(December 29, 2008 at 11:57 am)Purple Rabbit Wrote:I strongly agree.(December 29, 2008 at 11:46 am)CoxRox Wrote: Forget the award. Is there any 'truth' to it?Imo it's the same question you were asking about the Polkinghorne quote. Keeping as close as possible to what evidence tells us does not require the assertion that from order in the universe you necessarily arrive at an intelligent agent with godlike features of the christian kind. That's were faith starts and science ends.
The problem for me is that going straight from 'there is order in the universe' to postulating a superintelligent supernatural entity is a gigantic leap of faith. Its a non-sequitur. When there's no evidence, or incomplete evidence of something - the answer is not to just fill it with a skyhook. That doesn't follow. Its a non-sequitur. And in the case of God, - God is much more improbable than the order in the universe itself because he would have had to design it all - and create the universe, consciously - and he would have had to come out of nowhere - or rather been there all along without any explanation (or he's not God, because whoever or whatever created him would have to be God instead then and so on down the line, etc).
Of course as we know, when we don't understand something its very unscientific to just fill it with "God did it". Whether you're a religious scientist or not. Making a leap of faith from not understanding something to "God did it" without any evidence of God is not how science works. This part is just a "faith thing" here. There needs to be evidence for it to be otherwise.
Postulating a skyhook is not science. When something isn't explained; trying to explain it with something that's an even bigger - a much much bigger - problem of lack of evidence and extreme improbability is surely, not the answer.
Evf
