Ok, Bill, see you in a few days. I'll just leave this last thought then:

"Most religious ideas just don't fit that category...thus the very USE of the term 'belief' instead of 'know'."

Yes, but up to a point only. Because of course science tests new ideas and gains new knowledge about the physical world and we are certainly physical beings so we can know these things on a physical level.

From the empirical, scientific perspective, religious beliefs are....well, beliefs.

But religion IS, in fact, concerned with gaining new ideas and knowledge. Often I see comments on how the church made up this or that, or invented new parts of religion that were not in the gospels. This equally often seems to be done with a view to casting doubt over the authenticity and sincereity of the religious body.

In fact, what people are actually witnessing is the historical progression of a church probing and exploring the new spiritual revelation and experience and attempting to draw conclusions that will update the body of spiritual and religious knowledge. This does not mean God changes or develops, but that human understanding of Him and our role in things can and does. John Polkinghorne ("Belief in God in an Age of Science") sums this up rather well, pointing to the early church writers and religious councils (such as the Council of Nicea or St.Augustine) and indeed even within the gospels as the significance of events only slowly began to dawn on the apostles.

We tend to take the Christian church for granted today and perhaps assume it was always more or less in its present form with the same basic beliefs, just with bits tacked on for political expediency (a view which assumes that the whole body of the church over 2,000 was singularly corrupt on a level not even found in politics....)

Actually the early church began life as a persecuted underground group which only slowly began to realise the full significance of events that had occured, and delve deeper and deeper into the mystery of it. There were many councils and discussions held over many years to try and update "the knowledge" (as marines might call it) and insights and come to a better understanding of what made it all tick. For once you get into it, you begin to find the spiritual world seems to be goverened by certian rules just as the physical one is, waiting to be uncovered by the curious.

Polkinghorne compares the methodolgy of science and religion and finds many similarities (once the difference of topic of the two fields is taken into account):

1) Both have moments of radical revision in which new phenomena lead to new insights, transcending previous understanding but also building on it.

2) periods of confusion during which old and new models exist alongside in unresolved tension (he gives the example of quantum theory 1900 -1925)

3) moments of new synthesis and understanding in which a theory is revealed as being capable of satisfactorily explaining the new phenomena ina convicing and comprehensive way while at the same time treating the old phenomena as particular limiting cases (again, the discovery of modern quantum mechanics)

4) continuing wretsling with unresolved problems, essential for total understanding of the new theory, but for the moment not capable of final solution (the measurement problem in quantum theory)

5) realisations that the new theory has deep implications of a kind unanticipated when it was first conceived (anti-matter, non-locality etc.,)


Man is by nature a curious, enquiring animal (unless he's had that curiosity hammered out of him, but before anyone rushes to give examples of totalitarianism, a simple boring 9-5 can accomplish that over the years). He (or she!) sets his mind to problems in a similar way, whether of religion or science. Though religion requires an element of belief (that God exists etc) of things not demonstrable according to the empirical (and I deliberatley do not say, scientific - the two are not the same thing) standards, it would be a mistake to assume no thinking is done in religion (that's what theologians are for, the scientists of religion; but as well as them, most individuals also enagage in some of this on their own level, just as not every lay person is a working scientist).