Midterm Quotes

Question 1

_____ of US scientists believe in life after death & that God answers prayers

Answer 1

40%

Question 2

“The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, ________ blind, pitiless indifference.”

Answer 2

nothing but

Question 3

“The complexity of living organisms is matched by the elegant efficiency of the _____________.”

Answer 3

apparent design

Question 4

“I have never been an ________in the sense of denying the existence of a God.”

Answer 4

atheist

Question 5

______ of Canadians & Americans are teleologists

Answer 5

90%

Question 6

______ of Canadians & Americans are anti-evolutionists

Answer 6

50%

Question 7

“The intention is to _______, rather than to pass judgement, on the phenomena of religion.”

Answer 7

describe

Question 8

“Evolution is the _________ of our age. By telling us our origins it shapes our views of what we [ultimately] are.”

Answer 8

creation-myth

Question 9

“We [my capitals] as religious people asking spiritual questions have tried to see ________our senses. Is it just imagination or is it a holy power that impels us?”

Answer 9

beyond

Question 10

“The traditional conception of philosophy, which was dominant throughout the history of Western thought, was that philosophy can investigate the content of our beliefs, including the _________________of theological beliefs.”

Answer 10

truth or falsity

Question 11

“Logic requires that religious trust can be either [1] well placed or [2] misplaced as can nonreligious trust, since beliefs about the divine are–-as all other beliefs–- either ____________ but not both at once. It follows, therefore, that when two beliefs disagree about what is divine, one or both of them must be (at least partly) false.”

Answer 11

True or False

Question 12

“A religious belief is any belief in something or other as divine. ‘Divine’ means having the status of not depending on anything else. . . . All [religions] believe that the divine is whatever is ‘__________.’”

Answer 12

just there

Question 13

“[Idealistic] Pantheistic traditions insist that what is wrong with people is their attachment to the illusory world as it is encountered in ordinary experience by reason … ______________, they say, fails to recognize that logical thinking is also part of the everyday world of illusion. As such, logical thinking is part of the deception that prevents people from discovering the divine unity of all reality.”

Answer 13

Logical Criticism

Question 14

“No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both ______and Money.”

Answer 14

God

Question 15

“If such non-literal, non-chronological usage seems strange to us that is __________ and our challenge to understand. The text (bible) is after all, our teacher.

Answer 15

our problem

Question 16

“Oral tradition … serves as the principle repository for the collective experience and general beliefs, attitudes, and values of the community … The primary function of oral tradition is the very practical one of explaining, and thereby justifying, the present state and structure of the community, supplying the community with a continuously evolving ‘____________’ …

Answer 16

social charter

Question 17

“Neither a philosophy of the ‘____________’ nor a philosophy of the ‘___________’ will do for our time. Only an approach that is resolutely guided by the question ‘What is what?’ will avoid reading mysteries into the facts, as well as refrain from impoverishing them by reduction to something less than experience attests them to be.”

Answer 17

Something More

Nothing But

Question 18

“The world which Science presents for our belief: That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end [teleology] they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are [nothing] but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; . . . all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system . . . all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so ____________, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.

Answer 18

nearly certain

Question 19

“Philosophers long made a mummy of science. When they finally unwrapped the cadaver and saw the remnants of an historical process of becoming and discovering, they created for themselves a _______________. That happened around _______.”

Answer 19

Crisis of rationality

1950

Question 20

“Conflation … simply means the collapsing of distinct items in such a way that their differences are apparently lost … [Conflation blends] science and ________into an undifferentiated smudge … a careless commingling of science with ________ … a tangled muddle.”

Answer 20

Belief

Belief

Question 21

“_______________________, scientific skeptics have uncritically fused [conflated] the scientific method with scientism, a belief system that assumes, without any scientific demonstration, that science is the only appropriate way to look at things.”

Answer 21

Without usually being aware of it

Question 22

“__________________________, theologians always bring at least implicit cosmological assumptions to their talk about God, and it is only honest that they acknowledge this fact.”

Answer 22

Whether they are aware of it or not

Question 23

“I think philosophically that one should be sensitive to what I think history shows, namely, that … evolution, akin to religion, involves making certain _________________________, which at some level cannot be proven empirically. I guess we all knew that, but I think that we’re all much more sensitive to these facts now. Well, I’ve been very short, but that was my message, and I think it’s an important one.”

Answer 23

a priori or metaphysical assumptions

Question 24

“The first major challenge to religion in an age of science is the ___________of the
methods of science.”

Answer 24

success

Question 25

“The [metaphysical] naturalistic hypothesis arising from scientific knowledge holds that the powerful emotions of religious experience are entirely _____________, that they evolved as part of the programmed activity of the brain favouring survival of the tribe and individual.”

Answer 25

neurobiological

Question 26

“No such conflict should exist [between science & religion] because each subject has a legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority–– and these magisteria do not overlap (the principle that I would like to designate as ___________. The net of science covers the empirical universe: what is it made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory).

Answer 26

NOMA

Question 27

“Theology of Nature holds that some traditional doctrines need to be ___________in the light of current science. Here science and religion are considered to be relatively independent sources of ideas, but with some areas of overlap in their concerns. In particular, the doctrines of creation, providence, and human nature are affected by the findings of science.”

Answer 27

reformulated

Question 28

“The mother of what is called her child is no parent of it, but the nurse only of the young life that is sown in her. The parent is the male, and she but a stranger, a friend, who, if fate spares his _________, preserves it till it puts forth.”

Answer 28

plant

Question 29

G.E. Ladd’s Aphorism

Answer 29

“The Bible is the Word of God given in the words of men in history.”

Question 30

“Biologists’ investigation of DNA has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved … The only satisfying explanation for the origin of such ‘end-directed, self-replicating’ life as we see it on earth is an _________________________.”

Answer 30

infinitely intelligent mind

Question 31

“The problem is that of complex design … every single one of more than a trillion cells in the body contains about a thousand times as much precisely-coded digital information as my entire computer. The complexity of living organisms is matched by the elegant efficiency of the _____________. If anyone doesn’t agree that this amount of complex design CRIES OUT for an explanation, I give up …

Answer 31

apparent design

Question 32

“Developing a philosophical argument in popular language, the apostle [Paul] declares a profound truth: Through all that is created, the ‘_______________’ can come to know God. Through the medium of creatures, God stirs in reason, an intuition of his ‘power’ and his ‘divinity’ (Rom 1:20) … By discoursing on the data provided by the senses, reason can reach the cause which lies at the origin of all perceptible reality. In philosophical terms, we could say that this important Pauline text affirms the human capacity for metaphysical inquiry.”

Answer 32

eyes of the mind

Question 33

“This is to recognize as a first stage of divine revelation the marvellous ‘book of nature,’ which, when read with the proper tools of human reason [ie, science], can lead to knowledge of the Creator. If human beings with their intelligence fail to recognize God as Creator of all, it is not because they lack the means to do so, but because their free will and their _________ place an impediment in the way.”

Answer 33

sinfulness

Question 34

“Our Saviour [Jesus] says, ‘You err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God’ [Matt 22:29], laying before us two books or volumes to study, if we will be secured from error; [1] first the Scriptures, revealing the will of God, and [2] then the creatures expressing his power; whereof the latter is a __________ unto the former: not only opening our understanding to conceive the true sense of the scriptures, by the general notions of reason and rules of speech; but chiefly opening our belief, in drawing us into a due meditation of the omnipotency of God, which is chiefly signed and engraven upon his works.”

Answer 34

KEY