Re: Religious Beliefs that *Require* the Falsehood of Scientific Theories (was: we h

From: Chris Cogan (ccogan@telepath.com)
Date: Sat Dec 09 2000 - 21:44:36 EST

  • Next message: bill r wald: "Re: Religious Beliefs that *Require* the Falsehood of Scientific Theories"

    >Bill Wald said:
    > >Until Francis Bacon and the Rationalists "we" lived in a spiritual world.
    > >From Bacon and Newton we had a physical world to study but since
    > >Copenhagen the universe has reverted to a spiritual world and science has
    > >been conquered by philosophy. many of the pop science books are more
    > >philosophical than scientific.
    >
    > >Personally, I think science should stick to Bacon's rules - verifyable
    > >observations.
    > >Dembski and others are preaching metaphysics.
    >
    >Hi Bill,
    >You may be right that Demski is preaching metaphysics, but so are Darwinists
    >who claim evolution and life is explainable without teleology.

    Chris
    No, because that's a real-world, empirical question, determinable by
    physical observation. It's not a question for biological ignoramuses to
    answer on the basis of what just *happens* to be "obvious" to them or on
    the basis of religious beliefs.

    Further, it is, as you well know, *quite* possible for a person to *agree*
    with non-naturalistic *metaphysical* ideas and yet *still* recognize that
    the basic nature of the question is scientific-empirical. Your denial of
    this fact exposes your own presuppositions, and your nearly total lack of
    intellectual objectivity, but it contributes nothing towards answering any
    actual questions about the world *or* metaphysics.

    Finally, even if life did arise and evolve *with* teleology, it's clear
    that, barring as-yet-unknown problems, life *could* evolve without
    teleology, your bigotry, deliberately-maintained ignorance of physical
    facts, mathematics, computer science, biology, geology, geophysics,
    genetics, logic, chemistry, paleontology, human history, climatology,
    epistemology, metaphysics, and evolutionary theory itself obviously
    disqualifies you from honestly making such claims as that merely advocating
    a theory that can be physically tested is "preaching" metaphysics.

    Of course, science in general implies a metaphysical proposition: That the
    world is at least causally coherent; that things behave like what they in
    fact *are*, that the world is logically consistent, that the world is
    logically *possible*.

    And, of course, that's exactly what you *hate* about the world and about
    science. I have only very rarely seen such a profound malevolence toward
    the logical consistency and the *causality* of the physical world as you
    have exhibited on this list for the past two years.



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