No, Sol. Let it lay as it is.
I am personally not interested in scientific tests for the efficacy of prayers, levitation, miracles, shrouds, molecular investigation of painted eyeballs or anything else that someone feels is necessary to prove God.
Non overlapping magisteria. There is no connection. None at all. Otherwise we’d have proof and there would be no atheists. We would all believe because we would not have the option not to.
To be completely frank, here. It has always puzzled me why there are atheists. There is a British atheist/scientist, Peter Atkins, whose cherished notion is that theism is “lazy” because it opts for God as an explanation, thereby stopping all search for explanation because, he claims, “God did it” is a non-explanation. This perspective, it seems to me has the entire picture backwards.
To mke a claim that “God did it” is to make the claim that everything that exists was created by the all-knowing, all-powerful and all-good God, which implies that since super-intelligence was behind the creation of both the universe and the human mind, then the universe is a completely intelligible place. which means, in turn that we can expect every gap in our current knowledge to be filled eventually with explanatorily sufficient knowing precisely BECAUSE the super intelligence of God was behind creation to begin with.
The idea of cause, pre-David Hume, was not merely brute facts preceded because of some unknowable, though pseudo-consistent, prior event called God. No. The idea of “cause,” in particular for the Scholastics, was more like “the intelligible explanation for the effect.” It was from this view of things, going back to Aristotle and Plato that the principle of sufficient reason was understood as the underlying tenet of human knowledge and the way the universe is. The universe is intelligible, at ground, because God is Intelligence Itself.
The universe is comprehensible BECAUSE it was conceived, designed and created by the Superintelligent Being. Therefore, we have every reason to believe every aspect of the universe can eventually be understood.
The atheist can provide no such assurance. The atheist has to assume that at the basic ground of existence is something like “brute facts” – things which just are with NO explanation. The fact that science or math has had any success at all up to now is pure coincidence and that sheer dumb luck, like the brute facts which underpin the universe, may run out at any time. We can expect, if the atheist is correct, to run smack into inexplicable brute facts where there will be no explanations to be had at any time ever and that eventuality is completely unpredictable, but has to be there. The question, then, is why pursue science at all, if you know a priori that the universe ultimately is inexplicable?
Not only that, but the abandonment of the PSR entails a number of other issues for the atheist. The atheist, not believing that all effects need or can be fully and sufficiently explained by causes, supposes that very real effects such as the moral order, beauty, goodness, values can merely be explained away because they do not require a SUFFICIENT explanation for their existence. This entire order of reality becomes “subjective” and, therefore, no need to explain the existence of anything “subjective” because, well… “subjective” is purely an epiphenomenon and does not “really” exist. Where is Atkins when you need him to point out real laziness on the part of atheists.
Given that intelligence itself has now been ruled “subjective” there is no need to insist upon the principle of sufficient reason because human reason is, at ground, a subjective thing. Where the universe can be accommodated and explained by human intelligence, well and good, but don’t expect it to go very far because our minds are merely “conditioned” to see order where no order really exists. Therefore, the insistence or promise of science that it can explain things is not to be held very tightly. We are already seeing that in Solmyr’s posts regarding quantum physics.
So, Brad, it seems to me that the theist position that the universe ultimately will be fully and finally explained and understood is the one best underwritten by reason itself, grounded as it is on the principle of sufficient reason – that everything that exists has a sufficient explanation for why it exists as it does. This is, as far as I can tell, a far more robust rationale for the existence of science than is the atheistic one which has to insist that at some level sheer brute fact will be encountered and no further explanation will be possible – thus ending scientific pursuit completely. It also seems to me that Peter Atkins is completely wrong about theism with respect to scientific pursuit, but he is too lazy to uncover why that would be.
