Thus for someone who knows, really knows, that god(s) exists (and there are many people who claim to know that god(s) exists) then some form of creationism follows as a rational deduction from the premises. It's no point telling these people that creationism is unscientific because given the premise that god(s) exists creationism is scientific. If god(s) exists then evolution is almost certainly false, if not in every particular then surely in the grand claims of a undesigned nature.
He references this Robin Hanson post as well. Both are channelling Thomas Nagel:
I agree with Philip Kitcher that the response of evolutionists to creation science and intelligent design should not be to rule them out as "not science." He argues that the objection should rather be that they are bad science, or dead science: scientific claims that have been decisively refuted by the evidence. ... However, the claim that ID is bad science or dead science may depend ... on the assumption that divine intervention in the natural order is not a serious possibility. ...
So far as I can see, the only way to make no assumptions of a religious nature would be to admit that the empirical evidence may suggest different conclusions depending on what religious belief one starts with, and that the evidence does not by itself settle which of those beliefs is correct, even though there are other religious beliefs, such as the literal truth of Genesis, that are easily refuted by the evidence. I do not see much hope that such an approach could be adopted, but it would combine intellectual responsibility with respect for the Establishment Clause. ...
I think the true position of those who would exclude intelligent design ... is that ... the very idea of design is as dead as Ptolemaic astronomy ... To exclude the possibility of divine intervention in the history of life is scientifically legitimate, and to assign it any antecedent positive probability at all is irrational. ... Most evolutionary scientists ... believe that there are no supernatural explanations, and that trying to show that they are incompatible with the evidence is a waste of time. ... They think, Anybody who is willing even to consider supernatural explanations is living in the past.
We cannot, however, make this a fundamental principle of public education. I understand the attitude that ID is just the latest manifestation of the fundamentalist threat, and that you have to stand and fight them here or you will end up having to fight for the right to teach evolution at all. However, I believe that both intellectually and constitutionally the line does not have to be drawn at this point, and that a noncommittal discussion of some of the issues would be preferable.
I don't know how willing I am to ratify the scientific assumption that the supernatural is never a possible explanation. I am a radical skeptic; I think that the supernatural is generally a very unlikely explanation, but I can evince no proof that the laws of physics as generally observed operate always and everywhere.
Nor do I think that even Young Earth creationism can be ruled out by science, if you are willing to posit the possibility of a creator; God might have created the world looking old for His own inscrutable reasons.
But that's no good way to set curricula. I also can't rule out the possibility that Brahma made the world out of a lotus flower at Lord Vishnu's command. Or that Gaia and Uranus spontaneously generated the world out of the primordial chaos. You can't teach the debate. Once you open the door for supernatural explanations, there's no debate. There are merely statements of faith.
ID and creationism are "not science" because they are untestable and unfalsifiable. There is no observation or experiment possible which would disprove them.
Scientists must rule out supernatural explanations by definition because science is the study of the natural, and allowing God to creep in ends all possibility of progress.
The key point scientists and their supporters need to make is not that religious accounts of creation are wrong (that will lose with the faithful), but that they are not science. It's just fine to talk about ID in an metaphysics or epistemology class, but not in biology.
Yes, there are merely statements of faith. Even radical skepticism exists in a framework of trust which makes questioning possible. "Doubt must come to an end." Where that end ultimately lies is a matter of faith. Frankly, I'd be a lot happier if everyone, including evolutionary scientists, were forced to explicitly identify those propositions which they hold on faith rather than claiming that I am a tough-minded skeptic, but you are an intellectually-dishonest fundamentalist. There isn't much of an epistemic difference, only a rhetorical one.
I will just never understand the ID vs. evolution debate.
If I were an all powerful, omniscient being, would I spend a ridiculous amount of time designing eyes, ears, legs, etc. or would I whip up the most ingenious, amazing natural system imaginable that would build everything automatically?
Evolution is far more impressive as a system than some busy tinkerer building animals.
To me, if you believe in God, why can't you believe he created evolution? Even if we're his ultimate creation, wouldn't he have known that we would be the end result? Plus, he's immortal right? Why would he mind waiting 8 billion years to see it play out? I'm sure he'd much more enjoy watching his system evolve to its ultimate end over time (which he of course knows, being omniscient and all) rather than just spending a day building us and watching us run around.
I mean really. There's room for God in any science.
Alex & Robin are, I think, confusing "logical" with "scientific". They are correct to say that you can logically argue for creationism if you assume a creator (which is, I guess, no more drastic an assumption than, "the laws of the universe have always been thus") but you can not scientifically argue it. Science does not allow that basic assumption.
But that's no good way to set curricula.
No it isn't. But that's not the point. The point is that, if you believe (or assume, for the sake of argument) that there exists a supernatural being that created the universe, then ID is pretty rational. In fact, once you have a supreme being as a given, it would be irrational to decide a priori that He must have kept his hands off the universe.
Now I don't accept a supreme being as a given, and I think Intelligent Design is wrong. But for the people who do believe in God, the superstition lies in THAT belief itself, not the inference that God -> Intelligent Design (or at least the possibility of it).
I'd like to second Rob's comment. ID and creationism are fine theories if we are talking about cosmology. Because really some super being we can't understand creating the universe seems on par with random chance. The problem is that they are not science, since their claims are untestable.
As a rational person of faith, my biggest problem with ID and creationism is that it always seems to want to make God smaller than our imaginations. To me, any creator of the universe who is not large enough to encompass all of our theories of the universe is not worth worshiping.
For an example, think about what general relativity has to say about time. Time is a property that is purely a part of our universe. So any being that created the universe exists outside of time. This means that God does not even perform actions in the way that we think of them, since actions are acts imbedded within time.
So I wish fundamentalists would have a little more humility when talking about their knowledge of God, because none of us really have a clue. That's why it's faith.
Rob Lyman is exactly right. Even the intelligent-design people sometimes concede the point, as when they complain of discrimination on the basis of religion when they get fired from biology jobs or don't get recommendations for medical school. What other "scientific belief" is found only among members of particular religious traditions? The only time it becomes "science" is when they're trying to get it into the schools.
My grandfather, a paleontologist who was also a devout Baptist, once wrote a book about human evolution, addressed to a lay audience. He spent no time at all trying to defend evolution, as he assumed (in the 1930s) that all educated people accepted it; the book just discussed details and particular theories. We have regressed quite a bit since those days.
Disclaimer before my comment -- I have no "creationist" position to evangelize or refute.
However, I find Evolution largely an article of faith -- or at least declaring evolution a "fact" based on circumstantial evidence a bit arrogant.
Since I tend to be endless rather than enduring, allow simply these ideas.
My understanding of the Origin of Species is that evolution represents minor biological anomalies (most of which prove fatal to the organism), over eons, and only as a reaction to the environment.
As such, shouldn't we be finding a continuum of organisms, not stark divisions between species? If adaption is simply a reaction to the environment, how can we explain Homo Sapien's extraordinary increase in brain-size as a reaction to an environment that required less than 4 hours effort a day for food and shelter?
The point is that I suspect future generations are going to be snickering up their sleeve at our complete faith in evolution as much as we do for those who accepted circumstantial evidence that the world was flat.
That does NOT mean I accept or refute the creationsist position.
BLC
I think it's important to point out that applying God towards a scientific explanation for the origins of man (or the universe) reaches across all scientific theories.
If the hand of God can be used to explain one physical observation, it can be used to explain all of them. At what point can we then say that the precession of the perihelion of Mercury's orbit can be explained by general relativity, or simply because God willed it so? To that end, all scientific explanations would be accompanied by the alternate explanation of God's will.
If we look at the history of the universe, from the Big Bang till now, we see ever increasing complexity. From the initial inflation after the big bang, to the first photons, then atoms, onward to the first supernovas, as they began producing the heavier elements of the periodic table, to the beginning of those elements forming into planetary systems, to the eventual advent of life, we see systems becoming ever more complex.
Now given that:
Strong Nuclear Force = 1
Electromagnetic Force = 0.0072
Weak = 10^-6
Gravity = 6x 10^-39
Is it possible that there is another much weaker force that, ever so imperceptibly, drives the universe to become ever more complex?
I would imagine that the existence of this force would be a scientifically testable hypothesis.
Two thoughts:
1) Is ID useful? In other words, if ID is true, does it tell us anything that will allow us to predict the future or manipulate our natural world (two litmus tests for me of science).
2) A very wise and devout Christian physicist of my aquaintence once opined:
' God really has no place in the science game. If you can prove God's existence scientifically, then he just becomes another cog in the machine, and ceases to be what I would recognize as God'.
(it should be noted the above physicist *absolutely* believed in God the creator of the universe, but also was *really* into studying the mechanism of God's creation).
What's the positive content of Intelligent Design as a theory? What does it see as its open questions? What is its research program to answer them?
"To me, if you believe in God, why can't you believe he created evolution?"
Well, for starters, evolution is unproven, as well. Now that's not to say that it couldn't be proven, but it hasn't.....and given that the theory has been around for more than a hundred years and we still haven't found a missing link for any specie which has "evolved", though we've found quite a few which haven't evolved for millions of years, I'm guessing that we never will prove it......but maybe, that's just me.....
if you believe (or assume, for the sake of argument) that there exists a supernatural being that created the universe, then ID is pretty rational.
Yes, that's why it's a mistake to try to argue that ID is "wrong." The focus needs to be on the (necessary) exclusion of God from scientific accounts of the world. This exclusion does not prove--or even imply--that God does not exist, or cannot interfere in the world, it just assumes that He isn't doing so. Assuming otherwise makes science impossible.
I don't know how willing I am to ratify the scientific assumption that the supernatural is never a possible explanation. I am a radical skeptic; I think that the supernatural is generally a very unlikely explanation, but I can evince no proof that the laws of physics as generally observed operate always and everywhere.
Irrelevant. Anything "supernatural" is outside the purview of science, by definition. And science can only go so far as we can observe.
The rest is theology/philosophy/whatever you care to call it.
Definitely need to state the premises for the debate. Science vs. creationism is a useless argument. The problem is that too many secularists don't understand nor respect people who truly believe in their religion (God, Shiva, Flying Spaghetti Monster). They want to "win" and get the religious to accept that all religions are false myths and everyone becomes atheists or at least agnotheists. This is just somewhat unproductive.
Science needs to say that the young earthers may be right. It's just that regardless of the Truth, evolution and the rest of Science works really, really well assuming no intervention from a supernatural being. It's not proof that there is no Supernatural being, nor that he doesn't intervene, it's just that the Supernatural is by definition unknowable and reliant on faith. Leave theology for Sundays and work with Science during the week as its the only explanation that we can prove.
Unfortunately too many people follow Dawkins and Hitchens and thus want to humiliate the religious. Personally I prefer to win, or at least get the debate off the table, rather than requiring the existential humiliation of the other side. Well, at least on the creationism thing - the Left needs to be utterly destroyed and accept its inherent Evil, but then creationists didn't kill 100M people in the last 100 years just for kicks.
I cannot take the Bible literally. See Chronicles II Chapter 4 Verse 2
That said, Science is the orderly investigation of God's creation. It is an attempt to carry out the job God gave Adam in the story of Genesis. I think it is a very bad idea to rely on words in a book instead of examination of the real thing.
Philip Kitcher's idea that "the claim that ID is bad science or dead science may depend ... on the assumption that divine intervention in the natural order is not a serious possibility..." misses the point of what science is. Until we can test for divine intervention (tough to replicate or peer review), whether divine intervention is possible or even probable isn't how science explains things. Occam's razor drives us towards less complicated explanations; science requires that those hypotheses be testable.
Once you open the door for supernatural explanations, there's no debate. There are merely statements of faith.
After a day spent writing in to critique, I have to say: incredibly well put.
Where that end ultimately lies is a matter of faith. Frankly, I'd be a lot happier if everyone, including evolutionary scientists, were forced to explicitly identify those propositions which they hold on faith rather than claiming that I am a tough-minded skeptic, but you are an intellectually-dishonest fundamentalist.
What propositions do you believe someone who accepts evolution must hold on faith? For that matter, what exactly do you mean by "faith?" In this context, I would define it as something like "belief unjustified by evidence." I emphatically deny that evolution rests on faith.
Can I put in my pitch for Iluvatar and his merry band of Valar creating the Universe with their music and singing? Stupid Melkor spoiling it all with his love of discord like some latter day avante garde artiste.
Megan wrote:
but I can evince no proof that the laws of physics as generally observed operate always and everywhere.
In fact, physicists do not assume that the laws of physics operate always and everywhere. Rather, there are several observations that establish that the laws of physics have changed very little in the past billions of years and are almost identical everywhere. For example, observations of spectral lines in distant quasars show that hydrogen atoms on the other side of the universe are identical to those here in the laboratory. This means that the fundamental physical constants (electron mass and charge, speed of light, proton mass, etc.) that govern atomic structure have not changed by more than a tiny fraction in billions of years.
There are several cosmologies that claim that, e.g., the speed of light has changed ever-so-slightly since the big bang, and other theories that claim that the laws of physics may be radically different in parts of the universe too distant to be observed.
The constancy of the laws of physics is not an axiom of science, but rather is subject to the same tests as any other scientific theory.
noseeum said: "To me, if you believe in God, why can't you believe he created evolution?"
jwh said: "Well, for starters, evolution is unproven, as well. Now that's not to say that it couldn't be proven, but it hasn't.....and given that the theory has been around for more than a hundred years and we still haven't found a missing link for any specie which has "evolved", though we've found quite a few which haven't evolved for millions of years, I'm guessing that we never will prove it......but maybe, that's just me....."
I think that misses my point, JWH. My question is, why would someone who believes in God be threatened by the theory of evolution?
Sure, maybe evolution has its mistakes. Or maybe its 100% right. I do think this is a lot more settled than you give it credit for, as there are indeed new species found constantly that strengthen those links. But really, who cares? That's arguing over details. Whatever the details, if you believe in God, it was God's plan.
Nothing we discover scientifically is a threat to God. If he exists, it's simply helping us further understand how incredibly amazing his plan was. One could argue scientific inquiry is one of the most spiritual endeavors there is.
Evolution doesn't say that God doesn't exist. Merely that He need not exist for the biodiversity seen on Earth to have developed. There are mountains of evidence pointing towards the fact of common descent and supporting the theory that evolution by natural selection can explain the observed facts in the world.
It's worth pointing out that the exact same arguments used to inject GOd into the evolution debate apply equally to pretty much any other scientific question. Why don't the particle physicists at the LHC consider tiny angels as a reasonable alternative? Because once you accept the existence of God, then it's logical that all observed phenomena, whether biology, chemistry, or physics, are in some way intelligently designed.
What makes biology so unique that it needs to stand aside and allow religion to be taught alongside it?
From my present position in time, I see no scientific evidence of a supreme being that can be hypothesized as a director of life. However, it is an article of faith to suppose that no such evidence will ever arise.
What was interesting about Tabarrok's analogy was this (and I think a fair number of the commenters to both the older and the newest posts missed this)- someone who found a Timex wristwatch in 10,000 B.C. would have to suppose one of two things- either a "god" created the watch, or the watch spontaneously arose from the world around it. Indeed, such a prehistoric scientist might even be able to conduct experiments that show organization from more chaotic to less chaotic structures- he might also quite plausibly find things in nature that were "ancestors" to the watch- and such scientists could definitely criticize the assertion that "something superior" constructed the watch because there would be no evidence that such a being even exists.
Shorter version- what is "supernatural" is relative to one's technological position.
What propositions do you believe someone who accepts evolution must hold on faith?
Well, the belief that fossils found in the ground are the remnants of once-living beings, or that isotope ratios represent the product of long-term decay from a known starting point.
These things could have been placed there by a sneaky God. Nobody living was there to see it happen. To assume that they weren't is to hold a belief for which there is no evidence.
I think the assumption is justified for the reasons I've already given, but I can't prove it.
Well, I would argue that one has only one reliable criteria when deciding the possibility or impossibility of propositions that are essentially premises from which reasoning starts.
If a premise necessarily entails contradictions, the premise is flawed. If it doesn't, it MAY be valid.
The problem is that too many secularists don't understand nor respect people who truly believe in their religion (God, Shiva, Flying Spaghetti Monster). They want to "win" and get the religious to accept that all religions are false myths and everyone becomes atheists or at least agnotheists. This is just somewhat unproductive.
The long-term trend throughout the developed world is a decline in the power, popularity and prestige of religion. For now, I'll be satisfied with a continuation of that trend. I don't expect most Americans to become atheists/agnostics any time soon, but I do hope and expect that they will continue to become less and less religious. It seems to me quite plausible that within a few decades religion will have declined in the developed world to the point at which it is no longer a meaningful influence on social/moral/political beliefs and behaviors. In much of Europe, religion has declined so much over the past century that it is already close to that point of irrelevance.
observations of spectral lines in distant quasars show that hydrogen atoms on the other side of the universe are identical to those here in the laboratory.
No they don't. They show hydrogen atoms with spectral lines shifted far into the infrared. We explain this by invoking redshift caused by the expansion of the universe, combining two locally known phenomena. But it may be that the laws of physics are different out there and our explanation is wrong.
Similarly, frequency-comb experiments can show that, as of right now, alpha is stable. But they cannot show that alpha is cosmically required to shift in a steady or smooth way, so extrapolation to either the past or the future is unjustified.
If evolution is proven true, that wouldn't prove the non-existence of God, but it may prove that a literal interpretation of the Bible is wrong. Some Christian denominations aren't held to believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible and can acknowledge evolution without destroying God or their faith. Other Christian denominations, however, may be destroyed if the Bible can't be taken literally so their followers are fighting for their existence so to speak and are willing to put reason aside to do so.
Rob Lyman said: the belief that fossils found in the ground are the remnants of once-living beings, or that isotope ratios represent the product of long-term decay from a known starting point.
These things could have been placed there by a sneaky God. Nobody living was there to see it happen. To assume that they weren't is to hold a belief for which there is no evidence.
I think the assumption is justified for the reasons I've already given, but I can't prove it.
That's a bit of a stretch, no? There's hundreds of years of research that's been put into analyzing fossils and isotope decay. I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert on either, but these conclusions aren't leaps of faith. They are the results of centuries of research.
It's not like the first fossil was pulled out of the ground and all of the conclusions were finalized a minute later. The conclusions are the result of questions. "What is this? How did it get there? etc. etc."
By your logic, it's an article of faith that if I jump right now, I will come back to the ground. Sure you can argue that, but what practical use does the argument have?
It is absolutely possible that God created the universe one second ago, and that all your happy childhood memories are an illusion created by God for His own inscrutable reasons. This possibility (and any other) is by definition within the power of an omnipotent God.
It is equally possible that God created the universe five thousand years ago with all its memories of its billion-year existence (fossils, light from distant galaxies, etc.) already in place. There is no way to prove in fact that any thing at all exists.
But it is not scientific, to believe in all these illusions. All science can tell us is that the Universe _appears_ to be 14 billion years old. People are free to believe that this is all an illusion, but they are not free to call such claims _scientific_. They can't say that the preponderance of observational evidence suggests that one should not rely on observational evidence for anything in particular. (Well, they can say all this... its a free country and all, but that don't make it true)
Belief that all observations have been thwarted by an omnipotent God may be logically consistent, but it is not scientific.
Evolution occurs all around us. It is the gradual shift in the distribution of characteristics in a population in response to selective pressure. Sometimes mutations of various types introduce new characteristics, most of which have no effect. The more focused the pressure the quicker the selection.
If you found them in nature, would you conclude that a Great Dane and a Chihuahua are the same species? You could only cross breed them via artificial insemination.
Look at antibiotic resistance in bacteria. The distribution of bacteria using more efficient versions of some fundamental cellular processes versus bacteria using less efficient processes has changed because of the selective pressure of antibiotics.
We do have continua of species. Zebras, donkeys, asses, and horses are all very similar, but when crossbred do not produce fertile offspring. Wolves, Coyotes and dogs are inter-fertile, but they don't normally interbreed because the occupy different ecological niches.
So. We know the basic mechanism of evolution works. The sticky point is whether it produced us. It's similar to the response my parents didn't do that!
The link at my name in the post is missing, and the next two paragraphs after should be shown as a quote.
The only problem is that, in science, you can't start off by assuming something non-scientific. You can't just say, "Well, given this premise, it becomes scientific!"
I mean, in that context, I could just say, "Given the premise that there are tiny, invisible gremlins capable of causing all the force in the universe, the idea of such gremlins becomes scientific!" It's effectively the same as, "Given the premise that there is a being, called God capable of creating the world and life as we know it, the idea of such a God doing so becomes scientific."
And, sure, one could argue that there may very well be such gremlins. But there is no evidence to indicate that they exist, so to act as if they are a viable, rational theory is just silly.
Science doesn't aim at being a source of objective truth. By the very definition of the scientific method, every single theory that the scientific community operates under could be, to someone who has all the facts, glaringly wrong. They're just the best explanations that people have been able to come up with using the evidence we have. To admit "theories" that attempt to leap around that evidence via assumption is to try to break down science itself.
Rob Lyman,
Well, the belief that fossils found in the ground are the remnants of once-living beings, or that isotope ratios represent the product of long-term decay from a known starting point.
Huh? I assert that beliefs are supported by evidence, not faith. If you are seriously claiming that those beliefs require faith, I am curious as to what you would consider a belief that does not require faith.
These things could have been placed there by a sneaky God. Nobody living was there to see it happen. To assume that they weren't is to hold a belief for which there is no evidence.
There is no evidence that fossils were placed there by a sneaky God. It is therefore irrational to believe that they were.
I think the assumption is justified for the reasons I've already given, but I can't prove it.
Sorry, I don't see where you described why you think you would be justified in believing an assumption about the origin of fossils. If you seriously believe that the belief that fossils were placed there by a sneaky God and the belief that they were not are both assumptions, and that evidence does not support either assumption over the other one, why do you yourself make the latter assumption? What justification do you think you have for making that assumption?
By your logic, it's an article of faith that if I jump right now, I will come back to the ground. Sure you can argue that, but what practical use does the argument have?
Well, none, but that's why I reject the "sneaky God" explanation. Still, "practical use" isn't the same as "absolute truth."
ID is not science since it is a hypothesis that is consistent with all observations. So why is it a big thing now when we used to accept evolution as a scientific fact?
I think it is because we've evolved into a society where belief in science (rational explanations for everything) has acquired a mythological status -- it's taboo even to question it publicly (see the scary global warming debate where being a doubter is equivalent to being a heretic to be drawn, slaughtered, and/or burned at the stakes).
In that environment, believers in evolution will overstate their case, as they have -- some of them assert that evolution proves that there is no god. That's of course just as silly as claiming that ID is a fact. Neither proposition can be (dis)proved.
So the real debate is actually less about ID v. evolution, it's about the limits of science. Evolutionary theory is consistent with lots of fossil findings, and some observations of adaptive changes in some species with high generational turnover. But no evidence has been found to be consistent with inter-species evolution. So the macro-version of evolutionary theory is a generalization and extrapolation from micro-data that are consistent with evolution. That is, it's still a poorly founded macro-theory. Yet it is taught in textbooks as fact, i.e., empirically proven theory.
Thus, the backlash. It would be much better of evolutionists took a step back and admitted that they have a nice theory, consistent with much data, but not a complete picture proved by complete observations. That would tone down the debate a lot, I think.
ID belongs in a biology class only as a counterweight to the excessive claims of Darwinism. There would seem to be better ways of teaching that point than through ID, however.
Assumptions, by definition, aren't justified. If they were justified, they'd be conclusions, not assumptions. Knowledge, all knowledge, is a collective good, only possible within a community with functioning systems of trust.
Why? Because only a minuscule fraction of what you consider yourself to "know" is based upon direct experience. Everything else, including scientific evidence, is just something someone else told you, and which you accepted on their authority. Even if you went out to "prove" a given scientific "fact," you'd have to trust that the people who made your instruments are reliable, and to do that you'd have trust that the instruments they used to make their instruments are too. Eventually, you just have to stop being a skeptic and take something, even on faith. There is no such thing as knowledge without authority. I say again: "Doubt must come to an end."
Now you might make an argument that having faith in the scientific community makes more sense to you than having faith in God. Maybe you find one easier to swallow than the other. Fine. More power to you. But that doesn't mean that belief in one is faith whereas belief in the other isn't.
Robb Lyman wrote: No they don't. They show hydrogen atoms with spectral lines shifted far into the infrared. We explain this by invoking redshift caused by the expansion of the universe, combining two locally known phenomena. But it may be that the laws of physics are different out there and our explanation is wrong.
He's right of course, and I knew this, but didn't want to unnecessarily complicate what I wrote. What I should have written is that the ratios of line frequencies don't change. And, of course, people have tried other versions of cosmologies in which the universe is not expanding, but our fundamental measurement of distance (e.g., the wavelength of a bit of light emitted by a Hydrogen atom) is changing instead. It turns out that the two are observationally equivalent, and so scientifically indistinguishable.
So people have instead tried to focus on those aspects of the laws of physics which can be expressed as unit-less constants, such as the _alpha_ that I think Robb is referring to. I think he's referring to the fine-structure constant, a constant with no units made up of the ratios of the speed of light, the charge of the electron, and Planck's constant, and with a value of roughly 1/137. Although its future behavior can of course not be tested observationally, its value in the distant past can be observationally measured in e.g., those quasar absorption lines I wrote about. Its value in the distant past here on earth can also be measured using the Oklo natural nuclear fission reactor. The Wikipedia article on the fine structure constant has a nice discussion of all this if you want to read more, and refers to some of the latest observational papers on this subject, which probably do a better job describing the science than my summary is doing.
These sets of observations are consistent with a constant alpha, and place limits on how alpha may have changed over the past billions of years. Other dimensionless ratios have also been probed. So, it has been established observationally that the universe appears to have had constant laws of physics for billions of years and over billions of light years. And scientists are continuing to probe these observations hoping to be the one who gets the Nobel prize for establishing that the laws of physics have changed.
I think my basic point holds: the constancy of the laws of physics is not an axiom, but a theory in the scientific sense of being supported by experimental and observational evidence.
What justification do you think you have for making that assumption?
In essence, I'm taking an inverse Pascal's wager. If God is being sneaky with the fossils and radioactive decay, it does us no harm to assume He isn't and try to fit them into a rational framework. If He isn't being sneaky, then it hurts us to assume that he is, because it prevents us from learning.
What evidence do you have that fossils are actually the remnants of ancient life, as opposed to red herrings planted by somebody much, much smarter than us, to test our faith?
You do realize there are hosts of scientists who believe in God and do not accept creationism by whatever name as scientific?
And the supernatural explanation comes down to this:
IDer: I don't understand how X could occur naturally. It is proof of God's presence. (Or aliens.)
Person who has studied X extensively: Actually it does make sense. You need to understand the amino acids involved and the parallels in fish and....
IDer: Okay, sure, you've got an explanation for X. But I don't understand Y. So that's proof of God. Or aliens.
Person who has studied X extensively: *gnashes teeth, goes off to recruit person who has studied Y extensively*
Refuting ID comes down to case by case refuting every single instance that is held up as "too perfect to be chance." It's boring. And impossible to win. No matter how many times you refute "Who ever heard of 10% of an eye?" (Earthworms) someone will pop up in the corner to repeat it 100 more times.
Shorter: Maybe one of those lights in the sky actually IS an alien spaceship and R2D2 is on board! But it's up to the conspiracy people to prove it, not to the rest of us to disprove every new light.
The real problem is with the secularists who don't understand logic.
Just to do a basic mathematical proof you require several axioms. Math hits a few irreducible assumptions that can't be removed. By not acknowledging the same with biology or physics you give room to the creationists.
True Math and Science acknowledges its limitations. There are just some things that have to be taken as granted for any inquiry to take place. That doesn't mean that creationists are right (they're very wrong) it just means that you have to grant them that they could be right. It's just that we have no way of verifying their claims, and even if they are true, God did one hell of a job making it look like they weren't.
Communists back in the day had to deal with this in International trade. The people who dealt with grain and oil shipments couldn't use Marxist analysis - cause it's utter crap. They had to deal with "objective reality". So you say "let's pretend that capitalism is true, and we'll get our gain and sell the oil",even while "knowing" that Marxist-Leninist thought is the true path of humanity. Put the creationists in the same position - grant them their truth but get them to accept that our limited senses and reasoning require us to act as if evolution was true. It doesn't matter if people believe in Creationism as long as they act as if it's false.
And the idiot who thinks that religion will wither away - good luck. People have predicting the imminent decline of religion longer than the imminent decline of markets. Religion fills a cognitive need and satisfies key parts of Maslow's hierarchy. Most secular people replace it with something they take on faith (Communism or environmental catastrophism) as well. Never mind that religious people have far more kids than the non religious. It would be nice if people all went for rationality and agnotheism while adhering to the culture of Judeo-Christianity, but it isn't happening in the next few centuries.
Rob Lyman,
In essence, I'm taking an inverse Pascal's wager. If God is being sneaky with the fossils and radioactive decay, it does us no harm to assume He isn't and try to fit them into a rational framework. If He isn't being sneaky, then it hurts us to assume that he is, because it prevents us from learning.
This doesn't make any sense to me, either. You obviously don't know that it does you no harm to "assume" (as you would have it) that the fossils were not placed there by a sneaky God. For all you know, he could be testing your faith, and by making that assumption you have failed the test and will be punished with hellfire and damnation.
What evidence do you have that fossils are actually the remnants of ancient life, as opposed to red herrings planted by somebody much, much smarter than us, to test our faith?
We have evidence from biology, geology, paleontology, etc that fossils are remnants of ancient life. Obviously, it is logically possible that this conclusion is false, and that the fossils are objects planted by a sneaky God that merely appear to be the remnants of ancient life. But that's an irrational assumption. There's no evidence for it.
I am still curious as to what you think the fundamental difference is between a belief held on faith (that is, a faith-based assumption) and a belief that is a rational conclusion from evidence. As far as I can tell from your writings so far, you don't believe there is any meaningful difference. You seem to think that all beliefs are faith-based assumptions.
That is not, strictly speaking, true. Tired light cosmology requires a lot of finagling to produce effects like time dilation in distant supernovae and a blackbody spectrum for the cosmic microwave background. It's also hard to put together a self-consistent theory of gravity that allows for a stable static universe.
If the standard model and tired light were truly observationally indistinguishable, then tired light would still be considered a viable theory, but it is not, and the reason why has everything to do with observations.
hey,
And the idiot who thinks that religion will wither away - good luck. People have predicting the imminent decline of religion longer than the imminent decline of markets.
There is abundant evidence that religion has been declining in the developed world for a century or more. There is some evidence that the decline is accelerating. There is no evidence that the decline has stopped. The decline has been especially rapid in Europe, but it's happening in the United States too.
I would say that if anyone is an idiot, it is someone who ignores this evidence.
You obviously don't know that it does you no harm to "assume" (as you would have it) that the fossils were not placed there by a sneaky God.
Pascal didn't know that prayer wouldn't piss God off as much like bunch of naggy children always demanding something from Dad. I cannot and do not claim to know what happens after death. But as for temporal knowledge, I'm pretty confident that we do, indeed, do better by deliberately excluding God from our theories.
We have evidence from biology, geology, paleontology, etc that fossils are remnants of ancient life.
Fossils are perfectly consistent with ancient life in every way. But as between "God put them there" and "ancient life," I don't know what evidence you are talking about. Perhaps you could clarify.
I am still curious as to what you think the fundamental difference is between a belief held on faith (that is, a faith-based assumption) and a belief that is a rational conclusion from evidence.
My point is that rational conclusions from evidence rest, ultimately, upon unprovable foundations. We assume that when we find bones in the ground, they arrived there by natural, and not supernatural, processes. We make this assumption because it is essential to the advancement of knowledge about the natural world. We could make the opposite assumption and drift off into a theological inquiry about what motivated God chose to put bones in the ground for no reason; indeed, if an understanding of God (instead of the natural world) was our goal, we would have to make that assumption or find our inquiry frustrated. I think the former assumption is more worthwhile because I think an understanding of nature is more important than an understanding of God, but I do not claim that it isn't an assumption.
Ryan Davidson,
Now you might make an argument that having faith in the scientific community makes more sense to you than having faith in God. Maybe you find one easier to swallow than the other. Fine. More power to you. But that doesn't mean that belief in one is faith whereas belief in the other isn't.
So you seem to be another proponent of the "all beliefs are held on faith" position. If you seriously believe this, why do you believe the scientific account of the origin of the world rather than the young-earth creationist account? Indeed, why do you believe any scientific claim over any competing religious one? If they're all a matter of faith, why assent to any of them over any others? Why is one faith better or more likely to be true than another faith? How do you choose between them?
No, the real problem is with people (I don't have a label for them, sorry) who don't understand science. Science is precisely that body of knowledge produced by the scientific method; nothing more, and nothing less. I'll leave a rigorous definition of the scientific method for some other time, but two good guidelines are testable hypotheses and predictive power. If your theory is immune to being falsified by experiment, then it isn't science. If your theory can't predict something you didn't already know about the world, then it isn't science.
It is important to note that science isn't necessarily "right," and non-scientific belief systems aren't necessarily wrong. In fact science is frequently wrong; scientific theories are discarded all the time because they are not borne out by observation and experiment. It is that very self-correction that makes science so useful.
Despite the fact that science makes no claim of infallibility, it has acquired a great deal of epistemological power in our culture, largely because its progeny, technology, has delivered miracles that any priest in history cannot help but envy. As a result, we see occasional efforts to stamp upon this or that religious belief the imprimatur of science. People are, of course, welcome to believe such if they like, but to teach it in a science classroom inevitably undermines the goal of teaching students what science is and how it works.
Rob Lyman,
I cannot and do not claim to know what happens after death. But as for temporal knowledge, I'm pretty confident that we do, indeed, do better by deliberately excluding God from our theories.
But what is the basis for that confidence? According to you, believing the scientific claim about the nature of fossils rather than the young-earth creationist claim is a matter of making a different "assumption." Why are you "confident" that one assumption is "better" than the other?
My point is that rational conclusions from evidence rest, ultimately, upon unprovable foundations. We assume that when we find bones in the ground, they arrived there by natural, and not supernatural, processes. We make this assumption because it is essential to the advancement of knowledge about the natural world. We could make the opposite assumption and drift off into a theological inquiry about what motivated God chose to put bones in the ground for no reason; indeed, if an understanding of God (instead of the natural world) was our goal, we would have to make that assumption or find our inquiry frustrated. I think the former assumption is more worthwhile because I think an understanding of nature is more important than an understanding of God, but I do not claim that it isn't an assumption.
Huh? Your argument is circular. If the "former assumption" (namely, "that when we find bones in the ground, they arrived there by natural, and not supernatural, processes") is false, then you're not "understanding" nature by making that assumption, you're misunderstanding it. You're falsely believing the origins of bones in the ground are natural rather than supernatural. You can't justify an assumption about the origin of the bones by simply asserting that the assumption is true and therefore leads to a better understanding of the origins. So how do you justify it?
Why are you "confident" that one assumption is "better" than the other?
Explaining the natural world by reference to supernatural phenomena makes understanding the natural world impossible. If you think that birds fly because they were given magic by God, you're not going to build an airplane. If you think prayer cures the sick, you won't be able to develop Cipro. For that reason, supernatural phenomena of all types should be categorically excluded from efforts to understand nature.
This does not mean that supernatural phenomena should be categorically denied as untrue or impossible--merely as unscientific.
You can't justify an assumption about the origin of the bones by simply asserting that the assumption is true and therefore leads to a better understanding of the origins.
I didn't. I said that you do better to exclude God from your theories about nature than to include Him, on the grounds that inclusion prevents the advance of knowledge if false, but exclusion does not. The worst that happens to knowledge if God is falsely excluded is we have a bunch of stuff in nature we can't explain. The worst that happens if He is falsely included is that we can't explain anything at all. That makes exclusion a better temporal bet, whatever it might mean for your immortal soul.
First, the assumption of a creator throws Occam’s Razor out the window.
Second, if there was a creator who created the universe 6,000 years ago, then he created it in a non-haphazard manner. She/he wrote in an elaborate back story of the Big Bang and the Evolution of Life with sufficient detail that we in the present cannot distinguish the story from reality. It seems to me, even if you believe in a recent creation, you may want to study the rules with which the Creator makes the universe appear to work.
Third, the term belief should never appear in reference to a scientific theory in a textbook. Scientific conclusions are the best explanation of evidence not beliefs. This not to say that an individual cannot believe the truth of evolution or relativity but that they should not be presented as Truth in a text.
First, the assumption of a creator throws Occam’s Razor out the window.
True, but Occam's Razor is not some infallible rule that was (ahem) handed down on Mt. Sinai.
I grew bored with evolution/creation arguments a long time ago. The level of utter ignorance on display when creationists start babbling about "no missing links" or "gaps in the fossil record" is amazing. The creationist viewpoint has been pushed by the most transparent hacks and frauds and nitwits - and so many people are so bereft of any real scientific education or curiosity that they just lap it up.
For some real laughs google "Dr" Kent Hovind. He's fairly typical of the scumbags.
And "intelligent design" is just the pig known as creationism with a fresh coat of lipstick. It's a tool invented by wingnut SuperChristians to pimp for their sky fairy and that's all it is.
I find it more than a bit fascinating that God's own communicated standard for determining whether a prophet was speaking the truth or not was that their predictions were to be 100% testable and falsifiable:
"But the prophet, who shall presume to speak a word in my name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or who shall speak in the name of other gods, even that prophet shall die....When a prophet speaketh in the name of the Lord, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously; thou shalt not be afraid of him" (Deut.18:20,22; see also Deut.13:33)
Mixner, you're making a few assumptions about what I believe, but you are right that I do believe that all propositions ultimately rest on some fundamental faith commitment. I happen to be a traditional theist, and thus I do believe that God created the world. This is a faith commitment, and I make no bones about that.
But the reason I'm not a young-earth creationist has nothing to do with scientific evidence. It has everything to do with the fact that young-earth creationism depends on an absolutely lousy interpretation of Genesis 1. I believe that God created the world from nothing, and I believe that empirical science gives us a pretty decent idea of how God has, in his sovereignty, chosen to do that.
In fact, I believe that it's only because God created the world that we can know anything about it, because otherwise there is no way of conclusively proving that we live in a rational universe. Even if your only faith commitment is that the universe is rational and predictable, that's still a faith commitment, and there isn't any epistemic difference between that and saying there is a God.
Still, I'm ambivalent about ID. I think the sciences have enough work to do in their own disciplines without trying to make them do apologetics too. I don't believe that empirical science can pose either evidence for or a danger to theism. But teaching kids that the world wasn't created, is just as much a religious commitment as saying it was.
Consider the Second Law of Thermodynamics : “The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.” Entropy can be thought of as “randomness”. The law really states that the universe is continuously proceeding from a state of order to one of disorder.
In the recent 2003 book SYNC – the Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order by Steven Strogatz, for example, we find “Scientists have often been baffled by the existence of spontaneous order in the universe. The laws of thermodynamics seem to dictate the opposite, that nature should inexorably degenerate toward a state of greater disorder, greater entropy. Yet all around us we see magnificent structures—galaxies, cells, ecosystems, human beings—that have all somehow managed to assemble themselves.” ( No, I don’t read this stuff . The quote is lifted out of the Wikipedia entry on Entropy.)
For those of you who don’t speak fluent Tecnobabble, let me suggest a simpler corollary to the Second Law, which I call The First Law of Small Boys “It’s much easier to smash something than build it.”
Thus we have evolution, with each tiny step having a higher probability of disorder than of order. We can try to explain this water-running-uphill process by mechanistic means, or we can allow that some intelligence was there producing the critical steps. In either case, it’s a matter of faith.
My post would have been a good rebuttal to bobquick, too... *waiting*
We can try to explain this water-running-uphill process by mechanistic means, or we can allow that some intelligence was there producing the critical steps
If you do the latter, you abandon all hope, without even trying, of achieving the former. And if you do achieve the former, you have no need for the latter, which kind of destroys your contention that it's all a matter of faith, doesn't it?
Aside from which, calling increasing entropy "increasing disorder" is using sloppy English to describe precise mathematics. Entropy, as mathematically defined, increases over time (or more precisely, it is highly likely to, given that there are more states with high entropy than low entropy). This does not mean that "disorder," as defined in the dictionary, is required to increase.
Ah, whoops, it must've been the links that I included.
Look-up... "The principle of asymmetrical transistions"
And... "The second law of thermodynamics says that god doesn't throw dice"
Rob Lyman,
Explaining the natural world by reference to supernatural phenomena makes understanding the natural world impossible. If you think that birds fly because they were given magic by God, you're not going to build an airplane. If you think prayer cures the sick, you won't be able to develop Cipro.
You keep saying these things that make no sense at all. "Understanding" the world is not the same thing as building planes or developing drugs. If a proposition about the natural world that makes reference to supernatural phenomena (e.g., the proposition that fossils are artifacts planted by a sneaky God, rather than the remnants of ancient animals) is true, how is your understanding of the world "better" if you reject that true proposition?
I didn't.
Yes you did. You asserted that what you call the "assumption" that the origin of the bones is natural rather than supernatural provides an "understanding of nature." But if the assumption is false, and the bones are not the remnants of ancient life but artifacts planted there by a sneaky God, how does the assumption provide an "understanding of nature?" If the assumption is false, it leads to a false belief about nature, not an understanding of it.
I said that you do better to exclude God from your theories about nature than to include Him, on the grounds that inclusion prevents the advance of knowledge if false, but exclusion does not.
Of course it does. If the bones are artifacts planted by a sneaky God, but you reject that explanation by "excluding God from your theories," that obviously prevents you from knowing the true origin of the bones.
Aha! So we come the the crux of it.
I'm not worried about knowing what is True. Being essentially a bag of salty water, I don't think I can really grasp it, and even if I accidentally tripped over the Truth, I don't think I'd recognize it.
I'm interested in muddling through as well as possible. For that, a limited focus on understanding the natural world as well as possible suffices.
Also, (for the purposes of this thread), I'm interested squelching ID in science classrooms. For that purpose, a large dose of modesty in claims to Truth is helpful. I don't claim that ID is false, I claim that it is both unscientific and useless.
bobquick: Thanks for providing that inevitable result of any creationist discussion, the complete mangling of the second law of thermodynamics. For those convinced by bobquick's massively and completely ignorant post, just note that the second law only applies to closed systems, those with no external energy source. If you look out of your window at noon, you should be able to spot a fairly large energy source external to the earth, one that might explain the localized decrease in entropy seen in some parts of the earth.
Ryan Davidson,
Mixner, you're making a few assumptions about what I believe, but you are right that I do believe that all propositions ultimately rest on some fundamental faith commitment.
So why commit to one faith rather than another? How do you choose between them? Aesthetics? Random selection? Social habit/conditioning (e.g., believing something because your parents raised you to believe it)? Or what?
But the reason I'm not a young-earth creationist has nothing to do with scientific evidence. It has everything to do with the fact that young-earth creationism depends on an absolutely lousy interpretation of Genesis 1. I believe that God created the world from nothing, and I believe that empirical science gives us a pretty decent idea of how God has, in his sovereignty, chosen to do that.
Sorry, but why do you believe that? You just told me that you think all beliefs are a matter of a fundamental faith commitment. Why commit yourself to the faith-based belief that science provides a "pretty decent" idea of how God chose to create the world, or even just the faith-based belief that science provides a better idea than creationism? It's no good appealing to Genesis, because that just begs the question of why you have committed yourself to the faith-based belief that the Genesis account is true (either as "interpreted" by creationists or as interpreted by you).
What is the crucial difference between believing something on faith, and believing something on the basis of a guess or a hope?
The earth absorbs low entropy radiation from the sun as sunlight and emits high entropy radiation as infrared. This allows the development and maintenance of low entropy life on earth without violating the second law. The law would be more correctly stated as “The disorder within a closed system never decreases.” The earth is not a “closed system.” bobquick’s interpretation would not have allowed little boys to be born and grow up.
I don't know, I just find the idea of being an atheist inherently depressing. I mean, this is it? There's no heaven? No punishment for bad people? If you're in a bad situation, there's no point in praying? If you're sick, is there anything that comforts you?
Also, someone used the term 'agnotheist.' What does this term refer to? Is it just a fancy term for agnostic?
Rob Lyman: "Also, (for the purposes of this thread), I'm interested squelching ID in science classrooms. For that purpose, a large dose of modesty in claims to Truth is helpful. I don't claim that ID is false, I claim that it is both unscientific and useless."
I don't claim it's false, either. It lies outside of the realm of the provable. But it's important to note that it is being presented in a fraudulent manner by charlatans, and that most of those charlatans have the same hidden agenda.
If we didn't have a massive group of politically active fundamentalist literalists in this country ID wouldn't be getting the attention it has. It would be laughed at as near-universally as Flat Earthers are.
Fortunately the whole ID scam peaked a few years ago. The reality-based community won the war again.
The earth is not a “closed system.”
No, but the universe as a whole is, which bobquick gets at with galaxies.
I can't believe I'm defending a guy with his loose layman's "understanding" of stat mech, but what the hell.
Carl the EconGuy says:
So the real debate is actually less about ID v. evolution, it's about the limits of science.
But who gets to say what the limits of science are? Everyone - I mean everyone - accepts that it it is rational to look for natural explanations for phenomena first. The problem is that some people - some religious people, some non-religious people - think that the limit of science corresponds to the limit of their understanding - or where science conflicts with a religious idea. The most neutral thing to say is that the limits of science are the limits of the universe since science is the study of the universe. This means there is no limit to science.
But teaching kids that the world wasn't created, is just as much a religious commitment as saying it was.
It is very easy to teach about evolution and not have any discussion on whether God did it or not. I'm just as mad at teachers that try to use evolution in their class to disprove God, either through snarky comments "if God did it, why was X mistake made" or stating it a little more clearly. However, that's not the argument of the creationists, they want to explicitly bring religion into a science class room. Some even want teachers to talk about how their literal interpretation of the Bible comes into play as well.
If you wanted to argue that life or complexity defies the second law, then you'd have to do it at the level of the origin of the universe, since equilibrium is the natural state, then where did the original order, (the singularity), come from?
The other route is that none of the observed structuring would exist without an anthropic constraint on the forces so the second law of thermodynamics *would* prohibit any of it in the most naturally expected universe.
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0512148
The answers are all partially justified theoretically speculation, but any natural solution will be necessarily preferred.
The real problem, in my view, is with a certain brand of scientists who want science to be something that it is not. Science is not a search for universal truth, it is the quest for ever more accurate predictive models. Even if we come up with a model that predicts perfectly, we still will not be able to say that it is true because Occam's Razor, while an extremely useful principle for building models (tends to prevent overfitting) needn't be true. There could always be an almighty god behind the scenes making your model look perfect.
If we correct the way we describe the goals of science from search for truth (which should be the subject of philosophy classes) to the search for accurate predictive models the whole debate goes away. ID predicts nothing whatsoever (not science), and evolution is indisputably a hugely successful predictive model that has led to many innovations.
The whole idea of your internal debate on whether the supernatural should be considered as an explanation is flawed. Science is the discipline that adjusts itself to best explain the data. Finding evidence that disagrees with some current model is hardly a blow against science, science will just re-mold itself to adapt. Far from hurting scientists, you have provided them with an amazing opportunity to create a new model -- the very most exciting thing that can happen to a researcher.
Rob Lyman,
I don't claim that ID is false, I claim that it is both unscientific and useless.
So what if it's unscientific? According to you, believing scientific explanations of the natural world over creationist explanations is a matter of making different assumptions. Why do you favor the assumptions of science over the assumptions of creationism?
And what do you mean by "useless" in this context, exactly? Useless with respect to what purpose or goal? Understanding the world? How is science any less "useless" than ID for understanding the world if, as you claim, choosing between them is a matter of making different assumptions?
Also, (for the purposes of this thread), I'm interested squelching ID in science classrooms.
But again, why? You keep saying that choosing science over ID (or any other religious explanation) is a matter of making different assumptions. So how do you justify privileging the "assumptions" of science over the assumptions of ID/religion in classrooms? If we have no basis other than "assumptions" for teaching schoolkids that the world is billions of years old rather than merely thousands of years old, why should we do that?
I have faith that when scientists tell me dinosaur fossils are creatures who lived over 60 million years ago and that birds evolved from them and if you want to check here is how they came up with that analysis, they are telling me the truth.
I have no faith that people who tell me a set of oral histories passed down from Semitic sheep-herders via a self-selected priesthood are the inspired word of some unknowable supreme being and we should all live according to their tenets are telling me the truth. No matter how noble the philosophy expressed thereby.
You must, because as has been endlessly pointed out, once you admit any supernatural explanations you must admit all of them because science is out the window. I know all too well how seductive it is to believe in the supernatural; after all, that's the reason religion exists.
And hey, maybe it really is turtles all the way down.
Matt says:
Science is not a search for universal truth...
Not anymore, but that's because science has assumed some truths that can't be proven, like, uncertainty and infinity.
If, for example, this physics is the reality, then you are wrong, because Einstein was right:
http://www.lns.cornell.edu/spr/2006-02/msg0073320.html
So what if it's unscientific?
Well, if we're talking about a science class, the things discussed should be scientific. For the same reason, math class should not involve the discussion of Shakespeare, nor Civics a detailed discussion of the fundamental theorem of calculus.
The most important thing kids can take away from science class is not a collection of facts which they will probably never use in their daily lives, it's an understanding of the methods of scientists. ID does not comport with those methods, so it does not belong in science class.
If they want to teach ID in philosophy class, that's fine with me (as I said well above).
And what do you mean by "useless" in this context, exactly?
Useless for making testable predictions or advancing understanding in a way which has pragmatic consequences. Science does both of these things very well, Genesis does the former fine (although its predictions do not pan out well) and the latter poorly, ID does neither at all.
Because people are using it as a lever to roll back the traditions of scientific analysis. ID is an attempt to draw a line: OK, Science, this far but no farther. Their plan is to get the innocent "theory" of ID accepted in school science curricula (after all, it's just another theory like evolution!) so the next few generations of students come to view it as equally valid as any truly scientific study. Then they can push the now-accepted theory (we've been teaching it in our schools for decades!) as the dominant one by simply outvoting all the rest. A cunning plan but oh so transparent.
ID is not science, it's not rational, and it's a tool used to promote supernatural mythology and ignorance. It should not be taught in schools at all, except perhaps as an example of how not to think.
Religion and science are not mutually exclusive enterprises. 'The Bible' does not disprove evolution anymore than evolution disproves 'The Bible'. That being said, "intelligent design" is bunk. It's not based on proper Biblical interpretation or scientific analysis. It is 20th century science fiction. It has more in common with Scientology than anything else.
Mixner, accusing me of begging the question for saying that something is a faith commitment is a tautology. Yeah, you're right, but only trivially so. Of course it begs the question. It's an axiom. That's why it's taken on faith. The only possible explanations for an axiom are necessarily logically dependent upon the axiom, and thus using them to support it is, as you've said, circular.
Why do I believe in God? You won't like the answer, because again, it follows from that belief rather than leading up to it, but I'm not really sure why that's supposed to bother me, so here goes. I believe in God because He has called me. Also because the logical implications of there not being a God are pretty unpleasant. Also, because I'm humble enough to admit that I need Him.
See, for you, the question of belief in God wouldn't produce a circular answer, because for you, the issue of God isn't one of faith. For me and for most other believers, it is. But you've got your own articles of faith, they're just different. So if I were to ask you the same question, you'd likely say something like "Because there's no evidence for him, and there's evidence against him." To which I'd respond "What are the criteria which you use to evaluate evidence, and what is your support for them?" And you'd give an answer to that, and I'd ask "Why?" again. Rinse and repeat. Eventually, we'll get to a place where you say something logically equivalent to "Just because," e.g. "I think, therefore I am," or something interchangable. That would be your faith commitment. No more circular than I, just a different circle.
Okay, into the fray...
Hey, liberal:
It is highly misleading to completely dismiss IDists as having no point, since creationists know full-well that there are many unjustified or weakly supported assumptions about a number of obviously relevant evolutionary mechanisms that creationists are perfectly justified to cry foul about when they are dishonestly mislead, intentionally, or otherwise.
Very much like what you’ll find in the “scientific paper”,(aka, cop-out on science), that is discussed
here... which exposes that the author quite obviously evades the creationist question in order to call absurdity an answer.
You are cracked in the head if you think that creationists shouldn’t have the right to *force-out* better answers than these kind of causally irresponsible issue-avoidance “answers” that very strongly appear to be intentionally designed avoid their questions, and it makes me sick to my stomach that I have to say that!... because that makes it politics, not science anymore...
I'm new here BTW... ;)
Rob Lyman says:
No, but the universe as a whole is, which bobquick gets at with galaxies.
I can't believe I'm defending a guy with his loose layman's "understanding" of stat mech, but what the hell.
I was only trying to address the anti-evolution portion of bobquick’s comment above, but since you brought it up. Due to gravity, galaxies have higher entropy than the gaseous clouds from which they form; the same is true for the solar system forming from the solar nebula. Though it would seem a gas cloud would have higher entropy than a galaxy, the release in radiant energy offsets any apparent increase in structure. (I’m paraphrasing Roger Penrose from The Emperor’s New Mind. My apologies to him if I’ve butchered this).
God answers the "why" question.
Evolution answers the "how" question.
The end.
Economists need to read Popper to know what science means. I'm an economist , by the way.
""Nor do I think that even Young Earth creationism can be ruled out by science, if you are willing to posit the possibility of a creator; God might have created the world looking old for His own inscrutable reasons.""
Megan, if you can be this irrational, then this my last time wasting reading your blogs. I used to think them at least and sometimes thought provoking, entertaining but if you believe or even posit the possibility on any rational basis that "god" hid all the fossils in the ground to fool us, created the universe 10,000 years ago (humans have been around 500,000, the earth about 4 billion and the universe 12 billion years ago. Planes fly because someone did their math right, not because the pilot or engineer prayed really hard.
You of all people becoming a fundamentalist christian is sickening.
Brooks Gracie III
Thoroughly disgusted with your unscientific
I'd prefer to call them ID-ots instead. ID yutzes, ID robots.
How is it misleading for me to dismiss them? I do dismiss them. No two ways about it. No way to be misled.
My time is limited. I'm not inclined to waste it arguing with ID-ots. Their questions are bogus, their answers are bogus, and their philosophy is bogus. Besides, you're cracked in the head if you think they intend to accept any "better answer" that doesn't comport with their philosophy. They are not reasonable people. If they were, they wouldn't be ID-ots pushing ID.
Whoa up there, pardner, she's not a fundamentalist Christian. She just said she doesn't think science can prove that creationism is wrong (creationists disagree, otherwise why are they so up in arms). I think she doesn't really know what to believe; her mind says science and her heart says supernatural. Thus all this sturm und drang that really doesn't go anywhere.
Shorter Megan: "I don't believe science can conclusively disprove religion, but neither do I believe that religion can be taught as equivalent to science."
No, God ducks the "why" question. It's the same as saying the answer to the "why" question is "because." It's not a good answer.
Why God? Because. Oops.
Rob Lyman,
Well, if we're talking about a science class, the things discussed should be scientific.
But if the difference between religion and science is "assumptions," why favor science at all? If there is no basis for asserting that the answers from science are true, or are any more likely to be true than the answers from religion, why not teach kids both, or neither? On your account, we should be teaching kids: "Science says the earth is billions of years old. Creationism says the earth is merely thousands of years old. We have absolutely no idea which proposition is true. Choosing one over the other is simply a matter of making different assumptions."
Useless for making testable predictions or advancing understanding in a way which has pragmatic consequences.
Again, so what if religion is useless for making "testable predictions?" What's the point of "testable predictions" in themselves?
And how do you know science has better "pragmatic consequences" than religion without making what you claim to be the "assumption" that science is a better guide to the natural world than religion? If it's only an "assumption" that science is not misleading us about the true age of the earth and the true origin of fossils, then it's also only an "assumption" that science is not misleading us about every other aspect of the natural world.
>> But that's no good way to set curricula.
It seems to me that spending time addressing questions that are serious and important in students' lives is a much *better* way to set curricula than bombarding them with information that 90% of them will never have any use for and the rest will learn again later anyway.
(I am a professional educator, though not a classroom teacher.)
Ryan Davidson,
Mixner, accusing me of begging the question for saying that something is a faith commitment is a tautology. Yeah, you're right, but only trivially so. Of course it begs the question.
I don't think it's trivial at all. It means your appeal to differing interpretations of Genesis to justify rejecting young-earth creationism in favor of modern science is really just another way of saying that you're making a different faith-commitment than young-earth creationists.
Which brings us again to the fundamental question of why you favor one faith over another.
I believe in God because He has called me.
What is the nature of this "calling?" Are you saying you think God has somehow made his existence known to you and communicated something to you? How did he do this? What was the medium of communication?
Also because the logical implications of there not being a God are pretty unpleasant.
I don't see how that follows. What difference do you see between the "logical implications" of there being a God versus there not being a God? Surely those implications would depend on all sorts of other matters, like the nature and wishes and powers of the God.
But whatever the implications, this answer is just wishful thinking. We have no reason to believe that a proposition is true, or is more likely to be true, simply because we would prefer that it is true.
If there is no basis for asserting that the answers from science are true, or are any more likely to be true than the answers from religion, why not teach kids both, or neither?
You keep coming back to this thing with "true," or perhaps True. As I said, Truth is not something I think we typing primates are likely to get a good handle on. I don't care much what is True.
As you are probably aware, science makes highly reliable, testable predictions about the world. This makes it a valuable thing to know, because it allows you to predict the future in a way that would make Balaam's ass thoroughly jealous.
Genesis makes only a few predictions, most or all of which are contrary to observations. This makes it interesting as literature and perhaps useful as a guide to understanding God if that's your bag, but not particularly valuable otherwise.
ID makes no predictions. You can't do anything with it.
Teaching children the useful one that makes good predictions over the one that makes no predictions and the one that makes bad predictions is a wise choice, in my view. I don't need it to be True to think it's the best choice. Futhermore, I think making claims to Truth is likely to harm the cause of science over ID in the minds of people who seek Truth in other ways, and who after all literally can't be proven wrong.
I have to say, I agree with Jerry Pournelle on this one. Because I'm wrong, you must overrule my local school board and dictate to us what we can teach our kids? I don't agree with Flat Earthers, but I think the harm that results from central control of our education outweighs the relatively trivial issues resulting from them teaching their nonsense to their kids.
That said, I think that the conventional wisdom that ID is unscientific is wrong. Up to two hundred years ago, virtually all scientists would have said that a divine being designed life. Why? Because no sensible alternative explanation was known. They weren't rejecting science; they would have said that their job as scientist was to explain the world, and this was manifestly the correct explanation, no other being available.
Now that evolution (nature selection) is available as an alternate explanation, the scientific question becomes, Does the world look the way that evolution would predict? If it does, one might still believe in God, but it would make little sense to say that he guided the development of life personally, any more than we would say since Newton that he personally carries the planets in their orbits. We would rather say that he made the laws of nature, and lets them handle the planets. Here, too, if evolution does a good job of explaining how things are, presumably that is the method used to get things to be that way - look no further.
On the other hand, if ID theorists can show convincingly that evolution does not describe the way things are, and that no variation can either, we would be left with no explanation for how things are except for the original one. ID would become the scientific understanding of the world, that is, the best understanding available.
This is an issue that scientists can settle. Does evolution do a good job of explaining, or can it be shown to be incapable of doing a good job of explaining, or we can't tell yet.
When scientists don't know how something works, "God did it" does not become the "scientific" explanation by default. It may be an explanation, but unless "God did it" yields up some testable predictions, it's not science.
Ryan Davidson,
But you've got your own articles of faith, they're just different. So if I were to ask you the same question, you'd likely say something like "Because there's no evidence for him, and there's evidence against him." To which I'd respond "What are the criteria which you use to evaluate evidence, and what is your support for them?" And you'd give an answer to that, and I'd ask "Why?" again. Rinse and repeat. Eventually, we'll get to a place where you say something logically equivalent to "Just because," e.g. "I think, therefore I am," or something interchangable. That would be your faith commitment. No more circular than I, just a different circle.
You're contradicting yourself. You cannot make any kind of logical argument against my position or in favor of yours, because you claim that logic itself is just another kind of faith. On your account, assent to the axioms of logic is no less a leap of faith than assent to biblical literalism. So any kind of logical argument you may make is equivalent to simply saying "I believe this on faith."
Which again brings us to the question of why you commit to one faith rather than another. And the only answer to that question I see in what you have written is wishful thinking. You believe in a God because you want there to be a God.
"I don't know how willing I am to ratify the scientific assumption that the supernatural is never a possible explanation."
Science and the supernatural are by definition incompatible. It is entirely possible that there is a supernatural explanation for anything. If there is, there is no such thing as science, merely supernatural forces that have previously allowed us to act as if science was valid. Those forces could capriciously change at any time, rendering all scientific endeavor meaningless.
Science is therefore warranted in ignoring supernatural possibilities, since if they are genuine, all science is then worthless anyway.
It should be noted that there is plenty that is unknown that is not supernatural.
Rob Lyman,
You keep coming back to this thing with "true," or perhaps True. As I said, Truth is not something I think we typing primates are likely to get a good handle on. I don't care much what is True.
I don't know what you mean by "True" (capitalized) as opposed to "true." Is there a difference? What is it?
And are you really claiming that science, knowledge, understanding and education have nothing to do with truth? Do you really think it's wrong to teach children in schools that, say, it is true that Washington D.C. is the U.S. capital? Or that Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system? Do you really believe that science would still provide a better understanding (your word) of fossils, the age of the earth, etc. than young-earth creationism even if every single proposition science makes about those things is false, and every single proposition YEC makes is true? What exactly do you think it means to "understand" something if understanding has nothing to do with truth?
You also didn't answer my question about "pragmatic consequences." How do you know science has better "pragmatic consequences" than religion without making what you claim to be the "assumption" that science is a better guide to the natural world than religion?
How do you know science has better "pragmatic consequences" than religion
I would have thought it rather obvious that a system of knowledge that produces the wealth, health, and relative ease of living that we enjoy today had better "pragmatic consequences" (at least in this life) than a system of knowledge which is completely incapable of doing so and that in some cases actively impedes progress on these fronts.
Furthermore, I never said that I "assumed" science was a better guide to the natural world than religion. I assumed that events have natural causes rather than supernatural ones, because doing so is useful to the advance of knowledge. But there's nothing inherent in the nature of religion which requires it to make erroneous claims about the natural world.
I don't know what you mean by "True" (capitalized) as opposed to "true." Is there a difference? What is it?
I'd put "Washington, DC is the capital of the United States" in the "true" bin, given that it is, in fact the capital. I'd put "God is the creator of the universe" in the "True" (or perhaps "False") bin, given that it is a larger statement than I really think myself capable of evaluating. It reveals my epistemic limitations. Not sure if that helps, but I'm also not sure it matters.
Do you really believe that science would still provide a better understanding (your word) of fossils, the age of the earth, etc. than young-earth creationism even if every single proposition science makes about those things is false, and every single proposition YEC makes is true?
I do not think the relative truth or falsity of YEC and evolution are commensurable. They exist in different epistemological universes, and their conclusions are based on different and incompatible forms of evidence. It's like asking whether it is "true" that the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees. In Euclidean geometry, yes, but on a sphere, no. This does not mean that one geometry is more "true" than another.
We should teach science because it is a system of acquiring knowledge which has proven highly useful. Religion has not, so teaching it requires another justification.
Mixner-
Sorry to bust your romantic and vastly wrongheaded idea of the philosophy of science. But the answer to most of your questions is that science cares very little about "truth" or "Truth". My favorite example - Newtonian mechanics and general relativity. General relativity was formulated at the peak of success of Newtonian mechanics. It said that Newton's laws were "false" - they failed to predict gravitational phenomena like the precession of the perihelion of Mercury. Didn't bother most scientists a bit. They kept designing aircraft and firing rockets based on Newtonian mechanics. The "false" theory of Newtonian mechanics has led to a far deeper understanding of the physical world than the "true" theory of general relativity.
Now, very few scientists admit these things to themselves. They like to believe they are on a search for the "Truth" as much as anyone. That's why they do such a bad job dismissing the Discovery Institute. (Asimov's story of "science" operating as a religion is one of his best.)
If god appeared tomorrow in a burning bush on national TV, biologists would go on thinking in terms of Darwinian evolution when doing things like designing new drugs. The idea that their success "proves" there is no god can only be held by someone who does not understand basic logic. It's like saying that the success of continuum mechanics proves that material is not made up of atoms.
Rob Lyman,
I would have thought it rather obvious that a system of knowledge that produces the wealth, health, and relative ease of living that we enjoy today had better "pragmatic consequences" (at least in this life) than a system of knowledge which is completely incapable of doing so and that in some cases actively impedes progress on these fronts.
Sorry, but you wrote:
You have repeated this same assertion several times in slightly different forms. To illustrate it, you claimed that science "assumes" that God isn't interfering to mislead us about the true nature of fossils. But if that is true, the same "assumption" applies to every scientific finding on every aspect of the natural world. Thus, your claim that science has better "pragmatic consequences" than religion rests on what you claim to be the assumption that God isn't interfering to make the "pragmatic consequences" of science appear better than they really are.
So again I ask: What justification do you think you have for making the "assumptions" (as you call them) underlying science rather than the assumptions underlying religion? It's no good appealing to "pragmatic consequences," since your interpretation of those consequences rests on the very "assumptions" you're trying to justify.
Thus, your claim that science has better "pragmatic consequences" than religion rests on what you claim to be the assumption that God isn't interfering to make the "pragmatic consequences" of science appear better than they really are.
It's possible that the world is not constructed according to rational laws which we can discover, and that God is merely making it appear so for reasons of His own. Rationality and consistency is an assumption on my part, shared by scientists.
What are the practical consequences of the "God interferes" assumption? If God is going to interfere in every experiment ever done to ensure consistent results, why shouldn't I just assume that the world is governed by laws and go about my business accordingly? Until God decides to stop with His interference, and thereby change the nature of the world, the assumption that the world is rule-bound is just as pragmatically useful as the assumption that God is merely making it appear that the world is rule-bound. Indeed, the two are indistinguishable from any human observation--and so, to use the language I have been using, neither is more true than the other.
Assuming God is messing with us has no consequences, so it's a freebie--feel free to believe it or not, as you will. But don't teach it as science because, lacking those consequences, it neither testable nor useful.
Again, you're trying to dig for some underlying Truth about the world. I'm not. I want my computer to work and my office building to stand up. The Bible (or ID) helps me with neither, science achieves both.
If somebody out there manages to come up with a God-centric theory of the world which has the predictive power of science based on non-scientific methods--say, to derive something novel about semiconductor design or bridge engineering through examination of a sacred text--then we might wish to devote some school time to that text. Until then, science it is.
Mixner - In what way does tracking the path of a satellite depend on the assumptions that went into predicting that path? In what way does a measurement of the effectiveness of a drug depend on the assumptions that were behind those who invented the drug?
Religion has done many things, but how many satellites has it launched? How many drugs has it invented? To be more specific, what has ID done? What information about the physical world has it discovered? The answer is zero, nada, nothing. ID is not science: it is a critique of science. The problem is that scientists don't care about critics. You can only win them over by showing them a better path to discovery.
Rob Lyman,
I do not think the relative truth or falsity of YEC and evolution are commensurable. They exist in different epistemological universes, and their conclusions are based on different and incompatible forms of evidence. It's like asking whether it is "true" that the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees. In Euclidean geometry, yes, but on a sphere, no. This does not mean that one geometry is more "true" than another.
This is all a complete nonsequitur to the question I asked. You claimed that science provides a better "understanding" (your word) of the natural world than religion, but also that we have no basis for asserting that scientific explanations of the world are true and competing religious explanations false. Indeed, you claimed the fundamental difference between them is merely "assumptions."
I am trying to understand how you reconcile these claims. You seem to be using the word "understand" in some bizarre and highly unconventional way. What does it mean to "understand" the world if understanding has nothing to do with holding true beliefs rather than false ones?
I'd put "Washington, DC is the capital of the United States" in the "true" bin, given that it is, in fact the capital. I'd put "God is the creator of the universe" in the "True" (or perhaps "False") bin, given that it is a larger statement than I really think myself capable of evaluating. It reveals my epistemic limitations. Not sure if that helps, but I'm also not sure it matters.
No it doesn't really help. So you use "true"/"false" for propositions you think you personally are capable of evaluating, and "True"/"False" for claims that you aren't? Doesn't make much sense to me. As I conceive the nature of truth and falsehood, they do not depend on the ability of any one individual to evaluate a claim. Or even of all people to do so. I think it is perfectly proper to say that it was true (in the ordinary sense of the word) that Jupiter was the biggest planet in the solar system even before any human being had been able to evaluate that proposition through astronomical observation. As far as we can tell, it was true then and it's true now.
Bob, you should keep in mind that Mixner is an atheist who thinks religion is actively harmful.
Which of course raises the question, why am I defending the teaching science instead of creationism from an atheist?
What does it mean to "understand" the world if understanding has nothing to do with holding true beliefs rather than false ones?
It means, first and foremost, the ability to make correct predictions about the future.
I'm sorry my capitalization is confusing. I'm sort of trying to use "True" for "big question" stuff (Does God exist?) and "true" for little question stuff (Is Jupiter bigger than Mars?), but as it's collateral to the issue, I'll just stop doing it.
(This refers back to my Previous posts, and some intervening comments.)
Let’s tie up a few loose ends. The comments that entropy can be reversed in an open system. Of course; that’s why we can have refrigerators. In fact, that’s what Steven Strogatz was trying to prove in his book. He is not pushing ID; he’s a Professor of Applied mathematics at Cornell. He was trying to examine the mathematical requirements for an open-system solution to the various evolutionary problems, from cells to galaxies. I do not know how successful he was, but it seems pretty likely that the additional restraints needed to locally reverse entropy could not be proven to have existed. This also covers “the principle of asymmetrical transitions” that Island brought up. That also appears to require an open system to work.
The “…god doesn’t throw dice” quote brought up by Island was part of an argument made by Albert Einstein against the new science of Quantum Mechanics. Seventy some years later, we find Quantum Mechanics, along with Relativistic Physics, to be the basis of modern physics. In that sense, Albert Einstein was wrong.
Okay, the questions is, should we teach evolution in our schools? Of course. It’s the best systematic approach we have, although we should also mention its limitations and uncertainties. Then, should we teach ID? I’m not really sure how to “teach” ID. I’m not aware of that much theory. On the other hand, the concept that “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth” is very much a part of our society; it cannot be disproved any more than evolution can be proved. Denying this teaches “There is no god.” This is indoctrination. Learning to deal with loose ends, and ambiguities is a good thing.
What we should be trying to teach our kids is how to live in a world filled with ambiguity, where we never have enough data, or enough time, or enough money to make the right decisions, but we must make them anyway. Indoctrinating kids won’t do. Programming them won’t do. We must teach them to reason.
Let me clarify a possible point of contention. I am not really advocating the teaching of the Judeo/Christian God here, although I am a Christian. That is not the function of a public school. “Designer” or other neutral term would be adequate, to avoid problems for other religions.
(Yes, I am an engineer, not a scientist. Thank you for asking.)
Rob Lyman,
What are the practical consequences of the "God interferes" assumption?
Who knows? Depends on the nature and magnitude of the interference or assumption of interference.
If God is going to interfere in every experiment ever done to ensure consistent results, why shouldn't I just assume that the world is governed by laws and go about my business accordingly?
The question is, why should you assume it? If it is indeed an assumption, rather than a rational conclusion from evidence, why are you justified in making that assumption? And the premise was not "God is going to interfere in every experiment ever done to ensure consistent results" but rather that God may be interfering in some way and to some degree.
Until God decides to stop with His interference, and thereby change the nature of the world, the assumption that the world is rule-bound is just as pragmatically useful as the assumption that God is merely making it appear that the world is rule-bound.
There you go again. You can only evaluate "pragmatic usefulness" through evidence that you claim you are "assuming" to be free of misleading interference by God. What is the justification for that assumption? You can't assume that God is not interfering, and that the evidence regarding the "pragmatic consequences" of science is therefore reliable, in order to justify making the assumption in the first place. It's a circular argument.
It means, first and foremost, the ability to make correct predictions about the future.
So what's the difference between a "correct" prediction and a true one? If the value of testable predictions is not that they help us distinguish true propositions about the nature of the world (the earth is billions of years old, Jupiter is the largest planet, etc.) from false propositions (the moon is made of cheese, gravity is a repulsive force, etc.) but something else, what is it?
The idea that even if everything science told us about a natural phenomenon is false, and everything religion told us about it is true, science would nevertheless still provide us with a better "understanding" of that phenomenon, seems to me completely nonsensical.
Not really that hard Mixner. "Correct" means predicting a humanly attainable measurement. "True" means reflecting an objective reality which may be beyond human perception and understanding. Gödel proved (and we're talking the no bullshit mathematical type of proof here) that there are objective truths that are beyond the ability of rationalism to demonstrate. There is unquestionably a difference between objective reality and what humans can "know." Your statement that "everything science told us about a natural phenomenon is false" is a classic straw man. Science simply has a more modest aim than TRUTH. People who actually do science and know science content themselves with simply trying to fit the curve.
Mixner,
It is undisputed that my computer works the way the semiconductor experts who designed it predicted. Whether that is because the doping of silicon creates holes, or because, contrary to what we have been taught, God regards doping of semiconductors to be a preferred form of prayer and therefore causes the computer to work, is not knowable. But it also doesn't matter. It works.
This is rather like the debates that occurred in the 19th century about whether electromagnetic fields were "real" or merely a mathematical construct that made calculation easier. Also the debates about whether quantum mechanics describes reality or is just a convenient probabilistic calculation device.
My answer: it doesn't matter, as long as it works.
ID doesn't work. It can't work, because it makes no predictions.
BobR,
"Correct" means predicting a humanly attainable measurement. "True" means reflecting an objective reality which may be beyond human perception and understanding.
This seems very confused. To try to attach some clear meaning to your nebulous definitions, let's suppose the prediction in question is a prediction of the length of an object. It seems to me that there are two values relevant to the "correctness" or "truth" of the prediction: (1) The predicted length, (2) the actual length.
I'd say that if (1) and (2) are the same (i.e. the predicted length is the actual length), then the prediction is "correct" and "true." I don't understand what you think it would mean for the prediction to be "correct" but not "true," or "true" but not "correct."
Rob Lyman,
It is undisputed that my computer works the way the semiconductor experts who designed it predicted. Whether that is because the doping of silicon creates holes, or because, contrary to what we have been taught, God regards doping of semiconductors to be a preferred form of prayer and therefore causes the computer to work, is not knowable. But it also doesn't matter. It works.
You still don't seem to understand the fundamental contradiction in your argument. You claimed that science makes the "assumption" that empirical evidence (e.g., the fossil record) has not been fabricated or contaminated by God to mislead us. I asked you why you think this assumption is justified. Your answer was that the assumption is justified on the grounds of the "pragmatic usefulness" of science. But your only basis for evaluating the "usefulness" of science is evidence. Your belief that science is "useful" rests on the same "assumption" of uncontaminated evidence that you're trying to justify. It's a circular argument. Your justification for the assumption involves making the assumption.
What I don't understand is why the justification for the assumption is relevant. There are two possible assumptions: God is messing with my head or He isn't. If I assume the former, either I assume that He does so in a highly systematic and repeatable way--in which case the assumption is indistinguishable for assuming no interference, so who cares which one I make--or I assume he's doing randomly in a way I can't understand, in which case scientific progress is impossible.
Whether science actually is useful, it merely appears useful due to a cosmic head-fake, I don't think there's much difference between the two, so long as our computers keep working. And given that it's impossible to tell the difference between those two options, I don't see much point in getting hung up on it.
ID, of course, is useless.
Mixner--
If you are willing to accept that there might be more going on in the world than humans know, or maybe even can know, then Rob and Bob_R's posts are quite obvious.
To approach their point from another direction, I can't prove that ghosts don't exist. I think that all the "chasing ghost" and "haunted house" shows that are on TV are boring and unconvincing, and I'd cheerfully walk into any "haunted" house, but I'm not arrogant enough to categorically state that ghosts do not exist.
I think that what Rob and Bob_R are getting at (if we assume I'm understanding their point correctly) is that to most of us, science is a tool, not an end. I can't prove that YEC is wrong. As stated above, the Lord might have created the world with fossils and rocks containing the appropriate isotope ratios, but assuming that He didn't enables us to do things like explain the inner workings of the cell and make drugs. Therefore, for the purposes of science we will assume that He did not. However, we don't positively know, and might not ever positively know, that God did not do so. It's simply not a testable hypothesis. And that doesn't bother me in the slightest.
Aaaand, of course. I leave during drafting a post, come back and finish, and find that Rob has ninja-posted me, saying the same thing much more succinctly.
RPL: FWIW, I wasn't comparing tired light and big bang cosmologies, which are not equivalent. Instead, I was comparing the idea that the universe is expanding with the idea that our rulers are shrinking, which are equivalent.
Assume there is an eternal God who wished to create a universe accomodating free will and intelligent beings to use that freedom. (I postulate this as an assumption; others seem to accept it as a matter of faith.)
Free will is only exercisable if not everything is certain. The physical laws of our universe are founded on the uncertainties of quantum mechanics; and the logic of our universe rests on the uncertainty of Goedel's theorems.
And can anyone human concieve of a more subtle and intelligent way of designing individual beings with unpredictability sufficient for the exercise of free will than evolution? Remember that for an eternal God the difference between a day and a thousand million years is not likely to be of great significance.
Should not anyone who believes in God, and does not believe in absolute predestination, be devoutly content with what the scientists so far think that they have understood? And how does any scientist rule out the assumption that I started with?
At the end of the day, the real question is:
Is your model useful?
This question is actual even more important to 'science' than whether your model is 'true'. Why? Because we have all sorts of models we *know* aren't true that are fantastically useful.
For example, newtonian mechanics and gravitation. We know that model is fantastically useful within certain domains of application. We also know it's not the whole story. If you push to far out (say the orbit of Mercury for starters) you discover that newtonian mechanics does not correctly predict what happens, in short, it's not 'true'.
Another example is the standard model of quantum field theory. It is astounding in it's ability to predict what we actually observe. But we *know* it isn't true, because we can see the points where it breaks down and fails to predict anything vaguely meaningful (even if we can't quite perform the experiments yet to see what really happens there).
So, with regard to ID, the question becomes:
What useful thing does it do?
Does it allow us to predict the future correctly? Does it allow us to create beneficial technologies?
I've never heard ID alleged to do anything useful. It seems to purely be a way to 'explain' the past. We have a name for that, we call it 'narrative'. There's nothing wrong with 'narrative'. It's just not science.
Megan,
ID and creationism are not “scientific claims that have been decisively refuted by the evidence” because they are not scientific claims at all. They are not “bad science” but nonscience.
You seem to suffer from a basic, common misapprehension about what the term ID denotes.
ID is not the contention that the universe was intelligently designed by a creator. ID is the contention that the universe had to have been designed by a creator.
Even the religious and conservative journal First Things, after the notorious debunking of “ID as science” claims in federal court in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, acknowledged that ID simply has no place in science classes, although the piece suggested it be taught in philosophy of religion classes.
Please be more careful about terminology. This is a field where precision matters.
Mixner said to Rob Lyman:
You claimed that science makes the "assumption" that empirical evidence (e.g., the fossil record) has not been fabricated or contaminated by God to mislead us....
It's a circular argument. Your justification for the assumption involves making the assumption.
Basically, what Rob said is that science says "Reality is real". I don't see how you can argue against that.
Rob Lyman,
What I don't understand is why the justification for the assumption is relevant. There are two possible assumptions: God is messing with my head or He isn't. If I assume the former, either I assume that He does so in a highly systematic and repeatable way--in which case the assumption is indistinguishable for assuming no interference, so who cares which one I make--or I assume he's doing randomly in a way I can't understand, in which case scientific progress is impossible. Whether science actually is useful, it merely appears useful due to a cosmic head-fake, I don't think there's much difference between the two, so long as our computers keep working. And given that it's impossible to tell the difference between those two options, I don't see much point in getting hung up on it.
The real problem here, it now seems, is that you don't understand the difference between an assumption and a conclusion. An assumption is a proposition that is simply assumed to be true. A conclusion is a proposition that is rationally derived from evidence or premises. You originally claimed that choosing between a scientific explanation of a natural phenonenon (such as the age of the earth or the origin of fossils) and a competing religious explanation (e.g., young-earth creationism) is a matter of making different assumptions. But you're now arguing that what you have been referring to as the "assumptions" underlying science are in fact rationally supported by the empirical evidence of the "pragmatic usefulness" of science.
If you do in fact believe that reason and evidence support the propositions underlying science, then you're saying those propositions are not assumptions at all, they're conclusions. You're not simply assuming they are true. You're concluding they are true from a rational evaluation of evidence.
I think that what Rob and Bob_R are getting at (if we assume I'm understanding their point correctly) is that to most of us, science is a tool, not an end. I can't prove that YEC is wrong. As stated above, the Lord might have created the world with fossils and rocks containing the appropriate isotope ratios, but assuming that He didn't enables us to do things like explain the inner workings of the cell and make drugs.
So what would constitute proof at all, of anything, in your view? On your account, even abstract proofs of logical propositions aren't really proofs. After all, if "the Lord" exists and might be messing with the fossil record to deceive us, then he might also be messing with our minds to make us commit to a false set of logical axioms. And if even logic is suspect, then your claim that there's no proof that YEC is wrong is unjustified, because that claim relies on logic. Unless you commit to some basic set of principles or methods for distinguishing true propositions from false ones, then proof and knowledge and understanding are meaningless concepts.
Kids... the point is not whether ID is real or not. Could God have created the whole universe two minutes ago or 6000 years ago complete with the built in paper trail to make it look like it was billions of years old: sure.
The point is, what does it allow us to do if we assume God did so?
Does it allow us to better predict the future?
Does it allow us to more effectively manipulate our environment?
I would say that the answer is that, even if true, ID has no utility, and that's pretty much the litmus test for science.
quadrupole concludes: "I would say that the answer is that, even if true, ID has no utility, and that's pretty much the litmus test for science."
Yeah. Stipulating that it's possible that there's a "designer" is one thing. Being an advocate for ID marks you as a complete idiot.
Smurfs may exist somewhere in the universe. It's a big ass universe. But once someone starts insisting that Smurfs are real, I know I'm dealing with an undeniable wackaloon.
The real problem here, it now seems, is that you don't understand the difference between an assumption and a conclusion.
Ms. Smith enterns the hospital feeling ill. She is diagnosed with a rare form of cancer which has a 5% 1-year survival rate and no reported cases of survival past 3 years. Upon hearing the prognosis, she declines treatment, saying that she prefers a rapid end in her home to the misery of aggressive chemo for nothing more than a few extra months survival. 5 years later she is discovered to be in good health.
I don't see how anyone can conclude, from these facts, that there was no supernatural intervention involved. Maybe Mary interceded with God, who cured the cancer. But for knowledge to move forward--for oncologists to translate her survival into a practical treatment for others--scientists must assume the cause is natural. Maybe Ms. Smith has something unusual about her biochemistry that is responsible.
So what would constitute proof at all, of anything, in your view? On your account, even abstract proofs of logical propositions aren't really proofs. After all, if "the Lord" exists and might be messing with the fossil record to deceive us, then he might also be messing with our minds to make us commit to a false set of logical axioms.
It's possible. However, we wouldn't know the difference if this was so, so who cares? We can still use the broken logic that we're being tricked into seeing to design things that make our lives easier, so the fact that its not true in a cosmic sense (or, as Rob was putting it, "True") isn't relevant to me.
And if even logic is suspect, then your claim that there's no proof that YEC is wrong is unjustified, because that claim relies on logic.
There's no "proof" in a mathematical/logic sense that YEC is wrong. Unless you were around and actually observed those dinosaurs die, we're all just extrapolating from observations made 350 million years after the fact. However, YEC is not supported by the evidence without positing a supernatural Creator. Since that's not a testable hypothesis, it belongs in the realm of religion, not science.
As an aside, I think YEC is bad theologically as well as bad scientifically--the proposition all these fossils and isotope ratios were put in the ground to fool us makes it sound like the world was created by Satan, not God. The Lord gave us a mind so we could use it.
Unless you commit to some basic set of principles or methods for distinguishing true propositions from false ones, then proof and knowledge and understanding are meaningless concepts.
Hell, maybe they are. Like David pointed out way upthread, you can construct logically-consistent but unscientific scenarios. We could all be living in a Matrix-style simulation, and therefore the spoon isn't really accelerating towards the ground at a rate of 32.2 ft/s^2 because "there is no spoon," just a very fine polygon mesh. I might not really be typing this post--I might be lying in a gutter and my memories of this last six months spent in Afghanistan might be a Jimson-weed induced fever dream. Or any of a number of other crazy scenarios that you could dream up. However, none of these are testable. So I'm just going to assume that when I see an object fall, or that the ratios of U-238 to Pb-206 indicate that an object is 200 million years old, that that's what's really happening. Otherwise you're just chasing your own tail and not getting anything done.
Like Rob said: I'm not worried about knowing what is True. Being essentially a bag of salty water, I don't think I can really grasp it, and even if I accidentally tripped over the Truth, I don't think I'd recognize it. (Rob, I like that quote. I'm going to save it for future reference)
Scientific investigation is a formal process that we use to explain happenings around us. As long as it produces repeatable results, I'm happy to use it for day-to-day things. However, I don't need to believe that Science! has an answer for everything to give my life meaning.
I don't know if anybody has commented on Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit who contributed to finding Peking man. I would be interested in how the recent book on him might contribute to this debate. I suppose his own book was an answer.
Religion is a kind of poetry; it takes the Irish touch perhaps to remind us of pornography. Seriously, it is rather remarkable that an English Christian could have been the principle developer of the idea of evolution. Christian theology relies so heavily on the idea of a historical, original sin as an engine of the religion and evolution affects the stroke of that.
Quadrupole:
A decade back, some of the leading lights of the ID movement (particularly Behe and Dembski) did make specific predictions about evolutionary transitions that would remain unexplained. This was fairly scientific of them, in that they actually defined testable hypotheses. As you correctly note, most anti-evolutionary arguments don't make any predictions at all.
Unfortunately for the ID movement, several of the hypotheses, such as Behe's "there are no evolutionary antecedents for the bacterial flagellum", have taken a lot of damage in the intervening years. This may be why the movement is starting to lose steam---there's enough mid-1990's writing out there that's dragging them down. However, I've got to give them credit for actually stating something that could be dealt with in a scientific framework.
For Rob Lyman: I get where you're coming from, even though I'm an ontological agnostic and methodological atheist. I figure that if God exists and is putting this much effort into making a scientifically-consistent, knowable Universe, He or She is probably tickled pink that we're spending this much effort admiring the details of the Creation. It shows a respect for quality workmanship, if nothing else.
If I were an all powerful, omniscient being, would I spend a ridiculous amount of time designing eyes, ears, legs, etc. or would I whip up the most ingenious, amazing natural system imaginable that would build everything automatically?
If you're an unlimited deific being then neither one of those options is any harder than the other.
So then the question becomes - are you, as the putative God of love, justice, and order, going to structure your creation so that suffering is limited; or are you going to structure your creation on a foundation of death, suffering, disease, and starvation?
The fundamentalists are, unfortunately, exactly right on this point - evolution cannot be reconciled with the God as described in the Bible. (This is one of the reasons we know that God is fiction.)
As such, shouldn't we be finding a continuum of organisms, not stark divisions between species?
Exactly correct - and that's what we do find, no stark divisions between species.
Your belief that science is "useful" rests on the same "assumption" of uncontaminated evidence that you're trying to justify. It's a circular argument.
So? The problem isn't that science lacks sufficient justification under logic; the problem is that logic lacks sufficient veracity to justify science.
Science can only be supported with a circular argument. This is not a problem with science but with the logic of argumentation.
ID and creationism are theological ideas, not scientific theories. I have nothing against theology, but it is a category error to think it is a scientific enterprise. I am a strong believer in God, but I do not consider God to be a testable scientific theory - unlike, say, Dawkins. God is a theological proposition, in a category not approachable by material means. I have no objection to the teaching of ID or creationism in a social studies or history class devoted to the exploration of religion and theology. The debate between theology and science is also worth teaching to students, but again, as part of a history class, or a section devoted to the history of scientific debate. But within science itself, there is no actual "creationist theory" that makes scientific sense, so it can't be taught as some sort of "scientific controversy". THere is no serious controversy within science about creationism and ID. There's a social and cultural controversy between science and theology, which is certainly worth exploring and having students learn about. I personally don't think one negates the other, except where they cross the category boundaries and try to make declarations about the truthfulness of one another's domains.
One thing I heard recently, and I don't know for sure that it's true, is that Descartes was inspired to create his foundational philosophical approach to science by a vision of an angel, who told him "The secret to mastery of the material world is measures and numbers". I would second the angelic advice. This does not negate the existence of a spiritual dimension, but it does suggest that even the spirits think the way to understand the physical world is through scientific investigation, and not through theological interpretation.
Rob Lyman,
I don't see how anyone can conclude, from these facts, that there was no supernatural intervention involved.
Supernatural intervention is a logical possibility, but that doesn't mean there is no rational basis for concluding that someone with cancer is more likely to survive if she receives medical treatment.
But for knowledge to move forward--for oncologists to translate her survival into a practical treatment for others--scientists must assume the cause is natural.
You're again confusing an assumption (a proposition that is simply assumed to be true), with a conclusion (a proposition that is supported by evidence.) The evidence that the cause is natural is the success of "practical treatment." If practical treatments of diseases and illnesses never worked, the claim of a supernatural cause would be more plausible.
The evidence that the cause is natural is the success of "practical treatment."
Sure, after it's developed. But at the outset, when she is first found to be alive--and until scientists actually discover the natural cause of her survival--the information that forms a basis for that conclusion is unavailable. By conducting research to discover the cause, scientists betray their assumption (or if you like, their faith) that there exists a natural cause to be discovered.
cat,
It's possible. However, we wouldn't know the difference if this was so, so who cares?
Well, you're one who said we can't "prove" YEC is wrong, as if you think that matters. As I said, on your account proof is simply meaningless. If every claim of proof can be refuted with "God might be messing with our heads to make us think we've proved it, but really we haven't" then there can be no proof of anything. No logical proof. No mathematical proof. No scientific proof. No legal proof. No kind of proof at all. Does that really make sense to you?
Hell, maybe they are [meaningless concepts].
Really? So, in your view, no one knows anything, or understands anything or has proof of anything? You cannot possibly believe this. Life would be impossible. Every day, you make hundreds or thousands of choices that depend on your knowledge and understanding of the world around you. The very act of declaring something to be meaningless implies a belief that the concept of "meaninglessness" is understandable.
God is a theological proposition, in a category not approachable by material means.
Says who? Look, it's easy to falsify this. Either you believe in a God that takes action in this universe, or you believe in a God that doesn't.
Interventionist or non-interventionist. If you believe in an interventionist God, then he becomes approachable by material means, and thus, becomes detectable by his interaction with the matter in the universe, the same way we detect other intangible forces, like gravity.
If you believe in a non-interventionist God, then your belief has essentially no meaning, because the universe you believe we inhabit is indistinguishable from the universe where God does not exist.
A difference without a difference is no difference. If you believe in a non-interventionist God then you're essentially a tarted-up atheist.
The debate between theology and science is also worth teaching to students
I think, before theology is taught to students, the field of theology should be made to prove that they actually study something real, otherwise I don't see how theology is any more legitimate than, say, unicorn science or dragonology.
By conducting research to discover the cause, scientists betray their assumption (or if you like, their faith) that there exists a natural cause to be discovered.
Assumption != faith.
Sure, after it's developed. But at the outset, when she is first found to be alive--and until scientists actually discover the natural cause of her survival--the information that forms a basis for that conclusion is unavailable. By conducting research to discover the cause, scientists betray their assumption (or if you like, their faith) that there exists a natural cause to be discovered.
Huh? We have thousands of years' worth of evidence that diseases have natural causes and can be successfully treated with natural interventions. Even long before anyone knew how a treatment worked, they knew that it worked through observation of its effect on patients.
I'm really having a hard time understanding what you think the difference is between reason and faith, between believing a proposition to be true on the basis of evidence and rational inquiry, and believing it to be true by simply assuming that it is true.
Mixner--
If every claim of proof can be refuted with "God might be messing with our heads to make us think we've proved it, but really we haven't" then there can be no proof of anything. No logical proof. No mathematical proof. No scientific proof. No legal proof. No kind of proof at all. Does that really make sense to you?
I don't think that every claim of proof can be refuted by such a statement, since it's not falsifiable. The proposition that God is perpetrating some galactic mind-screw on us all is theological in nature; science can't answer it.
Contra Chet, I don't have any problem believing that God can interact with the world in a way we cannot detect; it's easy if you think God is omnipotent. However, such a belief is a statement of faith, and not amenable to scientific investigation by its nature.
Look, we're talking past each other. The fact is, sometimes logical systems have to make axiomatic statements to move forward. For Euclidian geometry, we assume that for every point not on a line, there is exactly one line parallel to the first through that point. This axiom cannot be proven. We do not have the ability to evaluate whether it's true with current technology. It might not be true in our universe, and definately isn't true along the surface of the Earth. However, it's still insanely useful for the vast majority of things that humans do in everyday life.
Similarly, every scientific investigation begins with the implicit assumption that there is a discoverable, natural explanation. Even if the experiment can't find such an explanation doesn't prove that one doesn't exist, just that our understanding of the world is insufficient to locate it. Conversely, the existance of a natural explanation doesn't prove that an omnipotent God didn't have a hand in it.
Maybe at some point it the future, science will be able to answer the question of whether or not there is an omnipotent God. However, we are nowhere near that point now.
"The “…god doesn’t throw dice” quote brought up by Island was part of an argument made by Albert Einstein against the new science of Quantum Mechanics. Seventy some years later, we find Quantum Mechanics, along with Relativistic Physics, to be the basis of modern physics. In that sense, Albert Einstein was wrong."
This is a common fallacy about Einstein's views. Einstein was not suggesting that QM is false in the practical sense. He wasn't arguing that the equations of QM come up with false answers. He was one of the primary developers of QM, and he knew how well it worked. What Einstein was arguing is that QM is not the foundational truth of physics, it's just how it seems to work at a certain level of study. He felt that what appeared to be the inherent randomness at the core of QM was not random at all, that randomness was merely how things appeared to operate at the level of appearances that QM could address. He felt certain that there was an underlying physics beneath QM that did not rely on randomness, and his efforts at finding a "Grand Unified Theory" were aimed at that. He failed, but so have all the others. (We'll see what the LHC produces. I know through a friend the physicist, Joel Premac, whose whole "dark energy, dark matter" theory is being tested there, and even he admits he hopes the LHC disproves his theory, because it would make physics much more interesting).
So it's simply not the case that QM has disproven Einstein's "GOd doesn't throw dice". QM has actually created even more internal problems with itself, and virtually no one in the field actually thinks that QM is the final answer. They all think the standard model is, past a certain point, just plain wrong. What is right, they don't exactly know. Add to this the inescapable findings of QM that there is no self-existing external reality, at any level. Read this link and prepare to lose any sense that we know what's going on:
http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2008/06/the_reality_tests_1.php?page=all&p=y
Chet,
Me: God is a theological proposition, in a category not approachable by material means.
Chet: Says who? Look, it's easy to falsify this. Either you believe in a God that takes action in this universe, or you believe in a God that doesn't.
Says virtually everyone in the history of religion. Seeing as how the concept of God was created many thousands of years ago, all over the world, and science didn't come along in full philosophical and practical force until the last few centuries, it's virtually impossible and ridiculous to say that God is a scientific theory, rather than a theological proposition. One can now try to treat it as a scientific theory, and subject it to various scientific tests, but that doesn't make it one. What exactly are the testable necessities of a scientific God-theory? Only a scientist would even think of coming up with such things, or a theologian with too much time on his hands.
You are running into a bad logical trap right off the bat by assuming that there's only two possibilities here, an "either/or" of a God who intervenes or one who doesn't. You leave out the possibility of a God who intervenes but leaves no trace of his intervention. An all-powerful God could not only intervene at will, but also make his interventions seem utterly natural and in harmony with natural laws, since he's the one who created the natural laws in the first place. In fact, I'd think a God with a sense of artistic harmony would do things in precisely that manner. But it's only one of many possible ways for a God to be active in the world and yet to have his actions not detectable scientifically.
You also leave out all kinds of notions of God as all-pervading Presence and Life-Power, or Consciousness Itself. There are many, many theological notions of God from around the world, and they do not fit into the neat boxes you would like them to.
If you believe in a non-interventionist God then you're essentially a tarted-up atheist.
Here you assume that God must be separate from the created world. But if God is inclusive of the world, the world we live in is not separate from God, and the notion of "intervention" has no meaning. Think, for example, of the world as the "dream of God", arising within God's mind. One can't say that God is intervening in the world, because the world is inside of God, but one can't say God is not intervening in the world, because everything that happens is happening only because God is dreaming it. If you've ever had a lucid dream, in which you become aware within a dream that you are dreaming, you will have some sense of the paradoxes involved.
I think, before theology is taught to students, the field of theology should be made to prove that they actually study something real, otherwise I don't see how theology is any more legitimate than, say, unicorn science or dragonology
This isn't a requirement we make of English teachers, who teach novels and poetry as we speak, or art teachers, who teach about Picasso and Van Gogh without having to prove that these people were painting things which actually existed. For that matter, science has yet to prove that an objective reality exists, and yet we allow them to teach students all the time. I don't see why religion and theology should be any different, in that they have certainly existed as human phenomena for a much longer time than science.
Look, we're talking past each other. The fact is, sometimes logical systems have to make axiomatic statements to move forward. For Euclidian geometry, we assume that for every point not on a line, there is exactly one line parallel to the first through that point. This axiom cannot be proven. We do not have the ability to evaluate whether it's true with current technology. It might not be true in our universe, and definately isn't true along the surface of the Earth. However, it's still insanely useful for the vast majority of things that humans do in everyday life.
It's not merely a matter of what is "useful." Unless you commit to the truth of logical axioms, you can't make any rational argument for any proposition. Including the proposition that God may be deceiving us about what is true (by messing with our heads, or planting fake empirical evidence, or whatever other sneaky methods he may be using). But to make that commitment to logical truth is to preclude the possibility that God is deceiving us about it.
As I said before, if we have no methods or principles for genuinely distinguishing true propositions from false ones, if all our claims of truth amount to leaps of faith, just like the creationist's leap of faith, then there's no such thing as knowledge or understanding or proof at all.
Says virtually everyone in the history of religion.
Oh, nonsense. Religionists only started saying this "God is beyond the scientific method" bullshit when it became obvious that science was disproving their God.
Before then, every world religion that had encountered rational inquiry into the natural world absolutely used it as positive proof of their god and how great he was, to the greatest extent possible.
The "separate magesteria" view is horsecrap. If scientists proved the existence of God tomorrow, the silence from the "god is beyond science" crowd would be deafening.
You leave out the possibility of a God who intervenes but leaves no trace of his intervention.
Because that's an impossibility. The action he took is the trace. If he's taking action, then he's detectable. Case closed. I only present the two options because that's all there are. If he's leaving no trace, he's not intervening. If he's interventing, he's leaving a trace - the intervention itself is the trace.
An all-powerful God could not only intervene at will, but also make his interventions seem utterly natural and in harmony with natural laws
Then it what sense did he intervene? If what He made happen was consistent with natural law, it was about to happen anyway. How can God have intervened if what happened was what would have happened anyway?
I think maybe you haven't thought this through. That's ok, most religious people haven't. That's why they're not atheists yet. You'll get there, I think.
You also leave out all kinds of notions of God as all-pervading Presence and Life-Power, or Consciousness Itself.
Because nobody really believes that nonsense. In practice, for almost all believers, God is either a figure approached in supplication to get things to happen (i.e. "prayer"), or a fictional character given lip service in order to get by in a religious culture. (Spinoza's God, in other words.)
But if God is inclusive of the world, the world we live in is not separate from God, and the notion of "intervention" has no meaning.
Then the notion of God has no meaning, either, if all you mean by the term is "the universe."
Hey, I believe in the universe. There it is, right there! (And there, too.) Just because you might use the word "God" instead doesn't mean that I'm not an atheist, or that you're not, either.
This isn't a requirement we make of English teachers
Of course not, because it's obvious that English literature and grammar exist.
or art teachers, who teach about Picasso and Van Gogh without having to prove that these people were painting things which actually existed.
Because it's already obvious that they do. Everybody knows that.
The existence of God, or which gods exist, however, is a subject of considerable dispute. And we certainly made plate-tectonics geologists prove that the continents move before we let them teach it in schools. We certainly made the evolutionists prove evolution before we let them teach it in schools. I see no reason that theologists should not be subject to the same requirement. How do we know what they're teaching is true, otherwise?
I don't see why religion and theology should be any different, in that they have certainly existed as human phenomena for a much longer time than science.
Study them as human phenomena, sure; but that's anthropology and sociology, not theology. Theology is the study of God, remember? Not the phenomenon of the human belief in God. We've got fields for that, already.
Theology should justify its existence. The only possible justification is that God is something that exists and is worth studying.
Can anyone on the side of "science is kinda like faith" define Faith. Is saying the earth goes around the sun ultimately like saying Jesus rose from the dead about 2000 years ago? If not, why not?
Can anyone on the side of "science is kinda like faith" define Faith.
Yes, I'd like to see that too.
And for anyone who defends faith as a basis for belief, I would like to know how they choose which propositions to believe through faith. Why have faith in one explanation of something rather than another? Why believe through faith that Jesus is the Son of God rather than that he isn't? Why believe through faith that there is one God rather than two Gods, or three, or many, or none at all? How is believing through faith different from simply guessing, or wishful thinking?
Chet,
"Religionists only started saying this "God is beyond the scientific method" bullshit when it became obvious that science was disproving their God."
Well, duh, seeing as science didn't exist until thousands, probably tens of thousands, of years after religion came into being. Science has only disproved certain material claims that religions have made, because religion makes category errors when it makes claims such as these. As stated, theology and science are separate disciplines with separate domains that don't share propositional theories. Science simply cannot prove or disprove theological propositions, and theology cannot prove or disprove scientific propositions. They are only in conflict when they intrude upon one another. Otherwise, they can actually be complementary to one another, like a good oil and vinegar salad dressing.
"Before then, every world religion that had encountered rational inquiry into the natural world absolutely used it as positive proof of their god and how great he was, to the greatest extent possible."
You exagerrate. Religious people have always looked at the natural world as a sign of the glory of God. But these things were seldom used as "proof" of the existence of God, because most people never thought such proof was necessary. It's only as rationalism developed in medievel Europe that some theologians began to feel a need to come up with "proofs" of God. For the most part, religious people have never felt the need for such external proofs, because their belief in God does not come from external sources. As the scientific/rationale view has gained strength, some religious people have felt a need to create logical proofs and refute the critics of religion, but honestly, it's still a very small contingent. Most religious people do not feel in the least bit threatened by science, and find the whole creationism/ID debate besides the point.
"The "separate magesteria" view is horsecrap. If scientists proved the existence of God tomorrow, the silence from the "god is beyond science" crowd would be deafening."
I don't see how that could possibly happen, and if it did, it would simply make science seem silly, rather than "prove" the existence of God.
"You leave out the possibility of a God who intervenes but leaves no trace of his intervention.
Because that's an impossibility. The action he took is the trace. If he's taking action, then he's detectable. Case closed. I only present the two options because that's all there are. If he's leaving no trace, he's not intervening. If he's interventing, he's leaving a trace - the intervention itself is the trace."
That's your assumption, but you aren't God, so how would you know?
Look at it this way. Imagine the universe is a giant sim-city game, and God is the programmer. Now, part of the programming allows the programmer to re-write the code to change things around. WIthin the program, this will always seem natural, because it's part of the programming. Even the changes in the programming are part of the program. How is a character in the game supposed to differentiate between a "natural" occurance and an "intervention". In terms of how the game is put together, there is no difference. It's all just "programming". None of it is actually real to begin with, and the characters are real only because they are programmed to seem real. But their judgment of what is real is entirely dependent on the game itself, so they cannot help but judge everything that happens in the game as natural and real, even if all of it is simply the result of the program itself. The game is not really separate from the programmer, it's an extension of the programmer's own imagination, wishes, work, skill, etc. The whole game is one giant intervention, and so you can't differentiate between any aspect of it as "natural" and "unnatural". It all seems natural within the game, and one can't, from inside the game, determine what the programming actually is, one can only make observations about the effects of the programming.
"I think maybe you haven't thought this through. That's ok, most religious people haven't. That's why they're not atheists yet. You'll get there, I think."
I know you're trying to be helpful, but I don't think you've thought this through. This is typical of people with very little interest in religion, other than refuting it. They aren't interested enough in it to actually understand what it's about, and they don't get to know its subtleties and meanings. Why should they? THey think it's all bullshit. It's the same problem most creationists have with science. They don't care enough about it to learn what it's actually about, and so they say all kinds of stupid things about science that make no sense to anyone with even a lay understanding of science.
"You also leave out all kinds of notions of God as all-pervading Presence and Life-Power, or Consciousness Itself.
Because nobody really believes that nonsense."
Really? So, like, a billion Hindus, and a few hundred million Buddhists, don't even exist?
"In practice, for almost all believers, God is either a figure approached in supplication to get things to happen (i.e. "prayer"), or a fictional character given lip service in order to get by in a religious culture. (Spinoza's God, in other words.)"
This just isn't true. It's the lazy man's understanding of religion, based on silly stereotypes and condescending attitudes. You don't know enough about religion, and you don't want to know enough about religion, to get past this stereotype.
"Then the notion of God has no meaning, either, if all you mean by the term is "the universe.""
Not if by "the universe", we mean "living, conscious being" transcending all appearances within it.
"Of course not, because it's obvious that English literature and grammar exist...or art teachers, who teach about Picasso and Van Gogh without having to prove that these people were painting things which actually existed."
Well, it's also obvious that religions exist, and religious leaders exist, and the Bible and other scriptures exist, and mystics and theologians exist. You can argue that what they talk about doesn't exist, but you can also argue that there has never been a night sky like that in "Starry Night", or that Van Gogh's self-portraits are innacurate, that his colors never existed in the "real world", that there have never been any women who looked like "Le Damsels d'Avignon", that there are no people who look like cubist paintings, and that all art is just imaginary bullshit. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't study it.
"The existence of God, or which gods exist, however, is a subject of considerable dispute. And we certainly made plate-tectonics geologists prove that the continents move before we let them teach it in schools."
Yes, but that's precisely my point. Theology is not a science. There's no scientific proof of "beauty" either, but that doesn't mean that art students can't discuss the matter intelligently. You can of course try to make a scientific study of "beauty", but it's not really going to have a lot of meaning to artists. It may be meaningful to scientists in some sense, but it's not necessarily meaningful outside the world of scientific assumptions.
"We certainly made the evolutionists prove evolution before we let them teach it in schools. I see no reason that theologists should not be subject to the same requirement. How do we know what they're teaching is true, otherwise?"
Again, I have no objection to this standard if we are discussing teaching about religion in science class. I don't think it has any business there, because it isn't science. But most of what kids study in school is not scientific in any case. Religion is a huge part of human history and culture, including the present, so it's perfectly rational to teach kids about it. Pretending it doesn't exist is hiding one's head in the sands. One can't teach which theological system is true, but teaching kids what religion is about and how it approaches the world is hardly inappropriate.
"Study them as human phenomena, sure; but that's anthropology and sociology, not theology. Theology is the study of God, remember? Not the phenomenon of the human belief in God. We've got fields for that, already."
I only suggested that students should learn about religion, theology, etc., not that they be taught to believe some particular catechism. You are being silly here, as if a course in religious studies somehow involves "studying God" rather than studying various theological ideas about God. In that it's no different from any other course of study.
"Theology should justify its existence. The only possible justification is that God is something that exists and is worth studying."
Well, this is just nonsense. Religion does exist, and studying religion is studying something that exists. Take a different tack, because this one just doesn't work.
Posted by Chet | September 14, 2008 11:13 PM
"Can anyone on the side of "science is kinda like faith" define Faith. Is saying the earth goes around the sun ultimately like saying Jesus rose from the dead about 2000 years ago? If not, why not?"
I'll give it a shot. Faith is acceptance of some foundational presumption we don't actually know to be true. Science is based on the foundational assumption of material logic. It doesn't actually know that material logic is true, but it proceeds on the assumption that it is. It doesn't actually know that the world is objectively existing, but it proceeds on that assumption anyway. This is a form of faith. It differs from religious faith only in the foundational presumptions it has faith in. Some people feel that foundational assumpations of science make more "sense", and some people feel that the foundational assumptions of religion make more "sense", but both have faith not only in their foundational assumptions, but in the basic "sense" that reality favors one of these assumptions over the other.
Science has only disproved certain material claims that religions have made, because religion makes category errors when it makes claims such as these.
The fact that you have it as two separate categories in the first place is what makes your whole point a circular argument. I'm talking about what religion is doing, not what it had a right to do in your opinion. You don't get to dismiss the "religiousness" of seven millenia-worth of claims simply because, in your narrow view, they're "category errors."
As the scientific/rationale view has gained strength, some religious people have felt a need to create logical proofs and refute the critics of religion, but honestly, it's still a very small contingent.
Absolutely false. You'll find far more people who will point to some external reason as justification of their belief in God or gods than won't.
I don't see how that could possibly happen
If God actually exists then it could happen at any time; otherwise, you're operating from a fairly unique definition of "exist."
That's your assumption
No, it's a necessary conclusion if words actually have meaning. To "intervene" is to make a change. There's no such thing as a change that is no change, that's a contradiction in terms. If God makes a change then it means something has been made different than it was before. If it's been made the same as it was before, then in no sense did a change occur.
Christ it's like I'm talking to a child. If God makes a change, then if the change is meaningful, then it must be detectable. There's no "undetectable change" because a change that is no change is no change.
That's not an assumption, that's inevitable if words like "change" and "makes" actually have meanings.
Well, it's also obvious that religions exist, and religious leaders exist, and the Bible and other scriptures exist, and mystics and theologians exist.
So let them be studied. That study properly belongs to anthropology - the study of Man - and sociology - the study of societies.
Theology is not a science.
I agree. But the study of the human phenomenon of religion is very much science, because humans and their religions exist. That science is sociology/anthropology.
Since you've agreed with me that the one potential legitimate purpose of theology actually belongs to a completely separate field, what is left for theology to do?
Religion does exist, and studying religion is studying something that exists.
Yes. It's sociology. What, then, is theology?
This is a form of faith.
No, this is a form of trust.
"The fact that you have it as two separate categories in the first place is what makes your whole point a circular argument. I'm talking about what religion is doing, not what it had a right to do in your opinion. You don't get to dismiss the "religiousness" of seven millenia-worth of claims simply because, in your narrow view, they're "category errors.""
I'm not dismissing milennia of "religiousness", or even defending it. I'm differentiating between the concept of God, which is a theological concept, or the notion that "God created the universe", which is a theological conception of creation, and the material timeline of the development of the universe, such as "God created the universe 6,000 years ago." The first two are extra-material, theological claims which cannot be proven or falsified within the material world. The third is an intra-material claim that can be proven or falsified within the material world. Science has nothing to say about the first two, but plenty about the third. You can try to dismiss the notion that distinct categories exist, but you haven't made an argument for this, you have just made an assertion. That doesn't fly.
"Absolutely false. You'll find far more people who will point to some external reason as justification of their belief in God or gods than won't."
People certainly point to external reasons to justify their beliefs, in large part because of the secular scientific culture of the modern world which insists that people have external reasons and rationales, but their beliefs are not derived from those external reasons, and are not dependent on them. Their beliefs are derived from internal reasons, intuitions, and plain old psychological needs, which is why when the external justifications are sometimes disproven, most people continue to believe in God, even in things that are otherwise rationally disproven.
"If God actually exists then it could happen at any time; otherwise, you're operating from a fairly unique definition of "exist.""
Not if God exists at a higher operational level than the universe itself. How can a character inside a simulation prove the existence of the programmer who created the simulation? He can't, plain and simple.
"No, it's a necessary conclusion if words actually have meaning. To "intervene" is to make a change. There's no such thing as a change that is no change, that's a contradiction in terms. If God makes a change then it means something has been made different than it was before. If it's been made the same as it was before, then in no sense did a change occur."
This is easily refuted by example. If God were to make every dimension twice as big as it once was, we could not tell from inside the universe, because all our rulers would also be twice as big. Only an observer outside the universe could detect this change. Likewise, a change in the programming of a sim-game could not be detected from within the game, because the programming could also change the memory banks to reflect the change. It's the same principle as changing the size of rulers.
"Christ it's like I'm talking to a child."
Maybe an infant talking to a child.
"So let them be studied. That study properly belongs to anthropology - the study of Man - and sociology - the study of societies."
Anthropology is a science. Theology is not. Anthropologists study the cultural aspects of religion, but they don't study the internal logic and theories of religion. I'm not sure why you are so insistent on excluding religion from having its own field of study, but want to fold it into something else. It seems small-minded.
"the study of the human phenomenon of religion is very much science, because humans and their religions exist. That science is sociology/anthropology."
One can certainly study religion from a scientific/biological/neurological perspective, and that is certainly what is done in those fields. One can also study religion through the disciplines of anthropology and sociology. One can also study art from these perspectives. That doesn't mean that one should exclusively study these things from a perspective outside their own field. To prohibit the teaching of art, or art history, outside of a scientific/anthropological viewpoint seems to me to be a form of fascist reductionism, not an honest approach to the subject matter.
"Since you've agreed with me that the one potential legitimate purpose of theology actually belongs to a completely separate field, what is left for theology to do?"
I'm not sure what you mean. I think there are many legitmate purposes to the study of religion and theology.
""Religion does exist, and studying religion is studying something that exists."
"Yes. It's sociology. What, then, is theology?"
Sociology only studies the social aspects of religion, not the theological aspects. Do you think sociology concerns itself with the finer points of Madhyamika?
Trust and faith are virtually indistinguishable in the context of the unknown.
We have thousands of years' worth of evidence that diseases have natural causes and can be successfully treated with natural interventions. Even long before anyone knew how a treatment worked, they knew that it worked through observation of its effect on patients.
Scientific medicine is what, 150 years old at most? A scant 500 years ago most people would have thought the book of Job to be a treatise on the causes of disease, and 200 years ago plenty of reputably "physicians" would have bled you when you got sick and warned you about the health risks of bathing and fresh air.
That said, you seem committed to an extreme form of scientific induction. Normally we assume (believe? conclude?) that because an experiment produced result X yesterday, it will produce result X tomorrow. In the context of an individual experiment, this seems like a perfectly justifiable view. But you seem to claim that because supernatural explanations have been found wanting in the past, they always will be found wanting in the future. That seems to me an unjustified extension.
Not if God exists at a higher operational level than the universe itself.
What "higher operation level"? We know from Bell's Inequality that no such level can exist - conceptions of quantum physics that involve hidden determinism are necessarily false.
We know that, experimentally. That makes it impossible for any such "higher operational level" to exist.
If God were to make every dimension twice as big as it once was, we could not tell from inside the universe, because all our rulers would also be twice as big.
And no change would have occurred. A difference that is no difference is no difference.
Anthropology is a science. Theology is not.
My point exactly. That leaves it unequipped to study the human phenomenon of religion, which is a scientific question.
So what can it study? The nature of God, presumably, but there's no reason to assume that there actually is a God whose nature can be studied.
So what do theologians do besides waste people's time on make-believe?
but they don't study the internal logic and theories of religion.
Of course they do. Don't be an idiot.
Sociology only studies the social aspects of religion, not the theological aspects.
But what are the theological aspects? You're just arguing circularly, now. The human phenomenon of religion is a scientific matter, and the study of it justly belongs to the scientific method. So what is left for theologians? If your answer is "theology", you're just wasting my time.
We know from Bell's Inequality that no such level can exist - conceptions of quantum physics that involve hidden determinism are necessarily false.
No, we know that local hidden variables are impossible. There are still viable global hidden variable theories, although nobody pays much attention because they don't really add anything to our ability to predict the outcome of experiments.
Aside from which it seems remarkably--shall we say, overconfident--to assert that our experiments are so utterly infallible and our understanding so thoroughly complete as to be able to put limits on the nature of God.
Chet,
"What "higher operation level"? We know from Bell's Inequality that no such level can exist - conceptions of quantum physics that involve hidden determinism are necessarily false."
QM is incomplete. It is a model, not reality. You are confusing the two. QM has also shown that there is no objective reality, that observation creates the observed. So, who is the observer? What is consciousness? Explore that deeply enough, and you will discover "higher oeprational levels". But on the theoretical level of God as the creator of the universe, God can certainly create a universe that operates by QM, while God himself not being bound by such rules. A programmer is not bound by simulation he has created.
"We know that, experimentally. That makes it impossible for any such "higher operational level" to exist."
Within our universe, perhaps. But if God is the creator of the universe, those rules don't apply to him. The creator must be at a higher operational level than what he has created. The creators of Sim City are not bound by the rules of that game in their own lives, and they can program the game, or "hack" it, any way they like, since they are the creators of it.
"And no change would have occurred. A difference that is no difference is no difference."
But a change would have occured. Any outside observer could see that the size of the system had doubled. But someone inside the system could not detect this. It's similar to relativity theory, where a near-lightspeed spaceship does not experience time or space distortions to an observer inside the ship, but an outside observer would see such distortions as obvious.
""Anthropology is a science. Theology is not."
"My point exactly. That leaves it unequipped to study the human phenomenon of religion, which is a scientific question."
Religion is certainly not equipped to study itself scientifically, but that is not the only way to study and understand something. Art does not study itself scientifically, but we still have art classes, and artists. Are you saying that scientists understand art better than artists and art history professors?
"So what can it study? The nature of God, presumably, but there's no reason to assume that there actually is a God whose nature can be studied."
You would not know unless you actually sincerely tried. You might as well say there is no truth or beauty in art, because science can't find such things. Well, so much the worse for science. It simply shows that science is not the ultimate vehicle for what matters in life.
"So what do theologians do besides waste people's time on make-believe?"
Again, you could as the same thing of artists. They just make things up. An engineer might call it a waste of time. However, it seems to be intrinsic to the human condition to create both art and religion. If science can't understand their value, it suggests that science isn't a good or final arbiter of human values.
"But what are the theological aspects? You're just arguing circularly, now."
I gave you an example. What sociologist studies the madhyamika, much less understands it? You probably don't even know what that is, which is kind of what I mean when I say you lack the necessary knowledge of the subject to say much about it. You think it's all made up nonsense, and not worth bothering with. Now THAT'S an example of circular thinking.
"The human phenomenon of religion is a scientific matter, and the study of it justly belongs to the scientific method. So what is left for theologians? If your answer is "theology", you're just wasting my time."
This is turning science into a cult, in which only science is "true", and only scientific methods can find "truth", and everything else is just a waste of time. To answer the other commentator's question, this is how science and religion are often all too similar. Both are attempts to create certainty in a world that is basically unknown. Religion creates certainty through faith, while science creates certainty through logic. Unfortunately, both have a tendency to see themselves as the only way to truth, the holders of the only truth, and they seek to abolish any "pretenders" to the throne. To suggest that human life is, essentially, a scientific matter, is to pretend that science is the ultimate arbiter of all truths, is the only real arbiter, and thus everything should be studied scientifically, and every other approach should be forbidden. How is this any different from the medieval religious perspective that allows only approved religious methods and aproved religious ways of thinking? Not much. It's the same human tendency to worship an exclusive path of certainty rather than an open path which acknowledges the uncertainty at the core of our human experience.
"you seem to claim that because supernatural explanations have been found wanting in the past, they always will be found wanting in the future. That seems to me an unjustified extension."
When van Leeuwenhoek saw microbes in his first microscope, people thought it was a supernatural phenomena and dismissed it as fantasy. Two hundred years later Pasteur came along and it because established as scientific fact. So not all "supernatural explanations" turn out to be false. Sometimes it just takes a while for science to catch up.
QM is incomplete. It is a model, not reality.
Again, you're ignoring Bell's Theorem. Is that because you don't know what it is?
QM has also shown that there is no objective reality, that observation creates the observed. So, who is the observer?
We are, when we're observing. And, indeed, the fact that it's possible to indirectly observe an uncollapsed superposition of quantum states is another proof that there's no omnipresent God - such a God would be an observer of every quantum interaction, always, and thus no superposition could actually exist.
But we know that they do exist. Therefore we know that there's no God observing everything simultaneously.
But if God is the creator of the universe, those rules don't apply to him.
It doesn't matter if they do or not. They either constrain his action in this universe, when he chooses to act here; or they don't, in which case the dramatic departure from the way things should have happened gives science the "in" to study God.
Religion is certainly not equipped to study itself scientifically, but that is not the only way to study and understand something.
Ah, I see. This old chestnut. The actual truth is that the empiricism of the scientific method is the only method that generates knowledge distinguishable from make-believe. There's really nothing else as useful, and therefore, no real other way to arrive at a true understanding of anything.
You probably don't even know what that is, which is kind of what I mean when I say you lack the necessary knowledge of the subject to say much about it.
That's just dumb. I don't need a degree in Textiles to see that the Emperor has no clothes on.
This is turning science into a cult, in which only science is "true", and only scientific methods can find "truth", and everything else is just a waste of time.
Well, look. Video games may entertain me, but they don't necessarily lead to a greater understanding of the world around me, and religion is much the same. There's nothing cultish about that, only the recognition that the scientific method is the best and only way to arrive at a true understanding of what is going on in the universe.
All the rest is make-believe. Make-believe can be fun and make you feel good, but it should not be confused with a way to understand the world around you, or even within you.
It's the same human tendency to worship an exclusive path of certainty rather than an open path which acknowledges the uncertainty at the core of our human experience.
And it's only science that can actually grapple with that uncertainty.
Religion simply ignores it. Where's the recognition of uncertainty when someone says "God is beyond all our capacity to understand, or even to detect; nonetheless I know exactly what he likes and dislikes"?
It's the breathtaking arrogance of the religious believer, not the scientist, who looks at an unresolved question and simply jumps to the conclusion that makes them feel better.
"Again, you're ignoring Bell's Theorem. Is that because you don't know what it is?'
In lay terms, yes, but I'm not qualified to say much about it otherwise. I've never heard it used to refute the existence of God or the possibility of Divine Intervention, and I suspect for good reason. My sense is that you're misusing the theory. In any case, the notion of local realism has been shot through with holes. Did you read the link I posted here earlier?
http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2008/06/the_reality_tests_1.php?page=all&p=y
"We are, when we're observing."
And who is this "we", or rather, this "I"? Do you actually know?
"And, indeed, the fact that it's possible to indirectly observe an uncollapsed superposition of quantum states is another proof that there's no omnipresent God - such a God would be an observer of every quantum interaction, always, and thus no superposition could actually exist."
This is the interesting issue. It suggests that God must not be a discreet observer as we seem to be. This is not proof that God does not exist, but only that God exists in an entirely different form than as any discreet subject or object. Which, as you must know due to your vast erudition on the subject, is very much how many theological notions of God conceive of him.
"But we know that they do exist. Therefore we know that there's no God observing everything simultaneously."
We know nothing of the kind. We cannot confirm the existence of anything. Realism is dead, my friend. Nothing exists prior to our observation of it. Thus, can we really say it exists in the most basic sense of the word? Not really. All we can say is we don't know what really exists. That should induce a kind of humility in us, rather than arrogance.
""But if God is the creator of the universe, those rules don't apply to him."
"It doesn't matter if they do or not. They either constrain his action in this universe, when he chooses to act here; or they don't, in which case the dramatic departure from the way things should have happened gives science the "in" to study God."
You confuse God acting upon the universe from the outside, with God acting from within the universe. A programmer can interact with his simulation from outside, without being constrained by the rules of the simulation. He can change the programming, he can create backdoors by which to manipulate things that others cannot use, he can seemingly defy the "rules" without actually doing so. Detecting such things from within the simulation are simply not possible, because one would have to have full knowledge of what is outside the simulation to know about the programmer, and that is not possible inside the simulation. It really doesn't matter how complex the simulation is. It could incorporate all of QM's "rules", and still not bind the programmer to the QM rules. I think this is pretty obvious. So suggesting the God can't violate QM is rather silly, in that QM can have all kinds of "backdoors" by which God could do whatever he likes and it would simply appear "random" to us.
"The actual truth is that the empiricism of the scientific method is the only method that generates knowledge distinguishable from make-believe. There's really nothing else as useful, and therefore, no real other way to arrive at a true understanding of anything."
This is the definition of circular logic. You use science to prove that science is the only way to prove anything. Hmmmm. Why does this sound so familiar? Could it be exactly the same kind of logic that cultic religions use?
"That's just dumb. I don't need a degree in Textiles to see that the Emperor has no clothes on."
Come on, talk about dumb. You certainly do need to know about textiles to distinguish between designer clothing and K-Mart. To say "all clothing design is imaginary bullshit, it's purely utilitarian" is simply a confession of one's philistine ignorance.
"Well, look. Video games may entertain me, but they don't necessarily lead to a greater understanding of the world around me, and religion is much the same."
Video games have been driving the personal computer industry for some time now. They take immense skill to program, and demand more of your computer than almost anything else. So this is a bad comparison for your purposes.
"There's nothing cultish about that, only the recognition that the scientific method is the best and only way to arrive at a true understanding of what is going on in the universe."
Anything that claims to be the best and only way to do acheive a true understanding of the universe is a cult. See fundamentalist Christianity, Islam, etc. Fundamentalist scientism is not different.
"All the rest is make-believe. Make-believe can be fun and make you feel good, but it should not be confused with a way to understand the world around you, or even within you."
Using the imagination is extremely important to most higher human functions, including science itself. If it weren't for our imaginations, we wouldn't have QM and GR. We wouldn't have science at all. Accusing religion of being the product of our imaginations is hardly a criticism. It's a form of praise.
"And it's only science that can actually grapple with that uncertainty."
I would certainly agree with you that many religious people can't deal with uncertainty, and create religious beliefs as a protective wall against their uncertainty. But so do many, even most scientists. Scientists pretend to grapple with uncertainty, but they spend their lives trying to reduce it to the bare minimum, and end up actually believing that they've discovered the only true way of "knowing". Mature scientists know better, as do mature religious people, who affirm the "unknowability" of ultimate truth through the mind. However, the mind is not the ultimate vehicle of knowledge, whether it is the religious mind or the scientific mind. True knowledge is found in the root of the observer, beyond the mind.
Megan, just because you can evince no proof that the laws of physics operate the same way everywhere, doesn't mean that is not so. To be blunt, the laws of physics don't care what you think. Also, physicists do experiments using the scientific method so you don't have to evince anything, they are doing the work for you. One thing physics teaches is that your viewpoint, yours Megan, is not special - so your snarky 'radical skepticism' about the laws of physics is just another form of ignorance.
But so do many, even most scientists. Scientists pretend to grapple with uncertainty, but they spend their lives trying to reduce it to the bare minimum
Why is that a bad way to grapple with uncertainty? And every scientist knows that theory, ultimately, is as good as it gets; our models are always approximate and our conclusions always provisional.
The only absolute certainty you'll find is the false certainty of religion. Absolutes only exist in science as convenient abstractions.
True knowledge is found in the root of the observer, beyond the mind.
I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. Are you proposing some kind of bizarre new organ that just sucks in knowledge and truth from the truth-iverse?
Realism is dead, my friend.
Only if you misuse quantum mechanics. No surprise; it's a very popular theory to misuse in support of mysticism.
Realism, in fact, is not dead; we've just learned that indeterminate states are a real part of the universe.
To say "all clothing design is imaginary bullshit, it's purely utilitarian" is simply a confession of one's philistine ignorance.
Funny, but I heard the exact same thing from the Emperor's new tailors. It's just the kind of thing you'd say if you wanted someone important to run around naked.
"Why is that a bad way to grapple with uncertainty? And every scientist knows that theory, ultimately, is as good as it gets; our models are always approximate and our conclusions always provisional."
History shows that every movement which claims absolute authority over "truth" ends badly. It's in the nature of human beings to be innately uncertain and fallible, and yet to seek for ultimate certainty and infallibility. Science certainly has an inclination to acknowledge uncertainty, and yet history is full of human endeavors which acknowledge, say, equality and yet promote slavery, or which acknowledge social injustice and end up promoting it. Science is not immune to the dangers that every other human enterprise which has claimed exclusive authority over what is true and what is not, what is of value and what is not. You yourself are claiming that authority to decide what is of value and what is not. I think that's a dangerous way of thinking regardless of the virtues of science.
"The only absolute certainty you'll find is the false certainty of religion. Absolutes only exist in science as convenient abstractions."
I'm not defending religions which claim absolute certainty and authority, but they are not the only human endeavors which do that. You yourself are claiming that science is the one and only authority on all matters of human life, which makes you very much like the absolutists of religion, except that your religion is called "science".
"Realism, in fact, is not dead; we've just learned that indeterminate states are a real part of the universe."
In terms of QM, yes, realism seems to be dead. At least until some new approach can be made. And it's misleading to suggest that these findings can be limited to saying that indeterminate states are a real part of the universe. It's more accurate to say that the entire universe is an indeterminate state until someone observes it.
As for mysticism, I won't pretend that QM is a mystical tradition, except in the broadest possible use of the term, to signify a contemplation of the "mystery" of existence. In that regard, QM seems to verify the mysteriousness of existence, rather than turning it into a "known" quantity.
As mentioned before, the secret seems to lie in the direction of the observing awareness, not the objects observed. But that would require a theological discussion, which you are not interested in.