Since you didn’t say that the preacher holds to determinism as well, the two statements are not in explicit contradiction. Even under extreme liberalism and people possessing free will, God can orchestrate everything so that it brings eventual glory to him. Holding evildoers responsible and punishing them for their free actions is one of such decisions.
Yep, that’s about why life without immortality is ultimately meaningless. And without God and an objective purpose of human existence, even immortal life would be ultimately meaningless.
During my internship in a medical company before the turn of the millennium, I was tasked to write a small program with C++, with the purpose of filling the fields of an HTML form with values from the measuring application. The marketing director happened by and started convincing me why the program should definitely be written with ActiveX he had just read about. The CEO told him to keep his expertise to himself and me to continue the good work.
You seem to think that people themselves thought they were living in the Dark Ages between 500-1500. Err… nope. The name was coined by the clever secularists of the Enlightenment era, and an Enlightenment sells poorly unless you term the preceding era “dark”, which it was not scientifically, as I have explained above.
Lots of folk here have been fed a steady diet of myths, I see.
No, it was the monasteries who preserved the classics, copied them and supplied them to the universities where they studied, debated, and corrected Aristotle for centuries before the Renaissance. The Muslims supplied practically no new texts to the West. Read Stark, p. 121-200, and you are informed enough to discuss further.
The Greco-Roman culture produced some valid engineering but was scientifically pathetic because of the prevailing philosophy. With a steady supply of slaves, there was no need to create functional steam engines or windmills. This changed in the Christian Europe where slavery was forbidden. So no, we would not have reached to Moon by 1500, despite the lovely graph that keeps recycling in atheist circles. The Romans could not even collar a horse. See the same source.
The Renaissance consisted of puerile imitation of the perceived great culture of the ancients. It could have stymied the whole scientific enterprise in Europe, had the whole project not been already so strongly underway because of the Middle Ages’ scholarly diligence. See the same source.
As for Galileo, he had no empirical support for his theories yet! Nevertheless, he set himself against the scientific(!) establishment of his day and decided to publicly insult his benefactor and supporter, the cardinal. See the same source, plus Jeffrey Burton Russell’s book on the myths of Christianity.
I never claimed that the epoch was a just a big party. Without modern farming equipment and medicine, but several small kingdoms next to each other, you can expect war, plague, and famine anywhere in the world. Despite these difficulties, Europe rose to the leading position in both natural sciences and engineering by the 1300’s. And that was not in spite of Christianity, but precisely because of it. See the same source.
The Middle Ages were actually very active times science-wise… the only culture ever to breed empirical science, the Christian Europe was establishing universities and revising Aristotle’s foolish errors in physics by the 12th century, not to mention their accomplishments in engineering over Greece and Rome.
It is sad when cartoonists and social commentators continue equating the Middle Ages with darkness, ignorance and unscientificality despite the general consensus of historians. I highly recommend reading agnostic Rodney Stark’s ”For the Glory of God.”
Since you didn’t say that the preacher holds to determinism as well, the two statements are not in explicit contradiction. Even under extreme liberalism and people possessing free will, God can orchestrate everything so that it brings eventual glory to him. Holding evildoers responsible and punishing them for their free actions is one of such decisions.