From: Sarah Berel-Harrop (sec@hal-pc.org)
Date: Wed Aug 27 2003 - 15:09:53 EDT
On Wed, 27 Aug 2003 12:35:02 -0600
"Terry M. Gray" <grayt@lamar.colostate.edu> wrote:
>Brian Harper wrote:
>
>>
>>This issue does seem to be problematic. Is methodological
>>naturalism
>>really the way of doing science or is it just a way to
>>circumvent ID?
>>If it is (and I agree that it is), then why is it one
>>sided? Why doesn't
>>MN also constrain the atheist scientist?
>>
>>This lack of symmetry will continue to provide fuel to
>>the
>>flames of rhetoric until its corrected.
>
>I'm having some difficulty in this thread understanding
>why we don't think that Dawkins violates MN. (I'm going
>to leave Gould out--I'm somewhat surprised at how hard
>we're coming down on him--he's a totally different beast
>than Dawkins in my opinion.) When Dawkins promotes
>atheism (or anti-theism) in the name of science, he is
>NOT doing MN.
The error here, I would say, is an error of inappropriate
extrapolation. It is not per se a violation of MN, it
is an inappropriate conflation of MN & ON. He's making
the argument that the results you get when you use MN give
useful metaphysical information. They don't.
>He's not constrained by it because he's not
>just about promoting a science agenda, but also a
>religio-philosophical agenda. (There's this "life is
>religion" part of me that says that he is being more
>honest and wholistically human about his religious view
>than we Christians and others who encourage the
>elimination of religion-talk from our science-talk.)
>
>Personally, I enjoy and find myself agreeing with 90% of
>what Dawkins says. For that 90% I suspect he is adhering
>to MN.
Problem is, the way he writes, people who don't
know much about evolution end up knowing less
about evolution, a lot about adaptation & NS,
and thinking they know a lot about evolution.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Wed Aug 27 2003 - 15:12:04 EDT