inducer wrote:My point is this: people who claim that god exist make up stories to fit the situation. When you can't explain something you say "god did it". Plain and simple. The same way people who claim god does not exist "make up stories" and say "science can explain this". I do not understand how you cannot see the circular argument that has been created.
Ill explain. You experience something "supernatural" or unexplainable and you conclude that because there is no way to understand what has happened there must be some unseen force at work - lets call him god. Next, you internalize the notion of god and use it to explain everything to the point of explaining god itself. Because you cannot grasp the concept of god you conclude that its just god. You are stuck in a loop where god explains everything and everything explains god.
Many say that the belief in God is just an argument from ignorance, you can’t prove that it’s not true so it must be true. This is the classic God of the gaps argument. We don’t know how it works yet so we say God did it. But we see this true with Darwinism all the time also with the origin of life, the origin of the phyla, the decent of man, in other words we don’t know how it works yet, but we are going to say that evolution did it. So there is no difference between God of the gaps and evolution of the gaps. We say it’s not testable; clearly you can’t take bunch of non-living chemicals, expose it to the right conditions and get a cell to come out. It’s something that took place in the past, we can’t test this. We can’t take a reptile, and expose it to radiation or gama rays, and get it to grow feathers. Basically Design and Darwinian evolution are not technically testable. This is not science vs religion, this is a battle between two different fundamental philosophies. Two different world views.
inducer wrote:The difference between believing in a god or not believing in god (i.e. science) is that scientists do not make absolute claims unless there is evidence to support them. If they cannot provide enough evidence (be careful here, i did not say proof) for something they simply say just that. This allows the break in the circle. If you can't explain something then just leave it at that. We do not know everything. This loop argument does not allow people to be open to the fact that god could not exist. There seems to be only one way to break a loop argument of this sort and it is to provide an alternative explanation that is logical.
Well that simply isn't true... You could argue that absolute claims are not being made, for example, in the fields of molecular biology, but man will always impose their philosophical views into it.. Philosophy and science must conflict. Science and philosophy deal with the same thing. The origin of life. But they try to understand it under different types of considerations. Again, read Darwin's book "The Origin of Species" or Stephen Hawking's book "The Grand Design." Issues raised by absolute claims will most likely naturally arise in biology classrooms whether design is mandated or not since the evolutionary theory was born in the theological cradle as it did with Darwin. Darwin as well on various occasions posed theological and philosophical questions on evolution. You cannot escape it..
inducer wrote:A woman living 2000 years ago would at some point believe that god makes lightning or clouds. A valid claim? Her perception / understanding of the world is somewhat primitive yes? Her belief at the time is perfectly valid, she cannot fathom or understand how lighting and clouds are formed so she thinks they are an act of god. At the same time she probably believes that god lives up in the clouds - that may be her interpretation of heaven.
Fast forward now 2000 year later. A modern woman now understand that clouds are just little droplets of water, she can make her own clouds with the proper equipment. She can also understand how lighting is made and make it herself, given the right equipment. There is no doubt in her mind that god was not really responsible for those things. She also believes that god doesn't live up in the clouds in heaven because she has flown in an airplane and seen that heaven could not possibly exist in the clouds.
As you can see these ideas of god, heaven and the world evolved over time.
The same modern woman can be found asking herself - "but where does the water in the little droplets come from to make clouds?" - god must have created that. Or she might wonder how the universe was made. The more she learns that things can be explained without god the more sophisticated her interpretation of the bible has to be to "fit" and explain current phenomena.
Belief in God is relevant to science in that it can furnish a conceptual framework in which science can exist. Christianity did furnish the conceptual framework in which modern science was born. Science can verify and falsify the claim of a belief. When religions make claims about the natural world, they intersect the domain of science and are in affect making predictions in which scientific investigations can either verify or falsify.
Example, science can certainly be used to falsify religion. Consider ancient Greek and Indian religions that the heavens or the world rested upon the shoulders of atlas, or on the back of a turtle were easily falsified.
Science can also verify religious claims, such as God creating the universe out of nothing a finite time ago. The Bible also teaches that the universe had a beginning. This teaching was reputed by Greeks philosophy and also by modern atheism. Then in 1929 the discovery of the expansion of the universe this doctrine was dramatically verified by the big bang theory. An entire universe created out of nothing (Ex nihilo) just like what the Bible foretold. Science can thus verify this Biblical prediction.
inducer wrote:As you can see, this argument can go on forever. I don't even need to write this because I already know the responses I am going to get. For example, "well god created everything so even though she can start the process of making lighting the actual lighting is created by god." "The universe was always created by god and everything in so even though she can explain it scientifically it doesn't change the fact that god put all these laws of physics in the universe to create it... we are just discovering these laws that god created." This type of argument leaves no room for anything but god. Therefore, until someone realizes that no one can argue with this closed loop /mind there is NO POINT in having any further discussion about any topic related to god. Even if aliens land tomorrow in central park New York and claim they are the creators of man kind - I am sure someone will find a passage in the bible and interpret it to "fit" the situation.
I haven't heard one "Christian" say they were open to the fact that god could not exist.
Actually you are right about one thing here.. God is both male and female, but when God creates, God is known as El Shaddai or the feminine side of God.
Shaddai meaning fertility.
A dogmatic belief is unhealthy. This over arching explanatory model is so much hand waving, well evolution did at that, we don’t understand how but it’s going to do that. Well that isn’t science, that’s just a verbal place holder. Many people argue that methodological naturalism is necessary because scientists who followed it have made valuable discoveries. That is true, but it is also true that scientists who did not follow it like Isaac Newton, who assumed that God was the designer, for example have also made valuable discoveries.
The scientific method is raw science also called (methodological naturalism), however when you say Darwinian evolution (DE) did it or intelligent design (ID) did it, these statements are pretty much neutral to science. It’s really not going to hurt or change how science is done if we talk about ID or DE in the classrooms. Maybe a different philosophical idea, but not how science is actually done. If you said that an intelligent designer did it, wouldn’t you be curious to know how he did it like how naturalism may have done it? Basically you just go back to doing science again although the different philosophical premises or alternatives have changed. It really doesn’t matter.
