THE COMING GREAT DECEPTION—PART 25: The VORG (Vatican Observatory Research Group) Disputes Divine Creation, Expresses Faith In ET
- THE COMING GREAT DECEPTION—PART 25: The VORG (Vatican Observatory Research Group) Disputes Divine Creation, Expresses Faith In ET
by SkyWatch Editor, https://www.skywatchtv.com/
We ended the last entry with the idea Vatican scholars believe there are two kinds of truth: one accessed by reason and evidence and the other by blind faith. If you pay close attention, it becomes easy to spot the truth-divide in the Jesuit scientists’ caustic criticisms of Intelligent Design and Creationism. For example, George Coyne, former head of the VORG, disputes the anthropic principle as evidence for Divine Creation:
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To imagine a Creator twiddling with the constants of nature is a bit like thinking of God making a big pot of soup.… It’s a return to the old vision of a watchmaker God, only it’s even more fundamentalist. Because what happens if it turns out there is a perfectly logical scientific explanation for these values of the gravitational constant and so on? Then there’d be even less room for God.[i]
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As you can see, following Aquinas, Coyne has divorced nature the particulars, from grace the universals. Coyne’s concept of God need not correspond to objective truths in the material world; rather, it is relegated to the upper story, grace, and need not be detectable. However, his scientific work inhabits the “lower story”—nature—and is accessed by logic and reason. In this realm, Coyne is no different than Richard Dawkins. His view of nature is governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and is therefore mechanistic and determined. Transcendent realities like God’s status as Creator and divine providence are in the “upper story” where grace resides. These are known only by faith and have no bearing on his science.
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The reason it’s so important to thoroughly understand this division is that it is the single most potent weapon used by secularists for delegitimizing the biblical perspective. Obviously, it wasn’t always this way. Schaeffer describes how the situation progressed from Aquinas through philosophy, culminating in the twentieth century, when the concept of truth itself was formally divided—a development he illustrated with a two-story building. In the lower story are math, science, and reason, which are considered public truth, binding on all people at all times. Over against it is an upper story of emotional experience, which is deemed purely personal and subjective. This is why you hear people today utter nonsense like, “That may be true for you, but it’s not true for me.” In this way, ethical claims regarding abortion and marriage are not taken seriously in the marketplace of ideas, because they are simply upper-story beliefs. When Schaeffer was writing, the term “postmodernism” had not yet been coined, but clearly he was ahead of the curve. Today, we call the lower story “modernism,” which still claims to have universal, objective truth—while in the upper story, postmodernism, reside spiritual beliefs and morality. Today’s fact/value divide is diagrammed like this:
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