Christians, Science and Phenomenology

The word ‘science’ means knowledge. The ‘what is wisdom to man is foolishness to God’ remark of Paul is applicable to scientific knowledge too. There is a difference between spiritual concerns and the experience of the world; the world is good as a product of God yet there is thermodynamics in it that contain willfulness to a certain extent. It is difficult to say how far human freedom is limited within the secular for the answer lies in metaphysical uncertainty. We know from Genesis that Adam and Eve and presumably the entire realm of being was changed when they were cast from the Garden of Eden after eating of the tree of knowledge. Then there is the issue of Wittgenstein's Indeterminacy of Translation concerning the interpretation of Genesis by readers.

Science occurs within a paradigm of contingent being for humans apparently enmeshed within some ultimately unknowable sort of field as innocently as Isaac was. We are spared the fate of spiritual death through Christ’s blood.

Scientific products are pragmatic in a sense- they emerged from what is knowable and practical. The logical fallacy of authority applies to science as well as political opinion. Much of scientific opinion is reliant on language definitions and descriptions of objects these days and that is a philosophically challenging field regarding linguistic epistemology. So the practical. Pragmatic opinions of science are more useful than the overly speculative.

The field of cosmology might be most relevant for Christians in regard to science; and it should be viewed with an informed awareness that it is loaded with uncertainty in theory and in interpretation of observations from sources like the Webb Infrared Space Telescope. It is fun information with new theories every week. These days pre-big bang Desiderata are paradigms for interpreting the Universe as a malleable theoretical model of about any configuration and hypothetical composition. Even the order of time or thermodynamic evolution is somewhat agnostic; that is, it is theoretically reversible or isometric mathematically, if not actually because of issues involving destruction of information in black holes, although there are theories about that too- exculpatory evidence if you like lol.

In a way Bishop Berkeley’s idealistic paradigm in his Three Dialogues still serves as a criterion for making an analogy of the experience of mind and being; that is; no one can be really certain of what it is- even with physics. In physical cosmology too the criterion in largely pragmatic. One does need faith in God who maintains or structured the reality of things- whatever they are for-themselves in regard to cosmology.

 https://garycgibson.com/2025/11/25/chatgpt-explains-a-bit-of-its-language-use-paradigm-as-a-large-language-model-based-a-i/

Faith vs Only-Evolution Camps...Sorting Things Out

 People in the modern world aren't so well educated in relevant topics to the criterion of the OP, or well rounded, and tend to be specialized. Once they learn something occupationally they stay with it. Scientist remain scientists and if group think opinion is anti-Christian so shall they tend to be. People that aren't philosophers tend not to think too deeply about philosophy and I would guess that pro philosophers tend toward occupational specialization as well. Actual intelligent, philosophy reading Americans at least might end up broke after college reading philosophy and not looking for academic employment or stocking groceries, driving a truck or whatever. Much of the opinion is superficial. There are Christian ministers that don't understand philosophy, or that believe there is an heretical Neo-pagan god of philosophy, and many readers of philosophy that have no idea about the several paradigms for belief in God that exist today. 

There are few that correlate philosophy, cosmology, physics and Christian faith with quantum mechanics and theology to consider how God could create a Multiverse within his mind solely, or that understand that Hegel's paradigm of God evolving to realize Himself through history may have numerous possible paradigmatic meaning values although Hegel assuredly had a single one. There are just not too many people that know interdisciplinary content well enough to understand and write about things. So it tends toward being a political paradigm of us vs them. Kierkegaard wrote a book named 'Stages on Life's Way'- a practical and rather wise title, yet life itself is a stage that people pass through- some believe unto nothingness, others belief unto eternal life with God via the Son, It is not only a temporal divide; it is an eternal divide. Fortunately religious tolerance is part of the American way of life. There are other temporal issues to be concerned with, such as these  I mentioned today elsewhere.

https://garycgibson.blogspot.com/2025/08/existential-data-points-of-nature.html

https://garycgibson.blogspot.com/2025/08/loss-of-tropical-forests-quarter.html

Epicureans and Stoics Had Beliefs- True or Not

 Epicureans and Stoics were both believers in a god or gods. Stoics believed in a divine principle or Logos and Epicureans leaned toward an identity as Deists. The actual beliefs of ancient Greek philosophic schools are different from those of modernity generally. Some of the ancients would be closer to Spinoza paradigmatically. They tended toward regarding god as a divine principle or power in back of everything, if they weren't polytheists. There isn't much of a relationship, if any, between those ancient schools and modern people of faith or of those that aren't. There are no simple answers in the field. One may of course compare and contrast ideas in a secular sense, phenomenally. That too generates synthetic ideas for-oneself and not necessarily an objective sense of what is true concerning various kinds of faith.

Religion's Cultured Despisers Considered

 I looked up TANSF and got Temporary Assistance for Needy Families- a government program.  TANSF is an acronym for those that attack people of faith with ridicule suggesting ad hominems, and muddy analogies? Richard Dawkins has made a few of those.  He wrote a book titled 'The God Delusion. That idea has, to use a Dawkinsism "infected the minds" of a generation. 

 I withdrew from being a group member in a couple of science fiction groups here because they were completely intolerant of spirit. They were died in the monkey believers in Darwinism-only and believe the question of spirit and God was settled once and for all by Clarence Darrow and defended by Aldous Huxley. Yet theology and philosophy have depth that fundamentalists of science only and Biblical literalism only aren't aware. Some things are slow to change. One could labor as did Freidrich Schleiermacher in his: 'On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers' published in 1799 and write to modern despisers of faith.

Scientists tend not to think about God and spiritual matters in a serious way and so remain less than neophytes in understanding the Bible unlike some philosophers and theologians that research science matters routinely. In my opinion Socrates' idea about knowing that he knows nothing was a reasonable distrust of the certainty of meaning of knowledge including science that is operatively, pragmatically useful yet perhaps ultimately superficial and of course temporal. Nothing that happens in the Universe is of consequence for humanity from a Christian perspective except the matter of salvation. The Apostle Paul said that he knows nothing except Jesus Christ crucified. 1 Corinthians 2:2, Paul states, "For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

The nature of space-time may be wrong though it seems correct. The Hindu philosophy that reality is an illusion – Maya in the Advaita Vedanta (Nondualist) is comparable to the ideas of Bishop Berkeley and Ideaism as well as contemporary quantum mechanics with the Higgs Field.

It's a bit off topic yet interesting enough. I tend to regard Moses as the author of the Pentateuch as well as the inventor of the aleph beth- he was particularly well situated to make an alpha bet for the Jewish tribe instead of using hieroglyphs to write down ecclesiastical data. yet Moses said "Deuteronomy 18:15-18 states that God would raise up a prophet from among the Israelites, similar to Moses, whom the people should listen to in all things, as they were to listen to Moses." One could take that as a reference to David who collected all of the scripture and put it into the Pentateuch form. Plainly there has been redaction of the Pentateuch. Yet for Genesis there is no question that it has two beginnings; Austin Gentry opined of it that " Genesis 1 focuses on the broader, cosmological creation of the universe and the earth, while Genesis 2 zooms in on the creation of humanity and the Garden of Eden." It is obvious that there are two starts of Genesis and neither was omitted by the collator of the work.

The GR paradigm of space-time is challenged by more recent cosmology theories. and certainly the the book of Genesis appears to have two narratives or beginnings that aren’t inconsistent with the concept that Adam and Eve were interpolated into an already created Universe after they disobeyed God and ate from the tree of knowledge learning the difference between good and evil unlike animals. The great initial lifespans of the patriarchs reduce in a paradigm suggestive of some kind of transfer from a timeless realm into one with time. That could be explained by innumerable scientific and metaphysical theories without one ever knowing the correct answer. Alternatively atheist evolutionary biologists would interpret the paradigm literally and say it's wrong in the same way that a 1920s Biblical fundamentalist would take it literally and say it's right.

On Christology

 Christology is not a simple subject. Even so I would say that making categories a,b,c, regarding what comprises a human or “a complete human” are not very satisfactory, much less applied to Christ. One can make a set of word to comprise a definition and invalidate that criteria with formal logical examination. One might define the parameters for an ostrich and if it includes fins then the criterion is wrong. One never gets anything more than words that are logically consistent with the criterion you built. Words are different than objects.

There is the additional problem of words as definite articles compounded, with those words individually difficult to define through reductionist procedures. One has trouble defining a spirit, a mind etc. especially as contingent objects. The divine nature and character cannot be defined exhaustively for that is not an object of human knowledge. How the Spirit of God indwells Christ as a human is not something that can definitely be known. neither is it simple to define what a soul is or how it is constructed; it could just be information or a record that God keeps of the data of a human life. If programmers can know the data that makes a program or an AI and recover it if hardware breaks down I am sure that God can do better than the best quantum computer would ever be able to do in order to capture the entirety of information that makes a human being, soul etc. what it is.

At end one can say that Christ was fully human and God. He is The Son and is Spirit as are the Father and the Holy Spirit. As a human physically he knew God the Father. One cannot satisfy the criterion of defining the proportions or composition of Jesus in regard to the other two members of the Triune God through physical means.

https://www.udio.com/songs/ppYMShLZBG91focYi1NUDe

Post-Tribulation End TImes With Jesus and YHWH

 A Baptist minister said to me once that The Revelation was like a newspaper written for Christians of the time of John of Patmos. It needed to be slightly coded because Nero probably would have had John executed instead of just exiled if John had described Nero as the Beast. I like the partial preterist interpretation of John with the apocalypse occurring in the first century A.D. with the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 and the terrible persecutions by the world government of the region that was Imperial Rome. 

Post-tribulation interpretations differ from pre-tribulation interpretations popularized by Charles Ryrie. Remember that end times pre-tribbers have existed since the first century and they tend to be wrong- except for the one that Jesus said would occur and that did within that generation. Jesus will return some time yet it will be different from the pre-tribber version that some Christians have, comparable to that of Muslim Shi'ite 12ers that believe the hidden imam will return before Armageddon and Jesus will lead the Muslim troops. One might read He Shall Have Dominion by Kenneth Gentry to learn about post-millennialism.

I enjoy being reminded of Christian themes amid all the clutter. I took a two year graduate course in reformed theology on-line in theology and my mentor lost my work. I published my papers in three volumes free to download at my web page. I read people like Thomas Brooks and Shaff’s multi-volume History of the Christian Church (free to download at several sites) https://ccel.org/ccel/s/schaff/hcc8/cache/hcc8.pdf

The post on the meaning of the tetragrammaton was a timely and good topic that led me to learn a little more about it. I found an article on it at The Torah.com with a quote from that below. https://www.thetorah.com/article/yhwh-the-original-arabic-meaning-of-the-name#:~:text=God%20reveals%20his%20name%20to,%2C%20desire%2C%20or%20passion.%E2%80%9D 

“God reveals his name to Moses as “I am,” from the Hebrew root ה.ו.י, “being.” The name YHWH, however, originates in Midian, and derives from the Arabic term for “love, desire, or passion.”

שמות ו:ב וַיְדַבֵּר אֱלֹהִים אֶל מֹשֶׁה וַיֹּאמֶר אֵלָיו אֲנִי יְ־הוָה. ו:ג וָאֵרָא אֶל אַבְרָהָם אֶל יִצְחָק וְאֶל יַעֲקֹב בְּאֵל שַׁדָּי וּשְׁמִי יְ־הוָה לֹא נוֹדַעְתִּי לָהֶם.

Exod 6:2 God spoke to Moses and said to him, “I am YHWH. 6:3 I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai, but I did not make Myself known to them by My name YHWH.

Saved by Faith, Not Works

Calvinists believe one is saved through faith alone (sola fide). Yet believe that if one is saved they shall do good works. Some say that if one doesn't show good works then they probably weren't saved. Calvinists believe scripture including that of James. The brother of Jesus said in chapter 2:"

14 "What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? can faith save him?" 15 If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food,

16 And one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit?

17 Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone.

18 Yea, a man may say, Thou hast faith, and I have works: shew me thy faith without thy works, and I will shew thee my faith by my works.

19 Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble.

20 But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead?"

Though Christians are saved through faith, they have an avocation in the world. Paul wrote in Ephesians 2:10 ""For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them".

 Even good works are the result of grace

Context in Proverbs Chapter 3 Verse 5

One might want a little more context; “3 My son, forget not my law; but let thine heart keep my commandments:

2 For length of days, and long life, and peace, shall they add to thee.

3 Let not mercy and truth forsake thee: bind them about thy neck; write them upon the table of thine heart:

4 So shalt thou find favour and good understanding in the sight of God and man.

5 Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.”

Trusting in God now is trusting in God; the Father, the Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. Faith in God does not require abandoning reason. Mind does not work that way. One may have faith that a barbeque shredded beef sandwich quality is healthful and give thanks to God at the same time.

One might want a little more context; “3 My son, forget not my law; but let thine heart keep my commandments:

2 For length of days, and long life, and peace, shall they add to thee.

3 Let not mercy and truth forsake thee: bind them about thy neck; write them upon the table of thine heart:

4 So shalt thou find favour and good understanding in the sight of God and man.

5 Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.”

Trusting in God now is trusting in God; the Father, the Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. Faith in God does not require abandoning reason. Mind does not work that way. One may have faith that a barbeque shredded beef sandwich quality is healthful and give thanks to God at the same time.

Trust in God is comparable in some respects to trusting in your instructors the first time you make a head-first Australian repel that you won't just fall and hit the ground. It is like trusting a guide to lead you across the desert or a navigator to make a course across the sea. Edifying Bible reading is for your own benefit. Trust in God is not retirement from effort or responsibility. As is said God has a plan for your life