Post by Amaris on Mar 14, 2012 0:17:40 GMT
PZ Myers on Guy Consolmagno, the Vatican astronomer.
freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/03/12/and-love-turned-into-a-beer-bottle-and-got-in-a-fight-down-in-the-castro-while-logic-manifested-as-a-duck-and-quacked-desire/
And Love turned into a beer bottle and got in a fight down in the Castro, while Logic manifested as a duck and quacked Desire
March 12, 2012 at 8:36 am PZ Myers
I know that Guy Consolmagno, the Vatican astronomer, is a nice guy, and that he supports good science…but he’s also a wackaloon who makes twisted rationalizations for god-belief. In a recent interview, HERE that tendency is on full display.
Despite people often having the “crazy idea” that science and religion conflict, science is “really one of our best principles for getting to know God,” he told CNA.
So now god is a material, natural entity? The kind of thing that science can study? Someday, we’ll get one of these guys to actually define concretely what they mean by “god”. Not this time, though! Consalmagno is just full of squinky evasive fluff in this interview.
During his talk, titled “The Word Became Flesh,” the planetary scientist explained that modern atheists tend to understand God as being merely a force that “fills the gaps” in our understanding of the universe.
No, we don’t. I understand god as the nebulous nonsense that believers try to impose on our understanding of what we do know. Every time we call them on some babble they make about how the world works, though, they willingly and enthusiastically flee into the gaps.
I call the gaps in knowledge “gaps”. I don’t call them “gods”.
“To use God to fill the gaps in our knowledge is theologically treacherous,” Br. Consolmagno said, because it minimizes God to just another force inside the universe rather than recognizing him as the source of creation.
Oooh, “theologically treacherous”. That’s a good thing, right? I’d love to sneak up behind Theology in the dark and stab it in the kidneys.
Those who believe in God should not be afraid of science, but should see it as a an opportunity that God gave humanity to get to know him better.
No god “gave” us science. It is hard work and human effort that enables science — and what we see is a universe with no need for any deity, anthropomorphic or otherwise, and especially no need for the bizarrely quaint and exceedingly silly dogma of Jesus.
Br. Consolmagno said that he believes in God, “not because he is at the end of some logical chain of calculations” but because he “experienced what physics and logic can show me but cannot explain: beauty and reason and love.”
Oh, crap. Isn’t Consolmagno supposed to be one of the smart ones? So why is he trotting out this same stupid bulls*it that Joe Doofus splutters every time he encounters an atheist? I experience beauty and love all the time; they are part of my perceptions and experience, are responses of my mind and brain, and are not invoked by some mysterious supernatural force. Dogs know love, and I suspect they recognize beauty (which is very different from our sense of beauty) — are these senses instilled by a god of dogs? I don’t think so.
The primary difference between him and atheistic scientist Stephen Hawking is that he recognizes that God is not another part of the universe that explains the inexplicable, but rather “Logos” and “Reason itself.”
The bulls*it is rising. I’m drowning! Help!
If God is reason, then it does not need me to worship it, and certainly has no anthropic perspective, let alone desires or goals. It just is, like gravity or the weak force, and all the rituals and prayers and magical dogmas are irrelevant and a distraction from the reality — it means that god is the principle that atheists, not Catholics, live by, and we can just repurpose the churches as bowling alleys and dinner theaters, recycle all the bibles and print physics and chemistry and biology texts on them, and dismantle the church hierarchies and put the people to work productively. Consolmagno, for instance, could be a full-time astronomer rather than a part-time apologist for stupidity.
He spoke of the faith needed to embrace Christianity and said that although other world religions and philosophies can give us a rational view of the universe, “only the Gospel could tell us that Reason itself became flesh and dwelt among us” in the form of Jesus Christ.
Wait…what happened to that talk of god being “reason”? Now he’s suddenly meat. And sectarian meat at that.
The Incarnation is remarkable because it happened, Br. Consolmagno said, and also due to the way it occurred. In coming into the world as an infant, God “exercised a kind of supernatural restraint” which still respected the laws of nature.
This is the kind of absurd and fundamentally dishonest inconsistency I find so objectionable in religion. One minute their god is “reason” or the “ground state of all being” or some similar vague cosmic principle, and the next they’re telling us that gravity/reason/language turned itself into bare-skinned baby ape (Why? Because it wanted to!), walked around, appointed a pope, told us that women are unclean, hated a few gay people, slaughtered some fig trees and Mycobacterium leprae, violated a few laws of physics (or played some cheap magic tricks), and told us to follow a set of arbitrary parochial rules and obey a child-raping priesthood, and then vanished off to some paradise in the sky.
I know reason, Mr Consolmagno, and I think your vision of reason constitutes an extreme act of disrespect to the principle, and shows that you don’t have the slightest clue about what you’re discussing.
freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/03/12/and-love-turned-into-a-beer-bottle-and-got-in-a-fight-down-in-the-castro-while-logic-manifested-as-a-duck-and-quacked-desire/
And Love turned into a beer bottle and got in a fight down in the Castro, while Logic manifested as a duck and quacked Desire
March 12, 2012 at 8:36 am PZ Myers
I know that Guy Consolmagno, the Vatican astronomer, is a nice guy, and that he supports good science…but he’s also a wackaloon who makes twisted rationalizations for god-belief. In a recent interview, HERE that tendency is on full display.
Despite people often having the “crazy idea” that science and religion conflict, science is “really one of our best principles for getting to know God,” he told CNA.
So now god is a material, natural entity? The kind of thing that science can study? Someday, we’ll get one of these guys to actually define concretely what they mean by “god”. Not this time, though! Consalmagno is just full of squinky evasive fluff in this interview.
During his talk, titled “The Word Became Flesh,” the planetary scientist explained that modern atheists tend to understand God as being merely a force that “fills the gaps” in our understanding of the universe.
No, we don’t. I understand god as the nebulous nonsense that believers try to impose on our understanding of what we do know. Every time we call them on some babble they make about how the world works, though, they willingly and enthusiastically flee into the gaps.
I call the gaps in knowledge “gaps”. I don’t call them “gods”.
“To use God to fill the gaps in our knowledge is theologically treacherous,” Br. Consolmagno said, because it minimizes God to just another force inside the universe rather than recognizing him as the source of creation.
Oooh, “theologically treacherous”. That’s a good thing, right? I’d love to sneak up behind Theology in the dark and stab it in the kidneys.
Those who believe in God should not be afraid of science, but should see it as a an opportunity that God gave humanity to get to know him better.
No god “gave” us science. It is hard work and human effort that enables science — and what we see is a universe with no need for any deity, anthropomorphic or otherwise, and especially no need for the bizarrely quaint and exceedingly silly dogma of Jesus.
Br. Consolmagno said that he believes in God, “not because he is at the end of some logical chain of calculations” but because he “experienced what physics and logic can show me but cannot explain: beauty and reason and love.”
Oh, crap. Isn’t Consolmagno supposed to be one of the smart ones? So why is he trotting out this same stupid bulls*it that Joe Doofus splutters every time he encounters an atheist? I experience beauty and love all the time; they are part of my perceptions and experience, are responses of my mind and brain, and are not invoked by some mysterious supernatural force. Dogs know love, and I suspect they recognize beauty (which is very different from our sense of beauty) — are these senses instilled by a god of dogs? I don’t think so.
The primary difference between him and atheistic scientist Stephen Hawking is that he recognizes that God is not another part of the universe that explains the inexplicable, but rather “Logos” and “Reason itself.”
The bulls*it is rising. I’m drowning! Help!
If God is reason, then it does not need me to worship it, and certainly has no anthropic perspective, let alone desires or goals. It just is, like gravity or the weak force, and all the rituals and prayers and magical dogmas are irrelevant and a distraction from the reality — it means that god is the principle that atheists, not Catholics, live by, and we can just repurpose the churches as bowling alleys and dinner theaters, recycle all the bibles and print physics and chemistry and biology texts on them, and dismantle the church hierarchies and put the people to work productively. Consolmagno, for instance, could be a full-time astronomer rather than a part-time apologist for stupidity.
He spoke of the faith needed to embrace Christianity and said that although other world religions and philosophies can give us a rational view of the universe, “only the Gospel could tell us that Reason itself became flesh and dwelt among us” in the form of Jesus Christ.
Wait…what happened to that talk of god being “reason”? Now he’s suddenly meat. And sectarian meat at that.
The Incarnation is remarkable because it happened, Br. Consolmagno said, and also due to the way it occurred. In coming into the world as an infant, God “exercised a kind of supernatural restraint” which still respected the laws of nature.
This is the kind of absurd and fundamentally dishonest inconsistency I find so objectionable in religion. One minute their god is “reason” or the “ground state of all being” or some similar vague cosmic principle, and the next they’re telling us that gravity/reason/language turned itself into bare-skinned baby ape (Why? Because it wanted to!), walked around, appointed a pope, told us that women are unclean, hated a few gay people, slaughtered some fig trees and Mycobacterium leprae, violated a few laws of physics (or played some cheap magic tricks), and told us to follow a set of arbitrary parochial rules and obey a child-raping priesthood, and then vanished off to some paradise in the sky.
I know reason, Mr Consolmagno, and I think your vision of reason constitutes an extreme act of disrespect to the principle, and shows that you don’t have the slightest clue about what you’re discussing.
