> Science may not be opposed to spirituality per se, but it is opposed to beliefs which are contrary to the weight of evidence. Let's assume a hypothetical scenario in which science could produce substantial evidence that God is not *specially* active in the world today. Certainly that wouldn't prevent anyone from ascribing to God the authorship of the magnificence we find in the natural world; God could still receive our awe for his design work. But I, personally, would feel that I did not know the artist so well after all, and my enjoyment of the complex universe would be considerably diminished, or killed outright.
>
> I'm not much interested in a laissez-faire God whose mind and purpose are foreign to me. Take away God's act of expressing his character as he works in his created world, and to me at least, you have taken away all that is worth believing in. Not just "God", but *this* God, the one who makes himself known to us, provides for us, actively governs the world he made. That's what makes the beauty of the natural world truly beautiful for me.

I don't know. It seems here that you might be letting your fixedness in time get in the way here. A God who set up a universe whose laws would provide for his creation doesn't seem to negate an active and self-revealing God.

I don't understand deism because it seems to talk of God in terms of linear time, a God who performed the act of creation once in the transient past. The terms "past" and "future" are meaningless in a description of God; he's only in the "now." A God who provides for everything physical (that is, everything scientifically verifiable) in our lives exclusively through physical laws isn't foreign and distant, because for God, the creation of the universe is *here* and *now*. God is creating the universe *right now*, and as he is doing so he is explicitly integrating into it his plan for me. At this instant, the position and velocity of every particle in the universe at the moment of its creation is being set, and *I*, because I am loved by God, am being considered and accomodated in this placement. To you or I, such an event is terribly distant, but that's only because we can't see past the limited point in time that we call the present; we can't see that the act of creation is happening right now.

>
> Iss "/act Brunnen_G deemed to be ruling" achar

"Some people object to such a view of music, saying that if you reduce music to mathematics, where does the emotion come into it? I would say that it's never been out of it.
The things by which our emotions can be moved - the shape of a flower or a Grecian urn, the way a baby grows, the way the wind brushes across your face, the way the clouds move, their shapes, the way light dances of the water, or daffodils flutter in the breeze, the way in which ther person you love moves their head, the way their hair follows that movement, the curve described by the dying fall of the last chord of music - all these things can be described by the complex flow of numbers.
That's not a reduction of it, that's the beauty of it.
Ask Newton.
Ask Einstein."

- Richard MacDuff
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, by Douglas Adams

Bal "Thought the quote was appropriate" anthalus