Science and Religion One of Term Paper

This type of evolutionary thinking will challenge the initial creationist act as well. Many creationist currents, including the Christian one, believe that human life was also created through divine intervention, so any kind of such approach where life actually evolved to form the human being along the way takes away the special characteristics of human kind, as perceived by Christianity, for example. So, evolutionism virtually challenges the entire theological belief on the history of Earth and its inhabitants.

4. Logical positivism is based on general skepticism towards mythology, theology or metaphysics and on the idea that all true facts can and have to be verified in order to become veridical. In this sense, besides empiricism and materialism, verificationism is also one of the pillars on which logical positivism is based.

For a fact, proposition or idea to be cognitively meaningful, it has to be able to follow a particular path of cause-consequences chain that will determine whether it is true or false. According to the logical positivists, arguments that follow out of similar procedures cannot be cognitively meaningful.

From this perspective, the statement "God is all-powerful" is not cognitively meaningful and we cannot determine, following a strict, finite procedure, whether it is true or false, from a cognitive perspective. However, according to logical positivism, we can mark this as a non-cognitive statement, which means that it can have a different than cognitive meaningfulness.

The statement "God is all-powerful" can have meaningfulness from a figurative perspective, for example. Figurately speaking, we can have an argumentation on whether God is all-powerful and determine that, from this perspective, God is indeed all powerful. Its meaningfulness comes exactly from the characterisitcs of a figurative approach. It is an approach outside the real system and, as such, argumentation no longer needs to follow realistic criteria.

In this sense, theologically, as a figurative approach, the value of truth of the statement "God is all-powerful" will be true, because monotheistic religions base the belief exactly on this all mighty God.

5. The three main approaches to God's action on Earth are the uniformitarian approach, denying the reality of divine action or intervention, the interventionist approach that believe in special divine action and objective intervention, but coming from outside the natural system and the non-interventionist approach, similar to the interventionist approach, but underlying the idea that divine actions are subordinated or come from within the system of natural processes.

The uniformitarian approach believes there is no divine intervention. However, something that can be referred to as partial uniformitarian stipulates that God intervened when he created the world, principles, mechanisms and humans and no longer intervenes. The uniformitarian approach stands as the basis for atheism or agnosticism, as well as for the scientific approach to world phenomenon.

The interventionist approach believes in external divine actions into the system from which we are part of. There are important characteristics of this approach that mark it different from the others. First of all, there is the action, an objectively interventionist one. Second of all, there is the direction of the action, from the outside towards the inside and, further more, beyond our spirit of comprehension (God responds to certain prayers, but we don't understand the mechanism by which this occurs or why and how it does).

The non-interventionist approach is probably the mixture between the interventionist approach and the human/scientific one, portraying divine intervention within the set of natural laws and processes. As such, these are not suppressed, but divine actions are based on them. This type of scientific interventionist also has three different approaches: the top-down causality, the bottom-up causality and the lateral causality.

As we can see, these three approaches define, first of all, the degree of divine intervention on Earth. This ranges from zero (uniformitarian) to medium (active, but within a scientific framework - non-interventionist) to high (active, from outside the…