[Buddha-l] Fighting creationism

[Erik Hoogcarspel]

SJZiobro at cs.com schreef:
> In a message dated 4/2/2007 3:59:35 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
> jehms at xs4all.nl writes:
>> The leap from being to God is shear nonsense, because anything God 
>> does needs time, even He cannot create time.  If we come to the 
>> limits of a model it doesn't mean we are at liberty to fill in just 
>> any other which has the same limits.
>> Besides, I dont't see what morals have to do with it, morals is about 
>> responsablility and religion takes that away. So when God talks, 
>> ethics fall silent.
>
>
> I don't know about any of this, Erik.  The analogia entis and the via 
> eminentia seem viable ways of conceiving of the relation of the 
> mutable and the created to a Cause that is not anything.  With regard 
> to time, I agree with you.  To say that God creates time is to speak 
> in a mythic fashion if one conceives of time as the result of the 
> maesure of some movement among things.  Time and thing are 
> inextricably bound to each other.  (I take this to be something of 
> what Dogen intimates in his"Uji" fascicle.)  I might disagree with you 
> that religion relieves one from moral action and responsibility if you 
> mean that religion and human authenticity are opposed one to the other 
> so as to be contradictory.  Is that what you really mean?  My 
> disagrement would probably arise in part from what you understand by 
> religion and what I may.  As for your very last claim, that makes no 
> sense whatsoever to me since I do not conceive of anything as separate 
> from God's logos (verbum).
>
> Regards,
>
> Stan Ziobro
Hi Stan,
both the analogia and the eminentia would not pass Kant's criticism of 
metaphysics. Both are models taken from the phenomenal world that are 
applied to the noumenal.  Maybe we can meet each other there, it's about 
halfway. I would be the first to admit that the scientific theories are 
models too and that the origin of the universe lies beyond the scope of 
scientific investigation. This agrees completely with the teaching of 
the Buddha and with the separation between samv.rti and paramaartha satya.
The evolution of biological species however is a theory and model that 
has been and will be tested over and over again. This is not the case 
with creationism. OK, I admit that to say that the fittest survives 
contains a circularity, it's like saying that the richest has most 
money. But the principle of striving to survive and selection by 
competition seems to be sound. Another problem is that creationism has 
to remain rather vague, because no one can tell exactly how God did the 
job, whereas genetic biology can tell in great detail how species 
change. So on pure pragmatic grounds creationism doesn't stand a chance 
and if we remember that the only reason creationism has been put forward 
is that some people cannot accept the duplex ordo, then it appears to be 
a matter of scientific hygiene never to accept it.


Erik


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