A response to Arcanus' post: If Science, why God?

[tavarish]

I read through his post on Aristophrenium, and I can't help but feel I need to bring him back down to Earth a bit.

Here's a link to the text. I'll be taking bits and pieces to which I'll post counter arguments.

http://aristophrenium.com/ryft/if-science-why-god/

The answer, of course, begins with the fact that ‘science’ is not a worldview. And that is an important point, because a worldview is a constellation of beliefs and ideas by which we make sense of the world around us.

That is correct. Science isn't a worldview - and neither is God. Science is a method of obtaining the most accurate representation of the world around us. It has no bearing on what we do with that information or how we live our lives, in the same way God isn't a worldview in itself. God is a facet of a worldview, and doesn't presuppose a specific belief system, as they can vary drastically. A specific religious belief system would constitute a concise worldview.

So science is not a worldview, but rather a toolbox available to one’s worldview. Science is a valuable collection of tools for exploring the natural or physical world; it can service a worldview but is not itself a worldview.

Exactly.

Returning our attention to his question, I would say that if science is a flashlight, then God would be the batteries that allow it to function.

Why make this assumption?

Most scientists are content to use the flashlight without bothering to question how it works. They are simply pleased that it does.

Do you have any evidence for this?

But there are others who are more curious, people who like to crack open that flashlight to discover how that beam of light is produced (i.e., to question and explore the foundations upon which science rests). That falls under what we call the philosophy of science, which is not a scientific enterprise itself; and yet science is an unintelligible coincidence of incomprehensible accidents without that foundation. So those batteries are a vitally important issue.

Here's where we diverge. Natural science, which I assume you're writing about, bases itself on logic - a simple premise, when manifested physically, has specific laws. This is uncompromisingly self evident and demonstrable in nearly all aspects of observable life. Science defaults to methodological naturalism, and the philosophy of science doesn't necessarily provide any explanatory value to the sciences it analyzes.

That science is not a worldview is something we discovered early in the 20th century with the failure of ‘logical positivism’, where some people tried to reduce epistemology to the empirical domain and to toss out metaphysics altogether, especially ontology. And it didn’t work. Because it couldn’t work (for it was self-defeating). Epistemology is a discipline that explores the nature of knowledge, what can be known, how we know, and so forth. Whether one describes epistemology under a justified-true-belief model or a warranted-true-belief model, science has very strict self-imposed limits on the degree to which it can service either the justification or the warrant elements. It turns out that epistemology draws more heavily on metaphysics than the logical positivists realized, with science proving to be of rather limited value.

Logical positivism failed because its main premise, "only statements about empirical observations are meaningful", could not be empirically observed. What you didn't write was the proposed solution to this issue - falsificationism.

The demarcation problem (how to distinguish science and pseudoscience) is the main topic of this issue. Here are the tenets of falsificationism:

Main Claims of Falsificationism:

1. Science starts with problems rather than “stark observation.”
2. Scientific theories are conjectures that attempt to overcome problems encountered by previous theories or to account for phenomena of some sort.
3. In order to qualify as a scientific theory, a hypothesis must be falsifiable.
4. Scientific theories can sometime be falsified (conclusively shown to be false), but they cannot ever be verified (i.e., shown to be true).
5. Science proceeds by scientists’ “ruthlessly” attempting to falsify proposed scientific hypotheses (by experimentation and observation) and rejecting those that they succeed in falsifying.
6. Some theories are more falsifiable than others in that they present more opportunities for being falsified.
7. In general, the more falsifiable theories are those that are greater in generality, clarity, and precision.
8. In general, theories of greater falsifiability are preferred over theories of lesser falsifiability.

http://www.hu.mtu.edu/~tlockha/h3700fals...m1.f05.doc

Logical positivism strove to make meaningless the things that science had no interest in explaining. Yes, it was a bad idea, but it isn't representative of modern scientific methods and philosophies. Scientific claims still have to be falsifiable to have merit - this is done as a direct result of wanting to weed out fact from fantasy and fabulation.

You see, epistemology is invested heavily in truth (whether justified-true-belief on the one hand, or warranted-true-belief on the other). But science does not do business with truth. Period. That is, science deals in probability, which gestures proximately at truth without presuming to reach it. (Real science is self-consciously modest.)

Exactly. Why are you pairing the two together? One deals with defining knowledge, the other deals with describing the world around us beyond reasonable doubt based on observation.

With regard to epistemology, at the very least we ‘know’ something when what we believe to be true is in fact true, such that epistemology depends heavily on metaphysics, the philosophical discipline concerned with the nature of reality.

Not necessarily.

The Gettier Problem:

Gettier problems or cases are named in honor of the American philosopher Edmund Gettier, who discovered them in 1963. They function as challenges to the philosophical tradition of defining knowledge of a proposition as justified true belief in that proposition. The problems are actual or possible situations in which someone has a belief that is both true and well supported by evidence, yet which — according to almost all epistemologists — fails to be knowledge.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/gettier/

The former is the means by which we explore the empirical world and how it works, while the latter is an assertion about the nature of reality. A statement which makes assertions about the nature or scope of reality is not a scientific statement but a metaphysical one. Since science is for exploring objects, causes, and forces in the natural world only, it is the wrong tool for finding out the scope or nature of reality. Nature is part of reality, but it is not necessarily the sum of reality.

Can you demonstrate that nature isn't the sum of reality? By what method are you gauging your assertion's truth value?

So then we have our chain of function and relevance. One starts with a metaphysical worldview and, from that, one grounds an epistemological model. Without the former, the latter is utterly meaningless. And one of the tools of epistemology is the scientific method, which is limited strictly to stuff that is empirically apprehended. Some of the things involved in epistemology are truth, logic, reason, etc., and none of that comes under the purview of science because they are not empirical matters (e.g., logic has no molecular structure).

Logic doesn't need a molecular structure. Its manifestations are falsifiable. You can take an apple and physically see and objectively verify, if need be, that it is an apple and not a bowling ball at the same time.

But insofar as our flashlight is a brilliant tool for exploring the physical world, what is it that explains how the flashlight itself works?

Here we go...

Science relies upon a number of vital assumptions that cannot themselves be proven scientifically.

They can be falsified, but have yet to be. Just because something isn't proven doesn't mean that it isn't true.

For example, science operates under the assumption that the physical laws of nature observed in this region of space are the same in that unobserved region of space, that inductive inference works, that the world we observe is how the world actually is—but cannot itself prove any of that.

Again, these tenets are not assumptions, they are laws based on a wealth of experiments, based on the falsifiability of these "assumptions". It isn't proven, but the evidence that we have confirms it and has yet to refute it. Science holds vast explanatory and predictive value. Is it possible a yet undiscovered area of space holds different laws of nature? Of course - but that is the nature of science and exactly WHY it provides an accurate description of our universe, but not an absolute one.

Science doesn't deal with asserting its absolute correctness, it deals mainly with continually trying to find evidence that it's wrong.

While I would rely on our staff writer Duane for the scoop on the historical evidences and references, the answer is that the biblical Christian worldview constitutes those batteries.

HUGE leap of logic there. Even given the trouble with generating a consensus on the philosophies of particular sciences, there hasn't been evidence presented that points to a supernatural explanation to this natural method for observing natural phenomena.

The scientific method as we have it today was birthed from the biblical worldview (Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, etc.) and flourished under it (particularly English Puritanism and German Pietism; q.v. the Merton Thesis), as scientists operated from biblical revelation about the nature of reality in their development of scientific enterprise, discovery, and invention—for several hundred years, up until the 19th century when Darwinism began to remove science from its foundations (i.e., ignoring the batteries).

Absolutely irrelevant to the conversation, and patently false that Darwinism (I assume you mean Darwinian natural selection, as opposed to Lamarckian evolution) removed science from its foundations. I hope you're not talking about social Darwinism or Eugenics.

I still don't understand how is has anything to do with a method that was literally unchanged for hundreds of years. You make the point that it doesn't have anything to do with metaphysical claims or truth, then you say it was necessarily birthed from people who believed such things? What are you attempting to demonstrate?

The biblical Christian worldview provides the most comprehensive and reliable metaphysical foundation upon which science can rest and engage confidently in its enterprises.

Why? You just asserted this with absolutely no evidence to support it.

No other worldview successfully constitutes those batteries, much less do any provide juice to power the flashlight, failing for various reasons unique to the worldview under critical analysis. That is how God is relevant, especially now that we have science.

So God is relevant because science does not explain knowledge, doesn't work in absolutes, and declines to comment on supernatural claims?

The elephant in the room is falsifiability. If you take a biblical view and apply it to science, many of the claims in the bible are falsifiable, and have been found to be fractally wrong. Many other claims, dealing with God, are unfalsifiable, and therefore NOT IN THE REALM OF SCIENCE.

A more accurate dissection of your initial question "If science, why God" would be the relevance of explaining NATURAL phenomena with a SUPERNATURAL answer, which is, I think, a more accurate representation of the first quote you posted. You went off on a tangent, downplaying the explanatory power of science, and somehow tying that to how a Christian God necessarily made it all happen. You need evidence for this kind of stuff - you say science makes assumptions, then took one huge leap to say your God did it.

Just because a worldview can account for something doesn't mean it's correct in its assertions.

I'll post this on your site as well.

[Tiberius]

I find it ironic that Arcanus thinks science is a valuable collection of tools and yet his blog seems increasingly more of an advertisement for Intelligent Design these days. It used to be a good intellectual blog...

[tavarish]

I find it ironic that Arcanus thinks science is a valuable collection of tools and yet his blog seems increasingly more of an advertisement for Intelligent Design these days. It used to be a good intellectual blog...

Creationist claptrap is what I would call it.

[Caecilian]

Great demolition job, tavarish.

I don't think that aristophrenium is just creationist claptrap. Its really very unfair of you to say that. They do good lines in anti-choice claptrap and homophobic claptrap as well.

[fr0d0]

It's a combined effort and not Arcanus's alone. I haven't seen him condoning creationism/ homophobia ...have you?

...darn - the server's down

[tavarish]

It's a combined effort and not Arcanus's alone. I haven't seen him condoning creationism/ homophobia ...have you?

I never said he did. The only remarks I made were about his specific claims and blogs.

[fr0d0]

Adrian referred to "his blog" (i.e. aristrophrenium) & not "his blogs" (as in blog posts). You acknowledged that statement and added "creationist claptrap". So literally - yes you did.

Caecillian referred to aristophrenium which is the collective.

[tavarish]

Adrian referred to "his blog" (i.e. aristrophrenium) & not "his blogs" (as in blog posts). You acknowledged that statement and added "creationist claptrap". So literally - yes you did.

Caecillian referred to aristophrenium which is the collective.

In that case I misspoke, I wasn't referring to his posts in particular - but the demeanor of the site in general.

[Caecilian]

I find it ironic that Arcanus thinks science is a valuable collection of tools and yet his blog seems increasingly more of an advertisement for Intelligent Design these days. It used to be a good intellectual blog...

Creationist claptrap is what I would call it.

Just for the record, I understood both these posts to be referring to the collective, rather than a particular member of aristophrenium.

Having had another look at the blog, its apparent that all the creationist crap and all of homophobic crap is written by Duane Proud- i.e. not Arcanus (David Smart).

Why Arcanus would want to be part of a group thats promoting those sort of views is beyond me, but thats his problem.

[fr0d0]

I think a goal of the site is to be open to intelligent discussion... so let's see