge, conscious living organism having both intellect and soul.(104) Indeed, according to Jaki, the “Muslim notion of the Creator was not rational to inspire an effective distaste for various types of pantheistic, cyclic, animistic, and magical world pictures which freely made their way into the Rasa’il.”(105) Nor were the outlooks of more conductive to science achieved by Ibn Rushd, known to the West as Averroes (1126-1198), and his followers, despite their efforts to exclude all Muslim theology from their work, in direct conflict with those who sustained the Rasa’il. Instead, Averroes and his followers became intransigent and doctrinaire Aristotelians – proclaiming that his physics was complete and infallible, and if an observation were inconsistent with one of Aristotle’s views, the observation was certainly incorrect or an illusion.

As a result of all this, Islamic scholars achieved significant progress only in terms of specific knowledge, such as certain aspects of astronomy and medicine, that did not necessitate any general theoretical basis. And, as time passed, even this sort of progress ceased.

[FONT=Times New Roman][COLOR=Red]Clearly, then, and contrary to the received wisdom, the “recovery” of Greek learning did not put Europe back on the track to science. Judging from the impact of this learning on the Greeks, Romans, and the Muslims, it would seem to have been vital that Greek learning was not generally available until after Christian scholars had established an independent intellectual base of their own. Consequently, when they first encountered the works of Aristotle, Plato, and the rest, medieval scholars were willing and able to dispute them! As I have tried to make clear, it was in explicit opposition to Aristotle and other classical writers that the Scholastics such as Albertus, Ockham, Buridan, and Oresme advanced towards science. To the extent that he clung to Greek concepts, Copernicus far fell short of founding scientific astronomy. Because medieval scholars outside the sciences (especially those in arts and in the speculative philosophy) had become such ardent admirers of the Greco-Roman “classics,” many of the great scientists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries often paid lip service to their “debts” to Aristotle and others, but their actual work negated almost everything the Greeks had said about how the world works.[/COLOR][/FONT]

I surely do not mean to minimize the impact of Greek learning on European intellectual life. It had enormous influence, not only in Scholastic thought, but on many subsequent generations. However, the most antiscientific elements of Greek thought were withstood or, at worst, sequestered in the humanities, while the sciences marched on. For example, the Greek notion that the universe was eternal proved very attractive to many Scholastics. But from the start it was heatedly opposed – Saint Bonaventure ridiculed the notion on logical grounds, and it was included among the condemned propositions in the famous edict issued by the bishop of Paris in 1227.(106) Moreover, not even the most ardent Scholastic supporters of the eternal universe claimed that is was uncreated. No Scholastic Platonists ever proposed a God as limited as the Demiurge. Nor did the idea that the earth and planets were conscious beings gain much credence, let alone such notions as that they went in circles from the joy of doing so. Moreover, even long before Greco-Roman learning was confined to classics department, it was not the philosophy of scientists. While it is true (and constantly cited by classicists) that Newton remarked in a letter to Robert Hooke in 1675, “If I have seen further (than you and Descartes), it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” such high regard for “the ancients” was not expressed or reflected in his work or in his usual presentations of self. Indeed, just as Newton and his peers achieved their breakthroughs in obvious opposition to the Greek “giants”, their contemporaries in theology mounted their own assault on Greek learning.(107) For example, Guillaume Bude (1467-1540), the founder of the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris, condemned Plato and Aristotle for so often writing about things they knew nothing about.(108) Luther took a similar view: “(M)y advice would be that Aristotle’s Physics … should be altogether discarded, together with all the rest of his books which boast of treating the things of nature … (for) nothing can be learned from them … I venture to say that any potter has more knowledge of nature than is written in these books.”(109) Others, including Pierre de la Ramee (1515-1572), launched an organized repudiation of the famous Greeks as “fallible individuals, prone to human error, apparently guilty of plagiarisms on many counts,” until the “old giants began to look more like modern dwarfs.”(110) What the great figures involved in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century blossoming of the science - including Descartes, Galileo, Newton, and Kepler – did confess was their absolute faith in Creator God, whose work incorporated rational rules awaiting discovery.

To sum up: the rise of science was not an extension of classical learning. It was the natural outgrowth of Christian doctrine: Nature exists because it was created by God. To love and honor God, one must fully appreciate the wonders of his handiwork. Moreover, because God is perfect, his handiwork functions in accord with immutable principles. By the full use of our God-given powers of reason and observation, we ought to be able to discover these principles.

These were the crucial ideas, and that’s why the rise of science occurred in Christian Europe, and nowhere else.

…

(footnotes to this excerpt)

1. In Crosby, 1997:83.
2. Whitehead, (1925) 1967:13
3. Ibid:12
4. Ibid:13
5. On Repentance 1.
6. In Lindberg and Numbers, 1986:27-28
7. De reductione atrium ac theologiam.
8. Grant, 1996; Meyer, 1944.
9. Webster, 1986:213.
10. Russell, 1922:193.
11. The quotation from Russell continues: “I have no doubt that if the Chinese get a stable government and sufficient funds, they would, within the next thirty years, begin to produce a remarkable work of science. It is quite likely that they might outstrip us…”
12. Needham, 1954-1984, 1:581
13. Lang, 1997:18.
14. In Mason, 1962:36-37.
15. Grant, 1994, 1996; Jaki, 1986; Lindberg, 1992, Mason, 1962, as well as the cited original sources.
16. Lindberg, 1992.
17. Mason, 1962.
18. Lindberg, 1992:54.
19. In Jaki, 1986:114.
20. Full text in Danielson, 2000:14-15.
21. Lindberg, 1992:42.
22. Jaki, 1986:105.
23. Lindberg, 1992, Mason, 1962.
24. Farah, 1994; Hodgson, 1974; Jaki, 1986; Nasr, 1993; Waines, 1995.
25. Oeuvres, 8;61.
26. Farah, 1994:199.
27. Nasr, 1993.
28. Jaki, 2000:207
29. Grant, 1994.
30. Baker, 1952.
31. Kinser, 1971.
32. Luther, (1520) 1915:146.
33. Eisenstein, 1980:321.

Quantrill

2004-09-10 12:52 | User Profile

Nice post, Petr.

Suomi Finland Perkele

2004-09-10 17:59 | User Profile

Yes Christian tradition which expects logic, and honesty, etc from its God, is one of greatest contributors to modern science. Many of the first scientist were religious men, and even in modern times there are scientis who believe in higher power.

Personally I believe that logic and especially mathematics is language of God and creation. And our mission in this world is to decipher it. If we really are images of God, then we should understand languege and ways of creation, we must understand reasons behind it, and ultimately wemust also create more beatifullnesss andf more life to Universe. Maybe I don't translate following right but in Genesis it is said that Man must (1)HARVEST and (2)PROTECT (3)Earth, (in finnish translation of bible If I remember correct(KR38): Ihmisen tulee (1)VILJELLÄ ja (2)VARJELLA (3)Maata). I would expand that order to all over Universe. Our final mission is to proliferate life all over, to dead deserts of many worlds, even to void itself. Our mission is to create life everywhere to tell greatness of God. No deepness of space should be too cold or too distant to bear life.

Texas Dissident

2004-09-10 19:19 | User Profile

[URL=http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-298.htm]Christianity: A Cause of Modern Science?[/url]

[url=http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/]Institute for Creation Research Article Index[/url] (good stuff here)

Suomi Finland Perkele

2004-09-10 19:33 | User Profile

BTW. You are evengelic Lutheran, Texas Dissident?

In Finland Evangelic Lutheran Church is majority state Church (I'm also confirmated member) but that church allows many heretical derivcataions of biblical teaching, for example priesthood of womans. I think that is not very orthodox to ways of christianity.

Texas Dissident

2004-09-10 19:42 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Suomi Finland Perkele]BTW. You are evengelic Lutheran, Texas Dissident?

That is correct, Suomi. More specifically, I am a communing member of a conservative evangelical Lutheran church within the Missouri Synod. [url]www.lcms.org[/url]

In Finland Evangelic Lutheran Church is majority state Church (I'm also confirmated member) but that church allows many heretical derivcataions of biblical teaching, for example priesthood of womans. I think that is not very orthodox to ways of christianity.[/QUOTE]

I don't either.

Petr

2004-09-11 08:18 | User Profile

The mainstream Finnish "Lutheran" Church is just as sold-out enterprise as I understand the mainstream "Presbyterian" Church in America is.

IMHO, they are not that far from John Shelby Spong.

"Narrow is the road and those are few who find it."

Petr

Suomi Finland Perkele

2004-09-11 15:20 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Petr]The mainstream Finnish "Lutheran" Church is just as sold-out enterprise as I understand the mainstream "Presbyterian" Church in America is.

IMHO, they are not that far from John Shelby Spong.

"Narrow is the road and those are few who find it."

Petr[/QUOTE] Yes you are correct. Nowadays many are members of church only because of tradition. Also many believers are in open rebellion against church authorities, especially from woman priesthood question. Personally I think that future of Finnish Church is dark, the church will betray more of its ideals and members, and people are resignating from church at accelerating pace. I have already decided that if they allow gay-"marriages" in churches, it will be final mistake, and I will resign just on that day.

Faust

2004-09-12 19:12 | User Profile

Suomi Finland Perkele,

Does not Finland also have a Finnish Orthodox Church too? I thought a good number of Finns were member of the Orthodox Church?