Calling all scientists! (evolutionists o.k. too)

[David_E.Mahony]

Science today is premised upon a particular ethic of cognition – the Kantian ethic. This does not allow of revelations, private messages, substantive claims to truth, sacred texts or holy writs. Explanations centre crucially on ‘mechanism’ and ‘empiricism’; it deals in facts and not in values. It is the Weberian world of disenchantment which has delivered us a boundless technology and scientific progress. It is not a world in which we can feel at home. It is technically brilliant but not morally consoling. With religions it is the other way round – their world is technically spurious but eminently consoling.

The Kantian ethic of cognition has seriously disturbed many a religious claim and queried many a religious perspective upon the world so much so that often today many branches of religion have succumbed to such depredations and manage to retain their faith by somehow looking upon everything religious as symbolic, mythical or metaphorical – perhaps reducing it to a branch of literature. Others made of sterner stuff still stick to the literal facticity of religious claims and the deus ex machina, or miracles and sometimes, mayhem. Religion and science do allow themselves to be seen sometimes to compete in their understandings of what the world is all about. They have different epistemologies.

Was it not Gibbon who drew the distinction between primary and secondary causes? The religious person seeking to explain how it is that today in the modern world, modernity has brought about such a falling away from religion may well be inclined to look knowingly at the machinations of Satan upon this world, the misdeeds of the evil one, ready to prowl about and prey, seduce and suborn etc., etc. These would be primary causes, wrapped up in a salvation history. Secondary causes are much more noble; they are scientific – an analysis of socio-historical processes to explain how it is that things have come to be thus – looking at causal relationship which are capable of verification – or, even more importantly, of being falsified. Religions do not allow this latter notion any place in their armoury since faith rules it out. The world has ‘progressed’ scientifically and rationally by following secondary causes and not primary.

David E. Mahony

 

[SocaliCatholic]

David E. Mahony:

Science today is premised upon a particular ethic of cognition – the Kantian ethic. This does not allow of revelations, private messages, substantive claims to truth, sacred texts or holy writs. Explanations centre crucially on ‘mechanism’ and ‘empiricism’; it deals in facts and not in values. It is the Weberian world of disenchantment which has delivered us a boundless technology and scientific progress. It is not a world in which we can feel at home. It is technically brilliant but not morally consoling. With religions it is the other way round – their world is technically spurious but eminently consoling.

The Kantian ethic of cognition has seriously disturbed many a religious claim and queried many a religious perspective upon the world so much so that often today many branches of religion have succumbed to such depredations and manage to retain their faith by somehow looking upon everything religious as symbolic, mythical or metaphorical – perhaps reducing it to a branch of literature. Others made of sterner stuff still stick to the literal facticity of religious claims and the deus ex machina, or miracles and sometimes, mayhem. Religion and science do allow themselves to be seen sometimes to compete in their understandings of what the world is all about. They have different epistemologies.

Was it not Gibbon who drew the distinction between primary and secondary causes? The religious person seeking to explain how it is that today in the modern world, modernity has brought about such a falling away from religion may well be inclined to look knowingly at the machinations of Satan upon this world, the misdeeds of the evil one, ready to prowl about and prey, seduce and suborn etc., etc. These would be primary causes, wrapped up in a salvation history. Secondary causes are much more noble; they are scientific – an analysis of socio-historical processes to explain how it is that things have come to be thus – looking at causal relationship which are capable of verification – or, even more importantly, of being falsified. Religions do not allow this latter notion any place in their armoury since faith rules it out. The world has ‘progressed’ scientifically and rationally by following secondary causes and not primary.

David E. Mahony

So based on this explanation science can explain everything scientifically but itself?

But if science could scientifically explain itself would that imply that the scientific explanation of science preceeded science?

But if the scientific explanation of science preceeded itself does that mean that explanations always preceed what is explained?

But if explanations always preceed what is explained, then this explanation explains itself which explains why science cannot explain itself?

 

[annejohno]

Isn’t science an attempt to understand everything that is created?

Is science one of the tools God has given us {reason) ?
and isn’t our Faith also reasonable.
God is not outside or separate from reason.
Yes I think our understanding can grow to the point that even here in this life Faith and Reason (Fides et Ratio) will help us come to ever clearer understandings of God …so that our scientific or fact based objective sense agrees with our metaphysical, religious sense

 

[kramerbaby]

I believe it impossible for anyone or anything to explain everything. There are some things not meant to be explained. God can never be completely explained. I don’t think humans will have a full grasp on the concept of time. Where does it come from? How and why does it pass? It is impossible to explain everything. I am a very big science buff, but science can only go so far. We have so many things yet to accomplish in science. But there are those few things that can never be explained. God bless all!

 

[oriel36]

David E. Mahony:

These would be primary causes, wrapped up in a salvation history. Secondary causes are much more noble; they are scientific – an analysis of socio-historical processes to explain how it is that things have come to be thus – looking at causal relationship which are capable of verification – or, even more importantly, of being falsified. Religions do not allow this latter notion any place in their armoury since faith rules it out. The world has ‘progressed’ scientifically and rationally by following secondary causes and not primary.

David E. Mahony

Many non Catholics find it bewildering that we go to confession and choose to admit remorse for wrongdoing whereas the scientifically ‘progressed’ spend a fortune looking to the phycobabble and drug industries as a substitute.

The Catholic secret is that we can find an outlet for that feeling of wrongdoing and this feeling is part and parcel of our faith as is the feeling coming out of confession.You should try it !.

 

[Dismas2004]

Veronica Anne:

Oh, well…

how about what created science, itself?
or Who?

Scientists, without Faith will never know how to ask the right questions! Thanks God for True Sceintist that try to figure out God’s creation, rather than fake scientists who ty to create. Sid enote, it is really ironic seeing them trying to create, when they know they can not, the most they can do is transform!

 

[David_E.Mahony]

The Kantian ethic of cognition is a particular way of looking at the world; it is one that humankind has developed. Kant and Hume did I think look upon it as a universal predicament, afflicting, affecting humankind anywhere and everywhere. That is however, open to dispute. A knowledge of the philosophy of science and the sociology of knowledge shows that there is a great divide between the cognitive powers, the respective cognition of industrial and pre-industrial civilisations. Is there a big ditch – as the late Prof Gellner maintained - intellectually and cognitively between so-called ‘modern’ man and ‘primitive’ man. Is there ‘evolution’ in human thinking? What has happened?

Weber identified the problem, situated it in the 17th century – the development of rationality – it was not (sorry Kant and Hume) a universal given in the human predicament. The fact is that this particular mindset or way of creating and looking at a world, analysing it (and it is we who come to think like this and see the world thus, structure it thus – it is the way our cognitive equipment has come to work) has produced countless benefits (and miseries as well); it is a mode of cognition more materially powerful than anything hitherto known and it is a mindset that the world cannot now do without; it is indispensable and its origins are located in the 17th century and later its development in the Enlightenment. It is encapsulated in that sentence – “….the proper study of mankind is man.” It is no longer Milton’s: “Assert eternal providence and justify the ways of God to men.” The religious motivation behind 17th century science was phenomenal and can never be gainsaid and the idea of studying the universe that God had created inspired many a mind. The development of science would not have been possible without 17th century religion. But now? No longer! Science takes off on a wing without a prayer.

The implications of this for religion have been profoundly disturbing. I see that Ratzinger has recently reflected ruefully upon the secular nature of European society, so that secularisation has become an aggressive ideology and religion has been corralled. I think he is correct in his analysis and what he describes is a direct function of developments in intellectual thinking from the Enlightenment onwards – the development of modernity. Those who would argue that religion and science are not incompatible must take into consideration the fact that since the Enlightenment generally, secularisation has taken hold – and in Europe at least, in a big way. How would this be explained? One may wish to argue that science and religion dovetail or ought to etc., but the fact is that historical processes show that they behave one to another often in a manner that proves they are quite irreconcilable – and of course, where the divide between ‘fact’ and ‘value’ is concerned, this is indeed the case. Science has produced a knowledge beyond culture and beyond religion but I do not see how it can produce a knowledge beyond morality.

People look for explanations as to how things come to be as they are. Science produces one sort based on establishing causal relationships between facts, whilst religion looks to another sort (that cannot be verified empirically) that rests on revelations and a particular teleological vision of humankind in which morality is embedded.

DEM

 

[oriel36]

David E. Mahony:

The implications of this for religion have been profoundly disturbing. I see that Ratzinger has recently reflected ruefully upon the secular nature of European society, so that secularisation has become an aggressive ideology and religion has been corralled. I think he is correct in his analysis and what he describes is a direct function of developments in intellectual thinking from the Enlightenment onwards – the development of modernity. Those who would argue that religion and science are not incompatible must take into consideration the fact that since the Enlightenment generally, secularisation has taken hold – and in Europe at least, in a big way. How would this be explained? One may wish to argue that science and religion dovetail or ought to etc., but the fact is that historical processes show that they behave one to another often in a manner that proves they are quite irreconcilable – and of course, where the divide between ‘fact’ and ‘value’ is concerned, this is indeed the case. Science has produced a knowledge beyond culture and beyond religion but I do not see how it can produce a knowledge beyond morality.

DEM

The old commies indeed tried to coral religious practice or rather knew the value of secular brainwashing and I can understand the recent reaction in the United States to the trend of secularisation,for good and for bad.

I apologise in advance if the old commie treatise offends participants here but I I can’t help liking the old cold war feel of it .

geocities.com/Heartland/7006/psychopolitics.html

 

[oriel36]

JimG:

Thanks for your enlightening post. I read somewhere that if you try to subdivide spacetime into units smaller than the Planck length or the Planck time, it becomes a chaotic foam in which up and down, direction, or forward or backward in time have no meaning; it referred to this as the “quantum foam.” Later I heard, perhaps on this board, that someone had actually proposed a structure for the quantum foam.

I’m glad that physics seems to have done away with “point particles.” I could never understand how a vast collection of point particles of zero dimension could somehow add up to a 3 or more dimensional universe, since no matter how many zeros you add to one another, the result is always zero.

Spacetime of 4 dimensions is also in this nonsensical category but it is a little bit trickier to see why 3 dimensions of space and 1 of time makes people feel uncomfortable.

The 1905 relativistic concept relies on rulers measuring distance and clocks measuring time in order to seperate time and space however many people today are familiar with the development of accurate clocks as rulers of distance and the principles behind the relationship between geometry,astronomy and the pace of equable hours,minutes and seconds.

I assure you that it is well worth revisiting the history of the development of accurate clocks as rulers of distance in order to determine what went wrong in the early 20th century and why even today,scientists insist on a zero ‘point’ dimension which makes no sense in our era or any other as you have already correctly remarked.

rubens.anu.edu.au/student.projects97/naval/home.htm

You will scarcely believe just how simple the error was that began with Newton and snowballed for centuries to reach its final form in the homocentricity of relativity.I therefore concur with the participant who recognises that relativism and agnosticism is basically equivalent and entirely destructive when left unchecked.

 

[Fergal]

My science degree had a great impact on my faith.

To me it equals the statioin of the Cross where Veronica wipes the face of Christ.

I had to do a bit of searching and clearing but through all my efforts I now see him more clearly and the great work of the Father which is Creation is easier to see and understand.

God Bless.

 

[JimG]

Rationality developed in the 17th century? Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas and others would probably not concur in our finding them to be irrational. The deductive mode of thought starting from first principles was their method, and is still carried on by some remaining modern day philosophers such as Peter Kreeft.

The observation and measurement based methods of scientific inquiry are not contradictory to the old methods, although many Enlightenment philosophers thought that they were. Indeed, the Enlightenment as manifested in the French revolution and others (i.e. in Spain and Mexico) displayed such a ferocious hostility to religion as to send numerous people to the guillotine for no other reason than that they were priests or nuns.

The historical results of the Enlightenment have been both the good of scientific inquiry and technology, along with the evil of the still remaining hostility of modern society generally to religion and religious principles–even principles so basic and natural as that human life is good and should be protected. .

 

[caroljm36]

I think secularization continues apace here and in Europe not because science has “taught” us that religion is obsolute, but because people want to loosen the bounds of morality that religion demands. They want sexual license, but know somewhere inside that what they want is wrong, so they fight harder and harder against the implications of what they want, and become edgier, uglier and more aggressive about it. So we’re in a downward spiral. And as any old roué knows, it takes more and more kinkiness to get it goin’…Science and its supposed “proof” that there is no God (which it does not prove at all) is just a pretext for decadence.

What is truly tragic is that Science becomes the way to inculcate the bias in children, so that by the time puberty hits they’re all for it, and want to take it a step worse than it was.

Funny how clear everything seems when you’re too old to do anything about it.

 

[SocaliCatholic]

caroljm36:

I think secularization continues apace here and in Europe not because science has “taught” us that religion is obsolute, but because people want to loosen the bounds of morality that religion demands. They want sexual license, but know somewhere inside that what they want is wrong, so they fight harder and harder against the implications of what they want, and become edgier, uglier and more aggressive about it. So we’re in a downward spiral. And as any old roué knows, it takes more and more kinkiness to get it goin’…Science and its supposed “proof” that there is no God (which it does not prove at all) is just a pretext for decadence.

What is truly tragic is that Science becomes the way to inculcate the bias in children, so that by the time puberty hits they’re all for it, and want to take it a step worse than it was.

Funny how clear everything seems when you’re too old to do anything about it.

Interesting view.

I am 26, what do you reccomend that people my age can do about that problem?

 

[insideitall]

Gerry, how do you open a paint can?

Quantum foam is a funny term… I’m picturing a sea of electrons (no pun intended) with big whitecaps of quantum foam

Back to the orignal question… I think it depends on whether God wants us to, and if we haven’t blown ourselves up yet

 

[JimG]

SocaliCatholic:

I am 26, what do you reccomend that people my age can do about that problem?

Read a lot of books by Peter Kreeft. They help to provide both moral and logical clarity.

 

[SocaliCatholic]

JimG:

Read a lot of books by Peter Kreeft. They help to provide both moral and logical clarity.

Thanks. I just realized I have Handbook of Christian Apologetics but never read it!