Clip 5: Does science make belief in God obsolete? (Templeton Foundation)

[jaggy723]

Love the monsignor..

[niinja2]

"if you dont love one another the world is justified not to believe in any of my claims"

so fuking true

i have always thought that the main reason people are atheists is because there are no Christians acting this way.

[megavolt67]

Sounds like what monsignor is saying is that unless science can provide an explanation for everything, he has no reason to abandon his own faith-based ideas. But science will never be able to explain EVERY mystery. It will only ever disprove SOME faith-based notions. The burden of proof should be on the more fantastical claim, but when one shifts that burden and reduces its relevance via the concept of faith, there's just not much to say except that faith should be a purely personal thing.

[megavolt67]

@megavolt67 If organized religion didn't spring up out of it, and there weren't beliefs that threatened the livelihood of others, it wouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately, there always seems to be the need of believers to spread that belief and use it to gain dominion over people. The fact that belief has no need of logic or reason beyond some sense of personal wish-fulfillment just makes it all the scarier. We must be ever vigilant when it comes to theocratic encroachment (as Hitch puts it).

[kram83au]

monsignor, was saying anything to avoid hitchens big punchs,which hitchens couldnt get off, cause the old guy just totaly sucked up to science. is this one of religions champion debaters. hitchens would have been better picking a fight with a drunk jehovahs wittness.

[hopkins4545]

I am Catholic and recognize evolution as fact and theory. Not all Christians are without scholarship or erudition. The South hath bred some bad apples.

[jlzkcarlos]

Gotta love the Hitch

[ilikezappa]

The monsignor is refreshingly incisive. I liked him to bits , even tho I am an atheist

[martiangrundy]

Yeh it's just a shame he's so old and set in his ways, one gets the distinct feeling he wants to ditch the whole ridiculous idea, if he had been younger when science was getting more advanced, I dare say he may have been able to acomplish it.

I really havent heard a sensible, cogent, and logical argument yet for religion.

They are either logical fallacies, please that the Bible is proof, or personal "revelations".

And none of these stand up. So its hardly suprising they have such difficulty.

[ilikezappa]

I feel that you might be right about him. I wish he would talk to the followers of John Macarthur, John Piper , Ted Haggard and all of those other Literalist halfwits

[mhopwood1]

Check out GMDInformation, another YouTuber who offers a non-fundamentalist view of Christianity and reason. There are these little rays of hope and sanity out there.

[mhopwood1]

I can assure you there's no-one less "set in his ways" than Albacete... I converted to Catholicisim in my early twenties when I was much younger and studying my Masters in Physics!

Like everyone, including me many times, in your post you confuse the religious sense or "instinct" with faith in a historical person which one has actually met directly; this is the crucial difference Albecete highlights in another of these videos.

[mhopwood1]

Even Christ was in some sense an "atheist" - there is that classic quotation from Chesterton's "Orthodoxy" where he comments that on the Cross, "God was forsaken of God".

Plus, Jews and Christians were originally accused of "atheism" because we had no images of our God in the temples. It was seen as madness and worse than madness by the pagan majority.

So I think actually the rational Christians and the fervent atheists are more or less on the same side really.

[fifty50matt]

i agree