Re: definition of science (MN)

Marty Hewlett said in a meeting of science/theology lectures I attended recently in Santa Fe that what the ID group are trying to do is "turn secondary causes into primary causes." They want to identify a cause of the effect, alright; the Cause--the "Intelligent Designer," or, as I call he/she/it, The God They Dare Not Name. It would be interesting to attend the show trial in Kansas and listen to how the ID proponents dance around this when they know their audience will be largely composed of people who are quite ready to name this God. And He won't be the Stoic god, either (sorry, Dembski).

Bob Schneider
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Don Winterstein
  To: asa
  Sent: Friday, May 06, 2005 4:58 AM
  Subject: Re: definition of science (MN)

  If you don't insist on methodological naturalism, how are you going to maintain your motivation to discover cause-effect relationships? Science can't start out by assuming nonphysical causes or it would quickly degenerate into simply describing instead of explaining.

  This is one of the problems that besets ID in its claim to be science. Certain ID protagonists are aiming to do good science, science that would not be done under conventional assumptions. That is, assuming ID, they claim, leads to testable hypotheses. I'm skeptical but willing to let them have a go. As a rule, though, a belief in ID would seem far more likely to discourage the search for cause-effect than stimulate it. And it is the success of that search heretofore that has earned science the status it now has.

  Trite but true.

  Don

    ----- Original Message -----
    From: Dawsonzhu@aol.com
    To: asa@calvin.edu
    Sent: Thursday, May 05, 2005 6:11 PM
    Subject: Re: definition of science (MN)

    Within a post from Burgy: Richard Lewontin is quoted as saying:

>"Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against
    common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community of unsubstantiated just?so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in
    the door."
>

    I take some issue with this:

    Methodological naturalism requires
    reproducibility independent of who is
    doing the experiment. Methodological naturalism means
    that religious commentments (including atheism) must be
    left at the door.

    Well, ok, I am starting to sound a little like Moorad's
    hard science view. More correctly,
    if it can, without too extensive a stretch, be called a
    "natural process" (something not involving culture and
    civilization), it should _in principle_ be reproducible.
    So the geologist would point to similar rock formations
    to propose a particular stratigraphy. A geologist is usually
    not fortunate enough to have "an experiment" demonstrated by
    nature in a timely fashion and one should probably hope in
    general that such does not occur to quickly or unexpectedly
    in heavily populated areas.

    If on the other hand,
    it we speak of historical, one would produce documented
    evidence, or persuasive circumstantial information to make
    a particular point. Implausible claims in history would
    be rejected for much the same reason as they are for natural
    processes, they are inconsistent with human activity and
    culture.

    So back to the so-called hard sciences (which seems largely
    to be what Lewontin was implicitly focusing on but with
    more effort could be extended to the "hard to do sciences")
    the limitations come in because we must use testable
    models to examine nature. I don't think anyone here
    is willing to volunteer a testable and reproducable
    model for God's interaction with the world independent
    of who is conducting the experiment. Certainly, I don't
    have any bright ideas.

    So it is not that methodological naturalism "cannot allow
    a divine foot in the door", it is simply that we have no
    way to test for this "divine foot".

    by Grace alone we proceed,
    Wayne
Received on Fri May 6 08:13:12 2005