@Krumple,
Krumple;170690 wrote:It's generally because those who see it as a mystery think mysteries mean end of the road. They were never wanting any reasoning anyways because they have already abandoned reasoning to begin with. So they expect and hope for mystery because then they don't have to do anything else.
Well there is some truth in that, no doubt. But I do feel about Dawkins (for example) that while he waxes eloquent about 'the great mystery of life', in actual fact mysteries of any type he finds quite disconcerting, and really only relishes contemplating them because we have them to some extent under control and there is a hope that one day, the will be all cleared up. He has a kind of faux humility about him which I cannot stand. (Unlike other great naturalists, such as Attenborough, whose humility before nature seems entirely genuine.)
But in a larger context, I do notice that in many of my exchanges with the scientifically-inclined on the forum, that they often assert their willingness to acknowledge 'the things we don't know' - but only up to a point. Religious traditions obviously have a lot to say about 'the unknown'. But precisely because they have become domesticated and dogmatized, they have kind of tried to tame the unknown, or make it knowable. And in this, if they succeed, they fail, for obvious reasons. This is a subtle point, but I hope it comes across.
So all this talk about 'God being an architect' - in fact any talk about God at all - is really, in an important sense, simply a concession to our existential situation and a conventional way of talking about that which is really beyond us. Then we forget that it is beyond us and continue to talk as though we know what we are talking about. It is OK to talk about it, provided we acknowledge that we really don't know what we are talking about. So as the Tao te Ching rightly says about exactly this issue, 'he that speaks, doesn't know, and he that knows, doesn't speak'.
So at this point I had better shut up.:bigsmile:
