Re: Signs of Scientism

I've put two messages together. Regarding the perception of miracles, a
person present can see that something unusual happened. Water was poured
into containers and wine came out. A crucified man was seen repeatedly
after his death. Note that swooning won't work, for no one swoons hanging
on a cross. Those present recognize a miracle. We can only look at the
record.

In contrast, how would we recognize a miracle of the creation of a new
life form? The only way I can thin of is to find a distinctive genome,
one that could not have come by natural alteration of previous genomes. I
recall claims of such, for example that the mouse and rat cytochromes did
not match. But soon after the claim it was discovered that there was more
than one such compound, and they did match. So we do not want a premature
claim before enough genomes are sequenced. Today we are discovering that
introns as well as exons appear to match. Also, finding that similar
genes function from bacteria through angiosperms and mammals is most
readily interpreted as common descent.

It is possible to interpret such descent as the act of God, implying that
he is not ingenious enough to come up with different ways of
accomplishing the ends needed by living creatures. This also requires
explaining the ambulatory cetaceans more recently discovered. Perhaps God
has to experiment to get things to function. If one does not want to
accept a rather stupid (or deliberately misleading) God, this will not
work.

Note that the absence of an early form among the fossils is not proper
evidence that something came into existence suddenly. We had about 5x10^6
of the most recent strata without any evidence found of crossopterygeons.
But /Latimeria/ either survived during that time or was suddenly created
again recently.

Now to the second post. We humans think we know much more than we can
possibly truly KNOW. We are finite, subject to more limitations than we
are usually aware of. This is why there is great wisdom in science, which
claims that its theories are the best description of the phenomena we
have at the moment, but they are subject to revision with new
information. I note that Carnot's theory used caloric, a substance, even
though formulated after the death of Rumford. However, we do not usually
recognize this strict sense of knowledge, but rather apply the term to
what we are confident of. Unfortunately, this tends to yield, "I believe
it, therefore it is true." There is wisdom in the saw, "It ain't so much
the things we don't know that gets us into trouble. It's the things we
know for sure that just ain't so."

To note a little different angle, lexicographers do a good job presenting
the meanings of words. However, they necessarily miss certain subtleties
in the general usage. I recall the disdain of a colleague who reported of
a student, "He thought he could end philosophical debate by quoting
Webster's." This problem is not restricted to philosophers, for I found
it in spades in /Words and Phrases/, to which lawyers refer. The layman
who "knows" what something means can be in for a rude surprise.
Dave

On Fri, 20 Jan 2006 09:17:46 -0500 David Opderbeck <dopderbeck@gmail.com>
writes:
Ok, but all of this has gotten lost in too many specifics about
particular miracles recorded in the Bible. The basic principle is this:
miracles that impact on the physical world imply physical evidence that
something unusual has occurred. There was water; now suddenly there is
wine people can taste and enjoy. There was a dead man; now suddenly
people can touch him and talk to him. If -- a big, huge if that I'm not
necessarily advocating -- God separately created some kinds of life at
different points in history, outside of or above or through an
accellerated common descent, it seems to me there should be no reason in
principle that we'd be humanly incapable of observing that something
unusual happened when sifting the ex post evidence. The "a supernatural
being can do everything and anything so there's no way we could
distinguish the supernatural from the natural" argument makes no sense to
me if I adopt an epistemology that allows for an orderly God who
sometimes causes observable "miracles" to happen.

*******
For some reason this isn't very satisfying to me. So we really can't
"know" anything? We can only look at things from various "perspectives,"
each of which have their own methodological limitations, and arrive at a
sort of bug's-eye pastiche that may or may not cohere?
Received on Fri Jan 20 14:07:08 2006