Witch: “I’ll have a henbane. Double, double.”

Heathen: “I don’t believe in this sort of indulgence.”

Member of a class of people whose lives are forfeit: [Said something, but who the hell cares.]

Thinking the devil created dinosaur bones may be drop-dead idiocy but much more recently scientific belief in Laplace’s Determinism was just as dogmatic.

The important thing to keep in mind is that in both science and Christianity there are vast bodies of work that get edited down into the ‘official explanations’ for mainly political reasons. Just as there is literature purposely omitted from the ‘official’ Bible, there is scientific research similarly lost to the ages.

No it isn’t. Hypothesis doesn’t mean “guess”. Maybe you could explain to me what this “God hypothesis” is? I suspect any such hypothesis you could give me would be unfalsifiable and therefore worthless and NOT a hypothesis.

“but it’s just another model for making our world intelligible. It’s science, in another word.”

I don’t accept the post-modern construction that science is just another world view that is on all fours with any other. Religion is mystification, something that science is not and if a scientist does it he is doing bad science.

“But as to the telelogical or theological “why,” science doesn’t have much to say”

That much is true, science doesn’t have a lot to say about ultimate ends, but it does seem to be getting there in cosmology. Discovering that we truly live in a multiverse, confirming string theory, fully explaining the big bang and the inflationary period, all these would go a long way to providing a teleology or ultimate end.

The Bible is “not an accurate history book in the sense that most modern-day scholarly history is accurate.”

Yes, of course that’s what I meant and that’s what most Christians believe. It’s almost wholly false.

Science is not limited to the ‘scientific method’. The scientific method is science as interpreted by an unqualified high school teacher.

Piss on the scientific method. I don’t know anybody who made a major discovery through anything but a process of well-documented mistakes.

If I knew enough about a subject to make a well-defined hypothesis before I began, there wouldn’t be any point in beginning. That’s discovery. Find something no one in the world knows even to ask about? Bingo. Job security.

The important thing is: science welcomes people to the search for truth. Scientists respect new ideas by taking them seriously. And, science is improved, generation after generation, by people who don’t know what they’re doing is ‘wrong’.

“This bothers me as a scientist and as a Christian, because it’s just as much a distortion and misrepresentation of Christianity as it is of science,” he said.

Ah! it’s a strange, strange world!

Actually, it does. You are confusing “hypothesis” and “theory”.

It’s not “Creation vs Evolution”: if the universe is 6,000 years old, or 12 billion years old does not alter the fact that Evolution is an on-going process, the “change in the genetic material of a population of organisms from one generation to the next”.

“Creation” is kind of a vague term anyway. Isn’t the Big Bang a “creation” event?

If the argument is “young earth vs old earth” then it’s clear that 6,000 years isn’t enough time for evoulution to produce much diversity from a common ancestor. Evolution would still be an observable fact, just acting over a shorter period.

So really, it’s “Creation of an old universe, that contains evolution” vs “Creation of a young universe that contains evoultion”

The sad thing is, the ‘Bible’ as its known today is a severely edited and Constantine-approved (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Council_of_Nicaea) version of whatever Jesus’s real legacy was. The dogmatism that is peddled for Real Christianity these days has more in common with the political motivations of Roman Emperors than we realize.

Apart from that, the creation of orthodoxy for the most part put an end on open interperetations of Christs’ legacy that had been going on in a number of different forms for hundreds of year. Without the creation of this dogmatic orthodoxy, perhaps Christianity would have naturally evolved into something far more open-minded and compatible with science than what we see today.

They want to teach Creationism next to Bioligy in school? Fine, let them: God created everything in 7 days. Test on Friday. Okay… now, onto Biology…

If i ever go back, i will do everything in my power to take the barbarian warrior photo for which the internet so yearns. Just gotta work out the logistics of sneaking a battleaxe and horned helmet into the place. I think i can make this happen.

-T

No I am not.

Hypothesis:
1. A statement which proposes a natural mechanism for a phenomenon, where the mechanism is amenable to test, provides explanatory and predictive power, and is conditionally held on review of further observations and experiment. [den., science] 2. A guess.

The first is the scientific definition and the second the common one. The “God hypothesis” is not a scientific hypothesis because gods or spirits are defined as existing beyond any possible natural mechanism. A true scientific hypothesis is not a question, it is a statement in the form of: IF X THEN Y. Common parlance would call the former statement a theory, which it is not.

(Tangentially related: an article Clarke wrote more recently about the relationship between megachurch architecture and the modern office building. Disclosure: I edit the magazine, Triple Canopy, for which these were written. But they’re two of the best pieces we’ve run.)

“That’s too Whiggish for my blood, Noen: science is a narrative, an incredibly useful narrative, but a narrative nevertheless.

“Your take on postmodernism is a bad one: we’d be as likely to stress science’s usefulness and pragmatic value as much as its fictiveness, its institutional histories and worldviews, its rhetorics and metanarratives, etc. Whatever.”

“Science” is a bit more than a narrative. It is an activity, a constant state of engagement with the world. The narrative is constructed later and then presented in textbooks. Sometimes people take that narrative a bit too seriously and begin to mystify or reify their idea of “science” and try to elevate it to some privileged ontological status. (Hence, my disagreement with certain New Atheists) That is rightly criticized (by me in the past) as scientism. But I do object to equating the activity of science with non-scientific narratives. What they do is something different, they “mystify” as Einstein in the quote provided by teufelsdroch (thank you for the correction btw) also mystifies science.

This is what do do, we take in data, information, and we perceive a pattern. Sometimes though we perceive a presence behind the data. Einstein felt he could perceive the presence of a god at work behind the mathematical laws of the world. He was mistaken of course as Bohr pointed out, but what he did was no different than what countless others have done. They perceive the world and then they perceive something at work behind the world. This is mystification. It isn’t “bad” per se but it should not be mistaken for the Real.

“Your take on postmodernism is a bad one” — I’m always open to being corrected. My understanding is that PoMo is dead (and good riddance). It’s sort of an open field right now.

empirechick

“sigh… evolution vs. creation – this has never been an issue for me, because Sister Mary Terrance explained it in 6th grade science class: why can’t BOTH be true?”

They certainly can both be true. I’ve no problem with that, as long as you get the science right. The problem is that many don’t get the science right and yet their theology depends on their subsequent misunderstanding. Like the erroneous belief that the historical Jews were ever enslaved by the Egyptians.

“Her explanation:
Yes, the Bible says God created the earth in 7 days, but who’s to say they were 24-hour days as we understand them? God has exisited for all eternity – to him, billions of years are like single days.

“I’m sure Noen is going to jump all over this one, but it works for me.”

And that’s your right, but you are wrong if you believe that the sequence of creation depicted in Genesis even remotely resembles an accurate history of how life developed on Earth or how the cosmos developed.The Bible is not a historical document at all. The history of the middle east is wrong, the history of life is wrong, the history of the universe is wrong. These tales contained within the Bible have no historical or scientific validity whatsoever. But as myths, sure, they contain profound insights into what it means to be a human being and how, perhaps, we should live our lives.

I’m sorry if you feel I am “jumping all over you”. I don’t feel as though I am. It isn’t personal, it’s just the internet.

wizardofplum
“…where can I see a”transitional fossil”?You say they exist,so show me!I can’t show you “His Nibs”,does He qualify as a transitional fossil?Help me here.”

Glad to be of service: Transitional Vertebrate Fossils FAQ

Fixed that for you Marcel. The “under god” bit was not in the original pledge.

It purports that Natural Selection and Evolution are totally divorced concepts. It states that natural selection over time can allow one species to diversify and create many types of sub-species, but denies the ability to chase that train of logic back millions of years saying that all forms of dog, cat, horse, etc, are merely diversified from the single species Noah carried on his Ark. And being as the whole creation/flood/Earth-being-only-6000-years-old premise is foundational to their reasoning, there ARE NO MILLIONS of years back through which one could trace these transformations. That, and they deny that the fossil record contains and transitional forms. So clearly, Natural Selection cannot be denied, because we can see it at work before our very eyes, but trying to follow the premise back any further than 6000 years is folly!

-T

First, science is first and foremost based on observation and repeatability. Science does not rule out an intelligent agent intervening on a wholly materialistic world. But it doesn’t start by assuming it either. A simple example is someone is found dead and taken to a medical examiner for an autopsy. Approaching the autopsy scientifically, one does not start out with a hypothesis of cause of death being a murderer using poison until there is some physical evidence to support it.

Scientifically, one would start out firmly in the area of “I don’t know” why the person died, and start collecting physical evidence from there. As physical evidence accumulates, various bits that were marked “I don’t know” become “I know”. I know the blood alcohal level was 0.8 and I know the person has a bullet wound.

You might hypothesize that the person committed suicide. You might also hypothesize that the person was murdered by another person.

But you cannot hypothesize that God struck him down dead.

That’s not a hypothesis. That’s a belief. It has zero evidence to support it. It will never have any physical evidence to support it. The physical evidence may end up pointing to they man committing suicide, but there is no way you can then prove that God manifested a gun at the side of his head and pulled the trigger. Just because the victim was a child-murdering, father-raping, bastard, does not prove that God decided to lay his vengeance upon thee.

Anytime someone looks at the physical evidence, throws up their arms, and says “God did it”, they’re not offering a hypothesis. They’re offering a belief. That science cannot explain something does not mean that we can then scientifically go off and embrace some metaphysical causation.

One must always respect the concept of “not knowing”. And one cannot use “not knowing” as an opportunity to insert some manifestly unknowable supernatural cause into the equation and still claim to be scientific.

Scientifically, everything starts out in the realm of unknown. The only things we can put into the “known” box are things that we can explain based on repeatable processes and observable processes. God is neither repeatable nor observable in the laboratories.

What seems to happen is that the folks who cannot grasp the notion that there may be things that fall squarely in the scientific region of “unknown”, these people instead look at the world as if everything is known, and if someone doesn’t know it, then god knows it. They cannot hold onto the distinction of “not knowing”. They treat it like a vaccuum that sucks in some explanation, any explanation, rather than keeping it in the “I don’t know” realm.

You’re using very confusing language to make the distinction here.

Science explains why things cause things to do other things. Add a match to gasoline and boom. Shine white light through a prism and you get a rainbow.

What science does not explain is why you should get out of bed in the morning. Why you should get married or keep dating other people. WHy you should quit your job and change careers.

Science doesn’t explain why in terms of WHY we do something in the subjective experience of life.

It can explain neuroscience and all that, but it can’t explain why you should choose to get married and have kids.

This was Einstein’s explanation as to why quantum physics was wrong. Einstein believed in a clockwork universe and felt that the idea of subatomic particles operating at a completely random fasion was absurd. He spent the later years of his life trying to come up with a clockwork explanation for the things that quantum physics was seeing. He failed.

This quote more than any other is used by theists to “prove” that Einstein believed in God, ignoring the context in which it was said.

It also ignores the responses that some of Einstein’s contemporaries told Einstein to his face:

Neils Bohr: Stop telling God what to do with his dice.

Enrico Fermi: Albert! Stop telling God what to do.

And the same folks who love to quote Einstein’s bit about dice will assert him as proof of the legitimacy fo God, but will ignore Einstein’s other opinions completely. Einstein was a pacifist and a socialist.

And they also ignore Einstein’s other quotes about God:

In 1929, Einstein told Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.”[63] In a 1950 letter to M. Berkowitz, Einstein stated that “My position concerning God is that of an agnostic. I am convinced that a vivid consciousness of the primary importance of moral principles for the betterment and ennoblement of life does not need the idea of a law-giver, especially a law-giver who works on the basis of reward and punishment.”[64] Einstein also stated: “I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth.”

I think it goes without saying that the Christian Fundamentalists would not at last be at peace with science. Hypothetically speaking, where do you suppose the Fundies go next to wage their next strike in the War on Science? Geocentrism? Flat Earth?

…walk into a bar?

For whatever reason, hating on relativity is pretty popular as well. In some cases, this is because they mistake “relativity” for “relativism”. In others, there is more than a bit of the old concern about jew physics.

The big one, and frankly, the one I’m surprised doesn’t attract more fire now, is neuroscience/psychology/psychiatry. Brain research hasn’t exactly expanded the space left for “soul” and other godbot favorites.

More generally, while some hardcore theists fall into the newtonian “laws of nature are god’s laws” school, a fair few believe in more or less constant divine action in the world. For them, any system of science predicated on observation of physical law is going to be ultimately unacceptable.