(June 24, 2015 at 8:29 am)Drich Wrote: lol, maybe in some idealic setting, but just look at how your peers are defending the use of science to disprove God, or the distain they have when I attribute a scientific understanding to how God operates..That's not an issue for science. Science does not depend on whether or not people want to find or bury god. I'm sure that scientists --being human-- go into a lot of their research with goals and biases and any number of things that don't matter to the discovery of how things work. And it even taints their results from time to time. The nice thing about the scientific method and the fact that so many different people seek to either confirm or overturn such claims is that over the long term we excise the stuff that is wrong and end up with answers. Our modern world is evidence of that.
Again, science has become an excuse as to why God can not exist, despite what 'purist' think science should be.
Drich Wrote:The search for the 'God partical' (with the hydron super collider) is a good example of 'science being used to disprove God.Perhaps in the eyes of those who you mentioned as wanting that result. Discovering a particular particle helps us to understand the universe better, but it neither proved nor disproved god. That was not the goal. We learned something, and it can be applied to what we know in order to expand our knowledge. And that's great. If it proves or disproves god somehow, that's just fine too. But I don't recall that the world suddenly realized that god did or did not exist. Learning of the existence of the Higgs Boson did not change my mind, and it didn't seem to change yours. So claims about what it proved regarding god seem premature, to say the least.
Drich Wrote:so?So as I explained in the paragraph that followed that one, there is nothing for science to discover if that is the nature of god. If you define god to be out of the reach of conventional discovery, then why would you chastise science for not looking deeper if you know god won't be there?
Drich Wrote:You seem to be oblivious to the fact that one does not have to be in a specialized field of study in order to have full access to God. God has given us access to Him if we simply A/S/K for Him, yet we take His formula and apply it to all sorts of other disciplines and endeavors instead.Consider how it is applied in those other circumstances. If we apply it with consistent methods that are designed to produce quantifiable, repeatable, and falsifiable results, then we get... just that. Others can test the work that has gone before and either refute it, confirm it, or modify it. And their work can similarly be compared and tested and refined further (or scrapped, or confirmed). In a religious context, ASK is none of those things. There is no method with specific and clearly-outlined steps, just a set of vague instructions (in this case literally just three actions which are heavily context-dependent). The results cannot be independently verified, quantified, falsified, or repeated. Many people who believe in the efficacy of it will not hesitate to question the methods and results of others who claim that it worked, but did not produce the results that the former expected.
The ambiguity of the method and the results should cause us to dismiss it as a useful method of learning anything. But to the believer the ambiguity is its greatest strength because it helps to shield it from scrutiny.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould