Re: [asa] on science and meta-science

<extracting Cameron's point #4 --along with confession that I didn't
make it all the way to point #15 except as a skim read>
Cameron Wybrow wrote:
> Keith:
>
> Fourth, I did not say that we could study God through scientific
> methods. This is *another* statement which continues to be made on
> this list because people do not read carefully either what I say or
> what ID writers say. What I have said, and what is obvious to most
> people, is that if a dagger is stuck in someone's back in precisely
> the appropriate place, we infer that the person has been murdered by
> *someone*. One doesn't need to know anything at all about the
> "someone" -- whether the murderer was male or female, black or
> Caucasian, young or old -- to discern that a murder was committed. ID
> does not claim to "study" God any more than the person who infers that
> the drifter in the alleyway has been murdered claims to be "studying"
> the murderer. If you have read any serious ID literature, and are not
> relying entirely upon the notions of ID held by church people who
> speak at education hearings, you should know this.
>

Yes ---one DOES need to know something --a considerable amount,
actually, about the culprit before they could infer any such thing as
murder. We *assume* that the suspect is a human being with experiences,
motivations, tendencies towards violence, ability to use a knife as a
weapon, etc. and from these assumptions springs our murder
investigation. In short, we have to know that they are human and we
can compare their actions with those of many other human criminals whom
we have heard of or studied. Without that basis of comparison and the
assumption that this, like all those other solved murders fits into the
same pattern, --without those assumptions and comparative experiences,
we are at a TOTAL loss about why the knife is in the victims back. So
then, what we need is a set of experiences with gods and the kinds of
motivations that drive them, a modus operandi for how they typically get
things done, and so forth. Then we could compare our God with what is
typical for gods and we could begin have an idea about what God's
scientific fingerprints should look like. This is deliberately silly,
of course, but I trust you see the point.

--Merv

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Received on Mon Nov 9 21:19:33 2009