B
batteddy
Guest
Can natural experimental empirical science detect God? No. It cannot detect ANYTHING certain. Science finds probabilities and makes models that try to be the best predictors. These models often seem to be statements of fact…but they are really more pragmatic. For example (and dont think Im a geocentrist, im not): a scientist saying “the earth revolves around the sun” is not so much a statement that this an absolute certainty in the philosophical or theological sense…but merely that a model that treats the earth as revolving around the sun is the best for explaining all known observations and for predicting the outcome of experiments. But it does not state the fact objectively in the philosophical sense, it merely uses the consequences and presumptions as a model for the known data.
Now natural PHILOSOPHY and metaphysics can know God without the supernatural revelation of Faith. But experimental science cannot, it simply is outside its testing. Science is simply a game of Occam’s razor: try to find the simplest and least spectacular model that accounts for all known data and observations. But it can never prove that things are not somehow more complicated than they are. Perhaps all this is an illusion displayed by some superhuman being, and as soon as we turn around what was behind us disappears! Such a model could also be made to fit with known science with enough crazy explanations…but science seeks the simplest model that is adequate. It wants pragmatic experimental results, not an objective cosmological or ontological or teleological statement of absolute certainty of something being.
Intellegent design, if anywhere, belongs in philosophy classrooms. If it claims that science cannot explain a certain point through darwinism, then science teachers should say “science has not yet developed an adequate model for by exactly what process this complexity could come about in a probable way” and then refer the kids to their philosophy class to debate and discuss science, evolution, the alleged gaps, etc from a philosophical standpoint. But it is not empirical science.
And Darwinism does admit where its explanation ends. In its “random” mutations and “natural selection of the ‘fittest’”.
Science does not try to claim what “random” really is, or where this randomness is coming from. An atheist may see random as pure chance or just the materialistic deterministic fatalism of the huge vast universe colliding in a nearly random way with earth, a Wiccan might see it as “fate” or “destiny”, and a Catholic knows that the mutations that occur are those that God wills in His providence, for reasons inscrutable to science.
And it does no more than ultimately define the “fittest” as those that survive, and those that survive as the fittest (a circular definition). It proposes no philosophical definition for “fittest” which it leaves to philosophy. An atheist may believe it is pure chance, the nazi may believe some creatures are mystically better by some neo-pagan criteria that rules the universe, and a Catholic will believe that the “fittest who survive” are those that God has selected in His Providence to survive for the sake of creating the world history He wills. Because surely sometimes a faster, stronger creature is killed by lightening before it can breed…and a weaker one by “chance” goes on to have many children. But there is a general upward pattern of increasing complexity, that science can try to explain based on circumstances, but ultimately these secondary causes are referred to an unknown first cause. A giraffe may be said to grow a longer neck to reach the leaves, and those who could were favored…but ultimately why evolve to reach the leaves instead of evolving to eat the dirt? Ultimately, in a way discernable to Philosphy but not science, God is there.
Now natural PHILOSOPHY and metaphysics can know God without the supernatural revelation of Faith. But experimental science cannot, it simply is outside its testing. Science is simply a game of Occam’s razor: try to find the simplest and least spectacular model that accounts for all known data and observations. But it can never prove that things are not somehow more complicated than they are. Perhaps all this is an illusion displayed by some superhuman being, and as soon as we turn around what was behind us disappears! Such a model could also be made to fit with known science with enough crazy explanations…but science seeks the simplest model that is adequate. It wants pragmatic experimental results, not an objective cosmological or ontological or teleological statement of absolute certainty of something being.
Intellegent design, if anywhere, belongs in philosophy classrooms. If it claims that science cannot explain a certain point through darwinism, then science teachers should say “science has not yet developed an adequate model for by exactly what process this complexity could come about in a probable way” and then refer the kids to their philosophy class to debate and discuss science, evolution, the alleged gaps, etc from a philosophical standpoint. But it is not empirical science.
And Darwinism does admit where its explanation ends. In its “random” mutations and “natural selection of the ‘fittest’”.
Science does not try to claim what “random” really is, or where this randomness is coming from. An atheist may see random as pure chance or just the materialistic deterministic fatalism of the huge vast universe colliding in a nearly random way with earth, a Wiccan might see it as “fate” or “destiny”, and a Catholic knows that the mutations that occur are those that God wills in His providence, for reasons inscrutable to science.
And it does no more than ultimately define the “fittest” as those that survive, and those that survive as the fittest (a circular definition). It proposes no philosophical definition for “fittest” which it leaves to philosophy. An atheist may believe it is pure chance, the nazi may believe some creatures are mystically better by some neo-pagan criteria that rules the universe, and a Catholic will believe that the “fittest who survive” are those that God has selected in His Providence to survive for the sake of creating the world history He wills. Because surely sometimes a faster, stronger creature is killed by lightening before it can breed…and a weaker one by “chance” goes on to have many children. But there is a general upward pattern of increasing complexity, that science can try to explain based on circumstances, but ultimately these secondary causes are referred to an unknown first cause. A giraffe may be said to grow a longer neck to reach the leaves, and those who could were favored…but ultimately why evolve to reach the leaves instead of evolving to eat the dirt? Ultimately, in a way discernable to Philosphy but not science, God is there.
