Re: [xmca] Response to DK about Volition

Where were you Steve during those centuries-long debates about whether God
was knowable were going on? :) As Bacon, the founder of western
experimental science, put it:

"Lord God of heaven and earth; thou hast vouchsafed of thy grace, to those
of our order to know thy works of creation, and true secrets of them; and
to discern, as far as appertaineth to the generations of men, between
divine miracles, works of nature, works of art and impostures, and
illusions of all sorts. I do here acknowledge and testify before this
people that the thing we now see before our eyes is thy finger, and a true
miracle. And forasmuch as we learn in our books that thou never workest
miracles, but to a divine and excellent end (for the laws of nature are
thine own laws, and thou exceedest them not but upon great cause), we most
humbly beseech thee to prosper this great sign, and to give us the
interpretation and use of it in mercy."
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bacon/1626/new-atlantis/index.htm

Really, I'm with you on this one Steve, but a Christian believes Nature is
God's Works, and one can know God by seeing His Work, as well as by hearing
His Word. A Pantheist believes God *is* Nature. The distance separating you
from these views is much smaller than I think you believe. In everything
you have said in these messages, you crossed out the word "nature" and
inserted the word "God" it would still make perfect sense.

Andy

At 05:45 AM 10/09/2007 -0700, you wrote:
My point here is that a scientific approach to nature, full of awe and
imagination, is entirely different from a religious view of the
supernatural. One is based on empirical fact, the other, spiritualist
faith. Nature is ultimately knowable; God is not.

>- Steve

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Received on Mon Sep 10 06:42 PDT 2007