I'm curious--since our science extrapolates (on a type of human faith) that the world we see is objectively measurable and understandable, and that our minds are equipped to know it not only instinctively, but speculatively...doesn't our entire system of Science kind of presuppose an ordered universe, with something faintly like a person ordering it (since it's intelligible to other persons)?
Obviously one doesn't have to be theistic to employ science--anyone could conduct an activity, and notice the effects, and for the heck of it, do it again...but you'd have nothing like the ordered system of science, the methodologies or the belief in progress we have today, if we didn't believe in some sort of fixed nature of the universe, would we? There'd be no more point in recording your findings, than in writing a map of a world which was one constant shift of tectonic plates and floating continents. It could all fall apart at any moment (which you could believe as a Theist, too--but then you'd also believe in a God with a knowable nature that was eternal...a sort of further undergirding knowledge of the nature of reality, and the reality of nature...a source of stability, purpose and order guiding it, Who WANTED and WANTS to be understood).
Again--I'm not saying that no atheists are scientists, or anything like that--it's just funny to me that the whole idea of order, logic, method--of trying to understand, seems to imply a personal orderer of the universe, to make it relevant. Otherwise, you could say that every scientific discovery was pure luck, and we just keep going with it--like kids pulling one rabbit, tree, bug, or amoeba after another out of a Magicians top-hat, when there's no Magician, and therefore no ultimate meaningful relation between them to understand. Is science as hoky as many of us here believe religion to be? Is it just creating our own framework of meaning out of what is at root a completely chaotic universe? It seems to me that one's got to choose one way or another--is there undergirding order, or not? If there's order to things--where do we derive that from?
If there's no order--there's really no point to either reading or not-reading this thread. And especially not for arguing with it
. But then again--we've got nothing better to do, either.
JMJ
Obviously one doesn't have to be theistic to employ science--anyone could conduct an activity, and notice the effects, and for the heck of it, do it again...but you'd have nothing like the ordered system of science, the methodologies or the belief in progress we have today, if we didn't believe in some sort of fixed nature of the universe, would we? There'd be no more point in recording your findings, than in writing a map of a world which was one constant shift of tectonic plates and floating continents. It could all fall apart at any moment (which you could believe as a Theist, too--but then you'd also believe in a God with a knowable nature that was eternal...a sort of further undergirding knowledge of the nature of reality, and the reality of nature...a source of stability, purpose and order guiding it, Who WANTED and WANTS to be understood).
Again--I'm not saying that no atheists are scientists, or anything like that--it's just funny to me that the whole idea of order, logic, method--of trying to understand, seems to imply a personal orderer of the universe, to make it relevant. Otherwise, you could say that every scientific discovery was pure luck, and we just keep going with it--like kids pulling one rabbit, tree, bug, or amoeba after another out of a Magicians top-hat, when there's no Magician, and therefore no ultimate meaningful relation between them to understand. Is science as hoky as many of us here believe religion to be? Is it just creating our own framework of meaning out of what is at root a completely chaotic universe? It seems to me that one's got to choose one way or another--is there undergirding order, or not? If there's order to things--where do we derive that from?
If there's no order--there's really no point to either reading or not-reading this thread. And especially not for arguing with it
. But then again--we've got nothing better to do, either.JMJ
