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To: Ahban
There is an informal rule of science: never bet on miracles; it hasn't panned out once in the history of science.

That is a cute way of saying we are to dogmatically rule out in advance the possibility that anything from outside our three-space dimensions plus time universe could ever effect anything inside our universe.

How many different ways are you going to make me repeat this? Science operates in the material realm. Therefore material explanations are what science is about. Science has no opinion about any flavor of immaterial realm. That is not it's job. In the ordinary course of affairs we do not to take this fundamental limit of science as a failing. If that bothers you, stay away from laboratories & science museums & field digs, & go to church instead--you'll get little mileage insisting that what you learned in church should stand on equal scientific footing with what you learn in the lab or the field.

I won't respond in detail to your last couple of posts because you chewed up way more verbal yardage than I have the patience for to say the same fundamentally incorrect thing over and over.

In no manner has ID or creationism ponied up the disciplined artillary of facts and problems that are forever unapproachable by the current paradigm, to give it the sort of footing, say, Copernican astronomy needed to replace ptolomaic astronomy. Our present take on how things work may, in the end, prove as useless as ptolomaic astronomy, but as long as it seems reasonably useful, we aren't giving it up for a big bag of undisciplined, fact-free wind created by antideluvian tinhats with an obvious agenda, no matter how many big words strung together in profound-sounding vague oratory they produce.

152 posted on 06/26/2002 1:00:04 PM PDT by donh
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To: donh
We BOTH seem to be trying, from various angles, to make the same points over and over, and each shouting that the otherone "doesn't get it".

Science operates in the material realm. Therefore material explanations are what science is about. Science has no opinion about any flavor of immaterial realm. That is not it's job.

I don't have a problem with that. But it is one thing to say science only answers questions about the material realm, and another to insist that the material realm is all that there is. That is naturalism disguised as science.

It is one thing to say "Using science, we don't know how the universe was created, if God did it we don't know how He did. We only measure things that are in the natural world to start with." That is different from saying, "God could not have done this, or anything else, as all actions have a natural cause". That is NOT science. Science can, to a high probability, rule out a natural answer, leaving the supernatural as the most probable explanation. Naturalism disguising itself as science insists in advance that no supernatural explanation is possible (even while admitting that the creation of the universe itself is in violation of its known laws).

We are beginning to make guesses about extra dimensions that may exist. Once we understand them, what we once thought of as 'supernatural' may simply be places where these higher-dimensional realms interacted in a way that touches ours. This could happen in strict accordance with the 'natural laws' of that realm. In other words, todays 'supernatural' is tomorrows 'natural' explanation.

You argue that as we learn more and more about our 3-space dimensions + time universe we will come to understand how cells can bootstrap themselves from non-living matter. I claim that as we come to understand more about the extra-dimensional world and how it operates we will come to understand better how God made cells from non-living matter.

Not really so much different, except for the Sagan mantra,"The cosmos is all that is, or was, or ever shall be." That is a dogma, not a scienctific truth. By your own definition of science it is impossible to verify that statement scientifically.

155 posted on 06/26/2002 1:37:00 PM PDT by Ahban
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