Sentences with phrase «without supernaturalism»

Not exact matches

Without engaging in supernaturalism, Borg believes that Jesus» grounding in the Spirit was the «source of everything that he was,» and that it was on this basis that the Fourth Gospel ascribes to him the words, «I am the bread of life.»

In our generation there is danger and hope — danger that these noncognitive accouterments will lose their aesthetic harmony and hypnotic power when integrated with the basic prehensions of science, and be reverted into impotent and empty symbols, jarring, ugly, and without force in final satisfactions: hope that the power of Jesus as lure will reassert itself in an aesthetic context devoid of supernaturalism, a context such that (the language now picks up echoes of van Buren) the vision of Jesus, the free man, free from authority, free from fear, «free to give himself to others, whoever they were «1 — such that this vision in its earthly, human purity will lure our aims to a harmonious concrescence, integrating scientific insight and moral vision and producing a modern, intensely fulfilling human satisfaction.

But furthermore — and this is perhaps Darwin's greatest contribution — he developed a set of new principles that influence the thinking of every person: the living world, through evolution, can be explained without recourse to supernaturalism; essentialism or typology is invalid, and we must adopt population thinking, in which all individuals are unique (vital for education and the refutation of racism); natural selection, applied to social groups, is indeed sufficient to account for the origin and maintenance of altruistic ethical systems; cosmic teleology, an intrinsic process leading life automatically to ever greater perfection, is fallacious, with all seemingly teleological phenomena explicable by purely material processes; and determinism is thus repudiated, which places our fate squarely in our own evolved hands.