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Retired Pope Benedict on issues of interest to the ID community

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From an 11-page letter to an atheist mathematician, the whole of which will be published later in a book:

Overall, the letter is devoted to an unfailingly polite, though occasionally pointed, response from Benedict on several stock subjects in the exchange between believers and their atheist critics:

Whether theology can be considered a “science”

Whether empirical sciences such as biology, and even mathematics, also have their flights of fancy – what Benedict describes as lapses into “science fiction”

Benedict also faults Odifreddi for proposing a “religion of mathematics” which fails to consider what he believes to be “three fundamental themes of human existence”: freedom, love and evil.

Also this;

“Whatever neurobiology does or doesn’t say about freedom, in the real drama of our history it’s there as a determining reality, and it has to be taken into consideration,” Benedict writes.

We’ll need to see it in context, of course, but his choice of language is curious and evokes his friend Cardinal Schonborn’s comments that so shocked the New York Times eight years ago.

Clearly, unlike many clergy, Benedict understands what the issues are and — one can but hope — appears willing to avoid meaningless no-conflict-between-faith-and-science phraseology, in favour of asking: Whose faith? What science? What counts as science? For example, if neuroscientists insist that denying free will is the “science” view, the Church has no option but to oppose them, and they would say that that means the Church is “opposing science.”

Comments
Jerad, obvious: the volume is asymptotic falling fairly fast, the surface, not as x rises the rings at dx get bigger and bigger. KFkairosfocus
September 24, 2013
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Don't forget that the retired pope is a phil prof. KFkairosfocus
September 24, 2013
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...it would take an infinite amount of paint to cover the surface but you can fill the object with a finite amount of fluid. Weird.
Not so weird if you think of it this way: Consider a water balloon. It contains finite amount of water and a finite surface area. Now compress the balloon into a pancake. The volume of water stays the same but the surface area increases. In the limit as the balloon is compressed to a pancake of zero thickness and infinite radius, the volume stays the same but the surface area will be infinite.cantor
September 24, 2013
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Whether empirical sciences such as biology, and even mathematics, also have their flights of fancy – what Benedict describes as lapses into “science fiction”
I, for one, would be very interested in the comments addressing this issue. One could consider things like imaginary numbers to be flights of fancy. Crazy even. But they turn out to have uses when modelling real world situations. Which is really mind-twisting when you first encounter it. My favourite is: take the function f(x) = 1/x. Rotate the part greater than or equal to 1 about the x-axis. When you calculate the volume of that object (sometimes called The Horn of Gabriel) you get a finite value. When you compute its surface area you get an infinite result. So . . . it would take an infinite amount of paint to cover the surface but you can fill the object with a finite amount of fluid. Weird.Jerad
September 24, 2013
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Aces! With Benedict and Francis sharing notes, the neo-Darwinists, not to speak of the New York Times, could be in for a torrid time - from to emerge 'as naked as the day that they were born! Music please, Philip... (kidding)Axel
September 24, 2013
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