Unique explanatory advantages of book "Starting Science From God"

• Presentation of a science of theism in a realistic manner with explanatory and predictive power.
• Non-metaphorical and non-mythical understanding of theism
• Philosophical account of 'substance' in terms of persistent underlying propensities
• Recognition and many examples of 'multiple generative levels' in physics and psychology.
• Presentation of the basis of theism as the consequence of One God existing who is being itself & unselfish-love itself & wisdom itself.
• Principles in more detail:
  1. God is love which is unselfish and cannot love only itself.
  2. God is wisdom as well as love and thereby also power and action.
  3. God is life itself: the source of all dispositions to will, think and act.
  4. Everything in the world is a kind of image of God: minds and also natural objects.
  5. The dispositions of an object are those derivatives of divine power that accord with what is actual about that object.
• Describes an honest, welcoming and living theism
• No reductionist or 'nothing but' explanations of God, spirituality or mentality.
• Prediction that minds exist with spiritual loves, mental thoughts and physical actions within an integrated complex.
• Prediction of internal structure of minds: thoughts of love, of thought and of action.
• Prediction of internal structure of physical degrees: principles of effects (pregeometric physics), propagation of effects (field  theories), and of final affects (quantum mechanics leading to actual selections)
• Prediction of relations between the mental and the physical
• Prediction of relations between the divine and the spiritual+mental: that we receive life according to those actions our loves have made in the past.
• Prediction of spiritual degrees not in terms of expansion/ elevation/ vibration/ dimensions/ nondualism of consciousness, but in terms of principal loves.
• Why progressive evolution of physical forms is necessary to make living & thinking beings like humans.
• Gradual biological, psychological and spiritual build-up is necessary in general, as there are no instant adults.
• That evolutionary fitness must be selected not only naturally, but also theistically according to reception of life from the divine.
• The consciousness is the joint action of love and wisdom. It is not itself causal, but is theoperation of spiritual and mental causality.
• That permanent spiritual growth depends on those actions our loves have made with wisdom/faith in the past.
• That some formal modeling is possible within this scientific theism.

See www.beginningtheisticscience.com

Do religion and theism make factual claims?

Literal and metaphorical images and myths are often contrasted with each other, and we are sometimes asked to choose between them. Are the stories of the bible (with their miracles) to be taken literally, or metaphorically? Which? Tell me!  Julian Baggini recently asks these questions in the Guardian Newspaper, in his column entitled The articles of 21st-century faith. He says

Atheist critics of religion are often dismissed for dealing only with the simple, highly literal forms of belief, while ignoring more nuanced, intellectual understandings of religion. The form of this argument varies, but in general terms it rests on a rejection of the idea that religion requires belief in anthropomorphic supernatural beings. As Theo Hobson put it in an exchange with me a few years back, "a huge proportion of believers inhabit this grey area between 'literal' and 'metaphorical' belief – in a sense all believers do.

He wants to know whether religious people choose between a metaphorical interpretation of religion, the first bullet of which is:

M1. To be religious is primarily to assent to a set of values, and/or practise a way of life, and/or belong to a community that shares these values and/or practices. Any creeds or factual assertions associated with these things, especially ones that make claims about the nature and origin of the natural universe, are at most secondary and often irrelevant. 

Alternatively, the choice is to take stories and miracles literally, which is to take the opposing positions:

L1. Religious creeds or factual assertions are neither secondary nor irrelevant to religion.
L2. Religious belief requires the belief that supernatural events have occurred here on Earth.
L3. Religions can make claims about the physical nature, origin or structure of the natural universe. That which science can study and explain empirically should not be left to science, and if a religion makes a claim that is incompatible with our best science, the scientific claim need not prevail.
L4. Human intellect and imagination are insufficient to explain the existence of religious texts.

Baggini thinks that such people would like to take these 'opposing positions', but are reluctant to admit this in public, because this exposes them to being contradicted by science. So they retreat to the metaphorical views M1-M4, which are almost devoid of content.  Baggini's immediate aim is to determine whether the fashionable atheists of today are correct in attributing positions L1-L4 to the religious believers, and hence whether they are targeting actual beliefs when they attack these from the scientific materialist & atheist point of view.

In theistic science, by contrast, our position is clear. We clearly affirm all the positions L1, L2, L4, and the first sentence of L3. And we do not retreat from them in the face of science. Instead we take science as the systematic application of reason and evidence in examining the nature of things. We therefore use science to examine things of religion, of spirituality, of mind, and even of God insofar has the Divine has effects in the world. That is our challenge in theistic science.

There are some provisos, however:

1. We do not insist that "if a religion makes a claim that is incompatible with our best science, the scientific claim need not prevail", because religions are also subject to investigation by theistic science, and, after sufficient investigations, not all parts of all religions will necessarily be found based on fact.
2. We do not insist that all stories in religious scriptures are necessarily literally true. That is because some stories may be included because they are parables rather than history. Or they may be selected pieces of history put together to illustrate a spiritual truth as if history were the parable. We are not going to get into discussion about whether the stories are 'real but not true'.  Only to say that the true reference of the characters and events in the stories may be at one of the discrete levels that exist in the interior parts of our minds.

There is much to discover and to learn.