Vreejack wrote:No, there is more to it than that. If you told a medieval person that there was no Creator, they would respond by demanding an explanation for where everything came from. "God did it" is the medieval answer for a world that had no way of knowing that naturalistic explanations for the world might exist. Since the Enlightenment and the discovery of the telescope and microscope there has been less and less space for the Creator to hide, and so it is easier and easier to be an intellectually satisfied atheist. Most people today do not consider weather prediction to be some sort of witchcraft, involving a pact with El Diablo, but instead ascribe it to the use of high-powered computers crunching good weather data through well-understood differential equations. (There is an recent anecdote about some literalist mullahs protesting a course program in weather forecasting, but I have not been able to track it down)
This is a caricature of actual medieval thinking. They did not at all invoke a Creator as a hypothesis to explain the world. Their remote ancestors in antiquity might have, but they assuredly didn't. And while it's indisputable they knew quite a lot less than we do about the details of all the "naturalistic causes" out there, they were quite well aware they existed. (At least on earth. They did believe that the heavenly spheres were above that kind of thing.)
Rather, they argued in a tightly-reasoned way from metaphysics to the existence of God. Whether you think their arguments are valid or not, increase in scientific knowledge has done nothing in itself to invalidate them - and furthermore, in the nature of the case could not ever do so. The existence or not of a Creator is not something science can even address.
To take a simple example, we know immensely more now about how heredity works - we know the structure of DNA and RNA and are learning more on a daily basis about how they are manipulated in the cell. They only knew that, obviously, traits in the parents tend to be passed on to the offspring. But they by no means thought that passage of traits was done by God 'by hand' so to speak - they knew perfectly well that natural causes were at work. They just didn't know the details of how they worked. If you could bring Thomas Aquinas into the present and teach him about DNA, his response would not be, "Oh! Guess we don't need God then," it would be, "Oh! So that's the efficient cause at work. Fascinating!" and then he'd write a hymn of praise to the Creator for the intricacy of His Creation. (After that, he'd probably write a synthesis of modern science with Aristotelian philosophy and Scholastic theology that would be enormously fun to read, but ah well.
Isn't it clear that if you could know every conceivable detail about the contents of the universe and how it works, the question, "Why is there a universe at all?" would remain completely untouched? It's a category mistake to think that scientific advances have anything to say about the presence or lack of a Creator; believers and unbelievers will be left just where they were, only knowing more. (And before you bring up Galileo, that's another topic entirely. The argument there wasn't over a Creator at all, which both sides fully accepted.)
Now... back to the comic, it's pretty clear to me that Ken lives in the Magic Kingdom, much like Janis does. What the heck is the deal with the MK? It seems to be a neutral meeting ground, and not a side of its own. Are the full-time residents there refugees from long-fallen sides? How does anything there get built if there's no Overlord to order them popped? Or are the building rules irrelevant because there's no large-scale fighting there, because of a lack of sides? (It does seem clear there can be combat there, though - Parson didn't get the warmest reception.)
