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I was intentionally vague on that point to avoid controversy distracting from my point, but if you're curious, I found faith in Jesus Christ (I became Catholic)
by pvnick 13y ago
I was intentionally vague on that point to avoid controversy distracting from my point, but if you're curious, I found faith in Jesus Christ (I became Catholic) and I fully believe that it was by the grace of God that I was brought out of my downward spiral and restored to peace and happiness.
- Lambdanaut 13y agoOff on a tangent here, but I'm curious if you're willing to divulge, does your religious bend ever conflict with you being a biochemistry major, and if so how do you resolve the conflictions?
- pvnick 13y agoThat's actually at the very core in why I went into biochemistry (aside from a naive belief in the triviality of curing cancer and the abundance of nobel prizes). In studying biochemistry I'm able to see how the math and the physics and the chemistry become biology. That is, I can actually know how life works and comes into being. I'll tell you what, God is the ultimate programmer. My studies have only worked to strengthen my faith.
- maroonblazer 13y agoLike the adulterer who professes to love his wife, you have some things to work out.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jpwgarrison 13y agoI have found that once you grasp that they are not all biblical literalists you can get along fine with Christians. The literalists are noisier but I think a minority. I married into a Christian family and they value science and logic as much as anyone.
- maroonblazer 13y agoAnd yet they believe in an invisible "creator" who takes a personal interest in their daily lives. How should we weigh their valuation of science and logic relative to someone who doesn't believe such things?
- exo762 13y ago> invisible "creator" who takes a personal interest in their daily lives Yet again, very literal interpretation.
- disputin 13y agoReligionists show no consistency in what they consider literal or not. I was raised catholic, am quite seriously offended by religion, and have had more arguments with religionists than I care to remember. What is literal to one person is not literal to the next. Further, when cornered a person will change their mind as it suits them. Discussion of religion is a quagmire, and the pursuit of fools.
- kirse 13y agoScience works best when it studies the here and now, the observable. That's the basis for confidence in empiricism, and that's where solid empiricism ends. Belief in a designer motivated many great men of science to understand this marvelous design, Newton himself being one of many. There's an unlimited world to be studied in the present, all with a high degree of confidence because it can be subject to strictly empirical testing. Quantum theory, understanding DNA, figuring out sleep, curing diseases, the list is really infinite. When science tries to take what it knows in the here-and-now and extrapolate those present-knowns billions of years into the past, that's where confidence should drop. At that point it's trying to take a hard-won confidence in present observations and borrow it for explaining the past. But it's not justified there. It's like trying to say you could observe a stock for 40 years and extrapolate that tiny slice of price history billions of years into the future -- and then proceed to claim to confidently know not only what the price was at the end of those billions of years, but also the price action along the entire way.
- tisma 13y ago"I'll tell you what, God is the ultimate programmer." Do you have a peer reviewed source for this?
- NAFV_P 13y agoI'll tell you what, God is the ultimate programmer. Let me guess, was the universe written in javascript?
- bigiain 13y agoWell, that's what we tell everybody, but it's really just a bunch of Perl scripts running on an old Sun box hidden in the janitor's closet.
- precisioncoder 13y agoThis is a reference to this XKCD comic: http://xkcd.com/224/ http://xkcd.com/224/
- NAFV_P 13y agoIf I believed in a god, I'd have trouble deciding which news would be more unbearable: finding out there is no god, or finding out that this god wrote the universe in Perl.
- boomlinde 13y agoObviously not: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/eternal-flame.ogg https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/eternal-flame.ogg
- NAFV_P 13y agoGreg Chaitin wrote a LISP interpreter in FORTRAN.
- tptacek 13y agoThere are absurd anti-science sects of Christianity, but mainstream Catholicism isn't one of them. I was taught evolution in both Catholic grade school and Jesuit high school --- in the late 80s and early 90s. It wasn't taught as a controversy or one of many possibilities, but rather as scientific fact. For what it's worth, if you're not familiar with Christianity, most Christian religions aren't biblical literalists. I was taught in grade school, by nuns, that the Old Testament wasn't to be taken literally.
- russellsprouts 13y agoYes. Pope Pius XII acknowledged evolution as compatible with Christianity in 1950, though he did not embrace it. In 1996 Pope John Paul II went further: > Today, more than a half-century after the appearance of that encyclical, some new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than a hypothesis. In fact it is remarkable that this theory has had progressively greater influence on the spirit of researchers, following a series of discoveries in different scholarly disciplines. The convergence in the results of these independent studies—which was neither planned nor sought—constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory.
- chalst 13y agoThe Jesuits are outstandingly good, for a religious denomination, in their respect for scientific truth. Other parts of the Catholic church (I'm thinking of Franciscan institutes like the Christian Information Centre) lean creationist.
- tptacek 13y agoThe Jesuits are pretty great. But my Catholic elementary school wasn't Jesuit, and it taught evolution and a non-literal interpretation of the Old Testament.