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Steve Fuller’s Christmas lecture, at Swedish Twitter University: “How to think like God”

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Here.

Yes, he’s the sociologist who said that Darwinism today is in the same mess that “floored” astrology:

Without denying that many – though exactly how many is far from clear – people not only don’t believe in God but also appear to object to the very idea, it might be a good idea to get a sense of what it would mean to think like God. At the very least, this would give both believers and non-believers a clear sense of what they’re talking about. One might think that ‘theologians’, whose name literally means ‘scientists of God’, would offer some straight talk on the subject. And while some theologians do, many if not most are compromised by having to speak within one or another church stricture.

In any case, what better time to discuss this matter than the Christmas season! After all, the sort of God whose mind is worth fathoming is the one that led a motley crew of dissenting European Christians in the 17th century to initiate the Scientific Revolution. It’s this version God, which I believe remains very relevant, that I wish to discuss in my lecture. Even today, it’s pretty difficult to rationalize science – especially if we look at both the positive and the negative sides of its score sheet – unless we imagine ourselves as over time, albeit in fits and starts, getting closer to the mind of this hypothesized God, in whose ‘image and likeness’ the Abrahamic religions maintain that we have been created.

Of course, some believe that science was a big mistake to begin with, or that we’re likely to be doomed if we don’t curtail science’s development. But that’s not my starting point.”

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Comments
Summary of Steve Fuller's Christmas Lecture: http://svtwuni.wordpress.com/2011/12/27/steve-fuller-stu11/ No mention of 'intelligent + design'. However, perhaps of interest to IDists here: 2. My conception of God is that of Abraham, filtered through Augustine: i.e. we are created in God’s ‘image and likeness’. 6. For reality to be ‘intelligible’, as science presupposes, it must exist so our minds can fathom it. We must think like its creator. 11. we’ve made most progress in understanding life by treating biology as if it were divine technology. 12. Darwin wouldn’t buy the idea of genetic code, let alone genetic engineering. Too anthropomorphic. Yet these ideas work. Commentary: One advantage that mechanism has that it implies agency–a mechanic who takes responsibility for the machine, be it God or us. How to think like God in Fuller's sense: 14. Take words and numbers extremely literally as expressions of the divine logos and hence the basis for reconstructing the world. (BioLogos &/or ID?) 16.God’s properties are indefinitely extended versions of our own. Were they not, the idea of ‘distance’ from God would be nonsense. 22. Modernity is about simulating Newton’s God in our own fallible but corrigible way: we treat past and future as equally knowable.Gregory
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