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To: When_Penguins_Attack
When you've found a way that science can investigate the supernatural world be sure to let us know; show us your God-o-meter, calibrated in micro-deities.

Absent that your posturings are so much empty smoke. Whether or not great scientists of the past believed that the regularity of nature was sustained by a creator is completely irrelevant to the fact that science's assumption of empirical regularity is what has allowed the startling progress of the last 300 years to be achieved. The assumption of the sustaining deity plays no part in the work or its results.

1,627 posted on 02/22/2006 2:47:05 PM PST by Thatcherite (More abrasive blackguard than SeaLion or ModernMan)
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To: Thatcherite
You don't understand what is being said. To wave about the absence of empirical data concerning the non empirical world like some dripping Archimedes shrieking "EUREKA" only shows you don't understand the issue at hand. OF COURSE there is no "God-o-meter." Give me credit for understanding that science is concerned with measuring the measurable.

THAT IS NOT THE POINT! Sorry to shout, but I do get tired of people waving this point about as though I just emerged from my monastic cloister and upon cognition of this fact, I will be struck with its profundity and slink back to my bible study.

The point is that science by definition cannot comment on what type of universe is assumed by science itself. Because science is concerned with empiricism and empirical observations, that in no way allows one to say, "this domain must operate as though the only order of reality is empirical." When confronted by claims of a "miracle" a scientist has two options: S/he can say "this does not belong to my field of study. If it is true, it will have to be verified by some other means than that of my domain." That is a TRUE scientist, who may or may not accept the validity of the miraculous, but is not stupid enough to think that he can define the nature of the universe by his field of study. The charlatan and poseur says that since it cannot be reproduced in a laboratory, then no meaningful statements can be made about it, and we must assume -at least in the lab - that the universe is non-supernatural and that an explanation must be sought for all data which excludes anything extramaterial.

Again, this is not "science" at all but a philosophy posing as scientific endeavor. It might be the prevalent philosophy of science today, but it is philosophy, nevertheless.

It is also pretentious nonsense.

1,632 posted on 02/22/2006 3:16:02 PM PST by When_Penguins_Attack (Smashing Windows, Breaking down Gates. Proud Mepis User!!!!)
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