@fresco,
fresco wrote:
The interconnectivity is 'divinity neutral'. Nor does evoking a divinity explain it. A much better 'explanation' might be the Gaia hypothesis, or the interplay of those 'cosmic forces' which the Hindu's call 'the 'gunas'. Pointing out the ad hoc , or parochial nature of such 'explanation' is not an attack on religion itself (as a palliative), it is a debunking of supercilous preachers like yourself who think they have a mission to spread their concept of 'truth'.
There are ideas/concept that transcend specific expressions/words used to describe/explain them. The Gaia hypothesis is the concept of Earth as a living planetary organism. It is a defensible concept, but it can be explained just as well by just describing different systems of the Earth as being interconnected and mutually-supportive of an overall-sustainable system, in the same sense that the organs of a living body take care of each other in various ways.
Religion is the same, the story of Jesus Christ is really just a collection of important ideas. If the same spiritual idea thought by/through Jesus Christ came to you via some other name, like Buddha, it would be just as valuable. The fact that you reject Jesus Christ but not Gaia, 'gunas,' or whatever other religious cultural figures you do respect really only proves that you are biased against Christianity and Christians because of an age-old culture of rejecting and disdaining Christianity instead of just studying what it's teaching and appreciating the truths of it where you can figure them out.
As for 'God,' Himself, one of the recent movies about Moses depicted Moses as naming God, 'I am that I am.' Moses explains his revelation of monotheism in terms of polytheism's notion of separate gods for the various parts of nature. What he says, I believe, is more or less, "if there is a god of the desert and a god of the sea, etc. then they are all one God over all the creation." So to understand the rise of monotheism, you have to grasp how people thought/felt about nature as having multiple gods.
Once you understand that the concept of a god is that agency and intention can be experienced in relationship to natural phenomena, then you can understand how it's perfectly natural for humans to identify that feeling in terms of single God that is the god of everything in the universe. Rejecting the existence of God is rejecting the human capacity to experience agency with regard to nature.
What I contend is that the science of studying different causal relationships and mechanics within natural systems isn't fundamentally different from the religious art of interpreting agency within nature, whether monotheistic or polytheistic. Energy is ubiquitous in the universe so everything that happens is an expression of power, i.e. the expression of energy as action and/or form/position/state. So when you accept this and deconstruct your assumptions of radical difference between scientific modeling of natural phenomena in terms of causation and religious modeling of nature in terms of divine agency, there ceases to be a conflict between religion and science.
You make the conflict because there are things about religion you don't like and things about science you do, but ultimately they are the same fundamental way of looking at nature in terms of agency and causation. Both are different POVs, for example, than aesthetic perspectives that treat everything as decoration and evaluate them in terms of their relative beauty and aesthetic 'fit' with each other. Both science and religion are ultimately about understanding the power of nature and how everything works and fits together in a structural-functional sense.
