(August 8, 2014 at 5:20 pm)Michael Wrote: Well, I'm a scientist and a faithful Christian. I happily live in both worlds. But I don't share your view that we must approach everything scientifically. I love my science, but I see it as a tool for a particular job. I don't base my marriage on science. I don't base my music on science. I don't judge the books I enjoy reading by science. I don't derive my moral code from science. And I don't see a problem with any of that. The problem, to me, comes when one sees science as the only game in town. I know science pretty well, and I know where is useful and I know where it has little use. And I don't think that trying to derive everything from science is a position you can hold consistently in life.
That's all well and good, but when it comes to building descriptive and predictive models of reality, what other game is there? Whenever science and religion have clashed, science wins 100% of the time. Religion must scramble to invent new explanations/metaphors/workarounds to continue to claim any relevance whatsoever. Always. And it *never* goes the other way.
One could even argue that one *could* explain music, marriage and moral code with science. The things you can't explain seem nothing more than arbitrary value judgments, e.g., why are the Beatles superior to The Monkees?
Music is mathematical relationships. Love is brain chemistry. Morals are almost certainly an evolved trait.
