Thursday, December 10, 2009

Overseas banking/Evolution and Christianity reconciled over 100 years ago?



Comparative Student 'going-away' banking 


























NAB
CBA
WBC
ANZ
SGB
HSBC
Market

Monthly fee
-100 (0)

0
0
3
0
0


Card provider
VISA
MC
MC
VISA
VISA
EFT only


































Card Overseas














Pay for something
2%
$1+2%
3%


2.50%
$1+1.1%


Cash withdrawal
$4+2%
$5+2%
$5+3%
$5+3%
$5+2.5%
$4.5+1.1%


















Telegraphic














Rates 10/12/09

6.9323 6.9216







7.0228

7.0559

Fee
22
22






20






I suppose the card fees are not that useful without their respective foreign currency exchange rates. Plus at each branch they said it's not available until you see the entry on your statement. Lame.


Anyway, recently I read Dawkins' God: Genes, memes, and the meaning of life by Alister McGrath - a professor of historical theology at Oxford University. It does seem like it's more about bashing Dawkins' bashing religion rather than putting forward religion but anyway... here's some of the points I took out:


  1. Various people in history were to blame for the ills of religion and anti-religion - not the movements as a whole (yeah, people always screw up things... take humans out of the system and it'd be fine)
  2. religion needs to keep changing with the times and McGrath says that the modern church is compatible with natural science (but where to stop with the picking and choosing/reinterpretation to fit?)
  3. In Victorian England, people were turned off Christianity because of the idea of everlasting hell
  4. In 1887, a few decades after Darwin, the Bishops of Carlisle, Bedford and Manchester said natural science was okay with religion - it's in the same sphere but in different planes or so. (But people can't agree so we've still got sentiment against evolution...)
  5. People can rationalise many things into others... Shoehorning as it were. eg Benjamin Warfield thought that biological evolution was quite magnificent and so it must've been guided by devine providence.
  6. Some stuff is unexplainable and does not need explanation - just leave it. (Well that's what I do when I'm lazy and my circuit or code just happens to work after a while.)
Still, an interesting response to Dawkins' stuff.



1 comment:

  1. yoyoyo, opinions: science and God are supposed to be compatible.

    Creatures that move on this earth + the whole ecosystem are quite complex and magnificent - for that to occur coincidentally, you have to believe in a miracle!

    so, v.good.

    ReplyDelete