"Why is evolution, out of all theories in science, being singled out for a disclaimer when its standing is no less firm than any other established scientific theory?" ~ Dimensio
Dawkins, et.al., want to call their man-centered religion, "science" - when in reality it is Scientism.
Scientism: "Only that which can be proved by science is true."
".....the implication is that science, because of the scientific method, somehow refines information to a point and focuses it such that we can look at that point and say that this is something that is true and will not change. ...
Scientists don't ask the question "What is science about and what can science do?" It is a second order discipline of philosophy of science that asks these questions.
In the area of philosophy of science there's a tremendous amount of debate as to whether science does tell us true things.
As a matter of fact there's a lot of debate as to whether science is one particular thing at all. Does the scientific method actually exist?
And very trenchant arguments have been offered to demonstrate that the scientific method per se, or some particular methodology necessarily that identifies something as scientific, simply does not exist.
Instead, what we have is a constellation of procedures and disciplines that when worked together and used inductively can help us to come to some reasonable understanding of truth.
Those understandings may be wrong. They are not absolute. But they represent evidence that brings us to a reasonable conclusion.
As a matter of fact, when you look at the history of science it is really a history of replacement of scientific views rather than confirmation. ...
....when science reasons it reasons inductively and it reasons basically the same way as we would reason about the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
It brings different pieces of information to bear on a particular point and if the information is valid then the point is valid.
But it's the same procedure that we use to discuss lots of different things and there's nothing sacrosanct about the so-called "scientific method" in itself.
So don't fall for the illusion that there is something inerrant about the scientific method and scientific ability at arriving at truth because it is not inerrant at all and there's a tremendous amount of debate in the area of philosophy of science as to what exactly science can accomplish for us.
So for Carl Sagan, for example, to say with impunity that there must not be a soul because science has not demonstrated any proof for it and come to his other conclusions is a little bit overreaching his bounds in the terms of the limitations of science. ....
For hundreds of years, since the time of Kant, there has been an aggressive effort by scientists to prove and demonstrate that the universe is infinite.
Part of the reason for that is that if the universe if infinite then they don't have to acknowledge a creator.
This is a self-conscious enterprise, by the way. I'm not reading in motives that aren't there.
These people were aware of what they were doing so much so that at one point even Albert Einstein suggested a universal constant which was completely invented because what he'd been doing up to that time seemed to indicate without any doubt that the universe had a beginning.
He introduced this thing that didn't exist to change his equations to imply that the universe had no beginning at all and was infinite.
He later said that that was the worst mistake of his career and abandoned it.
Now we all know that the universe had a beginning and that's what the whole Big Bang is about.
I want to make the point that for a hundred years or so there was a strong effort to try to demonstrate that the universe was infinite.
A point that Dr. Moreland made yesterday from a philosophic perspective is really helpful in dealing with this particular issue.
There may be things like possible infinites. We think about the numbers that could be infinite. But whether there's an actual infinite or not is another problem.
Can we actually count an actual infinite amount of numbers? Or could there be an infinite amount of time in which matter existed?
And Dr. Moreland argued yesterday that was not possible.
It may be a little hard to explain this but simply put, if there is an infinite series of events like there would have to be in the universe if it was infinitely old, it would be akin to trying to start this process to trying to jump off an infinitely high building into an infinitely bottomless pit.
The point is that there would be no place for you to even think about jumping because any place you would jump would be a type of terminus, a type of beginning and then it would not be infinite. Any point of departure would be a beginning.
So there are serious problems with there even being an infinite chain of events like that or the material order of the universe being infinite.
It's kind of like if you were in the process of an infinite chain of events, if you tried to move forward in those events, one step forward would flip you one step backwards into eternity and you would never make any progress.
There can't be an actual infinite like in the universe.
These are very strong arguments against the universe being infinite and if scientists would have taken this into consideration they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble.
It took them 150 years to finally come to the conclusion that there is no infinite universe, something philosophers could have told them for very good reasons a long time before that. ......." ~ Gregory Koukl
Complete commentary here: http://www.str.org/free/commentaries/science/saganand.htm