Posted on 08/19/2005 1:02:07 PM PDT by SmithL
That's it precisely. Technical institutes.
Maybe it's just my pet peeve, but I see the harmful effects throughout our culture, communities, politics.
Technical institutes.
It seems to me this was the height of "scientism" - Laplace. Laplacianism (?) had its demise with QM circa 1900, so we may ironically mark the fall of scientism with the greatest triumph of science.
Anyway, I may broadly agree with you that science does not address all the questions of existence. Nevertheless, the progress and material causes of life on earth would seem to be well within the purview of the materialist conception of science.
And science.
The materialistic concept of science is a metaphysical construct, not a scientific one.
That's "conception", and certainly I can agree with you that materialism is part of the metaphysical basis of science, and not a scientific conclusion. But it is in fact ingrained in the foundation and practice of science, and abandoning it would be tantamount to an overthrow of Science as established by Galileo and Newton.
Lighten up. If you can't handle a little robust humor, join a convent or something.
Your insults and name-calling don't bother me one bit.
Yeah, they do. But if your sense of humor hadn't left with your rationality, they wouldn't.
As an ex-evolutionist and atheist I was once just as bitter and hatefilled as you are toward believers.
Oh, so you're telling me you never had a sense of humor...
By the way, I was converted more than 30 years ago from atheism and evolution at the same time and haven't doubted the truth of what I believe for one minute since then.
Sad. A brain is a terrible thing to waste. But I suspect in this case it wasn't much of a waste.
Sorry for the typo, it's late. To the point, however, nonsense. As I have stated many times, science must posit a natural cause for the formation of a hypothesis. It does not require the insistence that only natural causes exist. One is a research method, the other a metaphysical assertion. Science does not equal materialism.
Too bad you don't really know which one was wasted.
1Co 1:20* Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?
1Co 1:21* For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.
DEMAND that the scientific community CHANGE its understanding of this bedrock law to accommodate evolution and you will suddenly awaken whole areas of science that have never considered the impact of this SCIENCE FRAUD called "evolution." Evolution will collapse, or science itself will collapse. Either way, the fraud will end. Science will embrace the religion of evolution and will lose all relevance, or evolution will be exposed as the science FRAUD that it is...
Neo-Darwinist evolution is nothing but a zealously proselytized secular fundamentalist religious belief. It is the opiate for the atheists...
Same cult, different words.
Wake up, think for yourself, and stop worrying about the meandering thoughts of a second rate, derivative Hellenistic hack of 1900 years ago.
It seems to me it does, or at least it confines itself to materialism. The material is a comprehensive domain!
Ultimately this devolves to the doctrine of Lucretius, "tangere enim tangi, nisi corpus, nulla potest res." - "For nothing can touch or be touched, except body."
... or, as I see it, anything that can affect the material is itself material. So, if you want to conceive of God as a material agent, then science will leap up and drag Him down, just like the helicopter in Jaws II.
BWAHAHAHAHA!
Yeah, let's pass a bill through Congress to override the Second Law!
PH, pass this one around. You couldn't make it up.
Thanks again, woodb01. This one will be on Panda's Thumb tomorrow.
the progress and material causes of life on earth would seem to be well within the purview of the materialist conception of science.
Isn't that almost tautology? "material causes are in the purview of a materialistic conception."?
But I think I know what you have in mind. I hope you'll forgive me if I seem to be to anal or philosophical in reply. First a rephrase, hoping it's in line with your thought.
Are the material causes of life within the purview of science? Yes. Up to a certain point. And, forgive me again, it hinges on the meaning of the word "cause."
But certainly, most definitely, science should, can and does help us understand the workings of matter and what we call forces acting on matter.
Remember science describes, or models, the material world. If the model "works" we say we "know why" or "know how" or "know what causes." [Of course later we can discover REALLY how it works and replace the previous model.]
A quick example: It's said that we could not understand how the heart works until the pump was invented. Then we could describe, model, the heart as a pump and know how it works and what "causes" the blood to flow. But what causes a pump to work. Well, Bernoulli's equation… and so on. Science doesn't really address the true cause, only describes how matter fits into certain concepts capable of comprehension by man.
But all the way we are still and only naming and modeling. [In the quantum world our models start to break down and we "know how" only by mathematics, symbol-rule modeling.]
Science, again, is the firmest knowing we have. We can use these models to blow up mountains, fly to the moon. I'm not denigrating science, only saying it needs humility too.
While its irrelevant to the scientist doing science, we should remember that these are models comprehensible by humans that when applied to matter follow the requirements of the model.
That's really all we truly know. And we can always ask a question on a higher level that science cannot help us answer.
We should avoid then mistaking our model for the thing itself. Avoid thinking we have reduced the thing itself merely by describing it in a material modeling method.
If we live, as we sometimes tend to, in a more and more scientific universe we lose everything but our models – we lose a great deal of our experience in this universe. For example when lightning becomes "just" a discharge of charges, we have lost lightning.
Nothing in the universe is "just" its scientific description.
Science should increase our wonder and appreciation of the cosmos and spark us to other and higher spheres of knowing. I love science a great deal; it's a fond hobby and study of mine. Here, I'm only advocating perspective in its teaching. Hey, I think I made it back to the topic of the thread!
Hope I haven't gone way off from the intent of your reply. And, thank you for posting it..
Be as technical as you want; I can handle the math.
BTW, you other creationists and IDers out there. This guy, like it or not, is your spokesman.
Are you familiar with Lewis's "Abolition of Man"?
Without external inputs of energy, any system, on its own, moves from order to disorder. Without external inputs of energy, systems eventually become totally random.
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