The Joys of Catholicism

[Idolater]

That's an interesting point.

I've always found it baffling that so few scientists seem able to recognize the circular reasoning behind much of the ice core data interpretation. I'm not even talking about the high-profile figures who have books to sell, institutions to protect, or agendas to promote. Their bias is almost expected.

What puzzles me more are the everyday researchers, the ones actually working with the data. They, it seems to me, should, in theory, be more objective. They often seem blind to the fact that their conclusions are preloaded into their assumptions. Instead of letting the evidence lead them, they let their worldview dictate how the evidence must be understood.

You would think that every once in a while, a young scientist, fresh out of school, without a reputation to defend and who is genuinely curious would raise a hand and say, “Hold on a second. Shouldn't we be letting the data guide our theories, not the other way around?” But that seems to never happen.

This is a good analogy, taken from another, unrelated thread, for why while born Evangelical, I eventually converted to Catholicism. Substitute "Evangelicals" for "scientists" or "researchers", "Biblical" or "Bible" for "ice core data", to get what I mean.

 

[Clete]

This is a good analogy, taken from another, unrelated thread, for why while born Evangelical, I eventually converted to Catholicism. Substitute "Evangelicals" for "scientists" or "researchers", "Biblical" or "Bible" for "ice core data", to get what I mean.

It is weirdly surreal how badly your analogy backfires. I have a difficult time believing anyone can be this blindly unaware of themselves.

You took my criticism of scientists who inject their assumptions into the evidence and then pretend to discover conclusions that were preloaded from the start and tried to apply that to Evangelicals reading the Bible. If you had stopped to think through what you were actually saying, you might have noticed that the problem I described applies far more directly to Catholicism than to nearly anything Evangelical.

Catholic theology begins with institutional dogma and then reshapes Scripture to fit. The Magisterium defines the worldview, and the Bible must be made to conform to it. Tradition serves as the filter, and anything that does not pass through cleanly is revised or ignored. That is not just a similarity to the error I described, it is the textbook definition of it!

By contrast, Evangelicalism, at its best, begins with an objective standard. That standard being Scripture itself. It does not always succeed, but it at least recognizes the principle that doctrine should be judged by the Word of God rather than the reverse. It tries to follow the evidence wherever it leads rather than building fences around a system and forcing the evidence to stay inside.

What you offered as a clever turn of the argument has boomeranged and hit your own position square between the eyes. The very thing you accused Evangelicals of doing is the lifeblood of Catholic theology. It is not escaping the problem I described, it is the longest lived and most carefully engineered version of it.

That said, it is not untrue that some Evangelicals, by which you likely just mean Protestants in general, fall into the same trap. Anyone who embraces Augustinian doctrine, whether Catholic or Protestant, is guilty of importing Aristotelian philosophical assumptions about the nature of God and interpreting everything else in their worldview, whether theological or otherwise, through that lens. The error is real, but it is not uniquely Protestant. In fact, it is basically the portion of Catholicism that survived the Reformation intact.

 

[Right Divider]