Re: law vs. science

Jan de Koning (dekoning@idirect.com)
Fri, 21 Mar 1997 18:18:45 -0500

In the first place, the "law of non-contradictions" is not generally valid.
Some statement may be somewhere in between true and false. My math. prof.
in a lecture in 1928 said: If you come out of the cold in a room, you may
say: it is warm here, while someone who is there for over an hour will
saay: no, it is cold. For many statements there is not an easy division
between true and false. So, in Poland, Sienckewicz (spelling?) wrote a
book on Many-valued Logic. In the U.S. Kleene defended that, but I have
not followed recent literature. The law is also not accepted in the
Intuitionist school of (math)logic.

Secondly, talking about "objective" truth is impossible. There is always
some subject, that decides about the truth of a statement. What is the
foundation of certain statements? I do not want to sound too negative, but
the so-called scientific method tests suppositions. If no contradiction
can be constructed, we assume it is (should be: may be) true.
Consequently, if a lawyer wants to find holes in a theory based on this
method, he has an easy time. A lawyer is used to wants 100% certainty.
So, just saying: how do you know that these laws were always in force, is
sufficient to say that (macro-)evolution should not be found guilty.
Johnson's is right: not everything can (according to legaal minds) be
proved, if certain presuppositions are not in place.

Thirdly, Johnson's and other's main error is, that he reads the Bible as a
science book. It never was. It was addressed to a nation, who had to live
by it and sta with God. If we want to discuss biblical truth we should
talk about which manuscript is correct, we should know the meaning of
certain words at that time etc. That is science too, but not science which
we do in the csience depts of the universities.