document updated 16 years ago, on Oct 4, 2007
- Religious pluralism is
interesting, at least to the extent that it tries to tackle the fact that different religions
have apparent contradictions. Relgious pluralism takes one approach to resolving the apparent
contradictions (akin to the elephant
story), but I personally tend to take the other way out: that the existance of
contradictions seems to indicate that they're mostly just fabrications, rather than possibly
true.
- explanations of religion that tend to look down upon it:
- various: opiate of the masses, an encoding of survival tips
- meme (described as the "entrepreneurial model" in the above link)
- God of the gaps, the idea that things
are ascribed to a diety when they're not understand, and slowly over time become explainable by
science, and stop being thought of as being in the domain of relgion. (for instance, the sun, moon, planets, and stars were
the domain of religion thousands of years ago... now anyone who seriously believes in astrology
is thought of as strange. Weather was also ascribed to gods).
- things I'm interested in learning more about:
- different views of creationism that Christian believers I know seem to believe in: day-age creationism, YEC, OEC, theistic evolution, ...
- the "first cause"... while this is sometimes used as an irritating "proof" of God, it's still
something that applies to scientific ideas of the origin of the universe as well. That is, what
happened before the Big Bang (what caused the super-dense chunk of matter/energy that became the
universe)? Is the timeline infinite (thus avoiding the question of "first cause")? (possibly an
oscillating universe) Or did something make the prerequisites of the Big Bang pop into existance all of a sudden?
I think the current answer is that it's impossible that any empirical evidence survived from pre-Big-Bang, so it's not something that science can hope to tackle.