Thursday, October 3, 2013

Discussions in Science and Religion - Week 4: Recap - "Imago Reductio or Imago Dei?"



Religion and Science wk. 4 Neuro-religiosity:
Imago Reductio or Imago Dei?
 

React:
 
It’s here that a now familiar tension in the class arises. We seem to be at a stalemate where nothing more can be said beyond brute disagreement as to whether there’s anything more real [or substantial] going on in religion. The reductionist wants to wager the claim beyond the science that experience of the religious is illusory and [therefore, there is] no metaphysical reality [while] the spiritual or religiously-inclined believer disagrees [to these conclusions]. Is this story then, of man's "neuro-religiosity reasoning," to reject a divine reality connecting with the evolutionarily explained structures in our heads and social networks (imago reductio), or [further] reason to praise the divine [evolutionary structures and inclinations within the very] nature of our imaging (that divine imago dei) within our complex neural capacities?! What wildly different readings of the evidence right? What can adjudicate such a divide? Do we only have experience? (These are questions I’d love reactions to).
 
Tripp, following Cobb’s evolutionary story, is a profound YES! to the imago dei reading of the [human] story. Using John Cobb’s process theology Tripp then went on to frame the quantitative difference in our capacities as a vocational imago: a vocation based on our being subjects (beings with subjective conscious experience) related to God as subject. The "image of God" [metaphor is about man's] creativity, language and stories—it is an invitation to live in right relationships [with one another, and to] our ecosystems (recall week 3). [The] communally expressed "depth of living" (Cobb’s imago) based on our being able to, having the qualitative complexity to relate and right others relationships.

Philip made an interesting comment in response to Tripp’s "Cobbified anthropology" that it seems to be a integrated, this-worldly, vocational understanding that certain traditional theists can equally subscribe to right?  Without the subjectivity in everything and other (at first blush) quirky elements of full-fledged process thought? Id like to hear a but more from Tripp, more Cobb, as to what that system will give us that we can’t get from something like Philip’s use of a more classical model with Pannenberg?
 
 

 
 
 
 
Imago Dei






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