Posted on 12/07/2005 3:31:28 AM PST by snarks_when_bored
Thanks for the ping!
Aha! So a chicken IS just an egg's way of making another egg.
And the egg came first, BTW.
A great article! After all, why should only smart people have opinions!
How does he know that the workings of physics are "unintended," particularly when we speak of "the laws of physics"? I don't know of any un-authored laws.
Dawkins makes an a priori assumption, which is the opposite of the a posteriori "scientific method."
Yet after a lifetime of studying Americans -- I have gone to school with them, I have argued with them, I have had sex with them, and now I live with them -- I am still puzzled.
Purity of heart and wisdom go hand in hand. Wouldn't it be in the interest of someone who treats human beings as disposable objects of pleasure to support a philosophy that reduces human beings to mere physical processes?
Excellent reply.
How does he know that the workings of physics are "unintended," particularly when we speak of "the laws of physics"? I don't know of any un-authored laws.
Physicists finally started to understand something about how nature works after they stopped asking 'why' objects behave the way they do and started measuring 'how' the objects actually behave. The results of their measurements began to show certain repeatable regularities, and these came to be called 'laws'. But I'm guessing you know this.
Dawkins makes an a priori assumption, which is the opposite of the a posteriori "scientific method."
The scientific method isn't a posteriori, its results are.
Your knowledge of Professor Ruse's attitudes (and those of his partners) derives from what source? Come on, Aquinasfan, such inapposite remarks don't buttress your case (whatever it might be).
The birth of the "scientific method" followed on the Church's dogmatic teaching of "Creation from nothing." The notion of linear time also follows from the doctrine of the Incarnation, which renders pantheism and its concurrent notion of eternal cycles antithetical to Christianity.
Buriden's and Newton's breakthroughs in physics followed almost immediately from the Church's dogmatic pronouncement.
To the popular mind, science is completely inimical to religion: science embraces facts and evidence while religion professes blind faith. Like many simplistic popular notions, this view is mistaken. Modern science is not only compatible with Christianity, it in fact finds its origins in Christianity. This is not to say that the Bible is a science textbook that contains raw scientific truths, as some evangelical Christians would have us believe. The Christian faith contains deeper truths-- truths with philosophical consequences that make conceivable the mind's exploration of nature: man's place in God's creation, who God is and how he freely created a cosmos.In large part, the modern mind thinks little of these notions in much the same way that the last thing on a fish's mind is the water it breathes. It is difficult for those raised in a scientific world to appreciate the plight of the ancient mind trapped within an eternal and arbitrary world. It is difficult for those raised in a post-Christian world to appreciate the radical novelty and liberation Christian ideas presented to the ancient mind.
The following selection summarizes the most notable work of Stanley Jaki, renowned historian of science and Templeton Prize laureate.
How did Christian belief provide a cultural matrix (womb) for the growth of science?
In Christ and Science (p. 23), Jaki gives four reasons for modern science's unique birth in Christian Western Europe:
1) "Once more the Christian belief in the Creator allowed a break-through in thinking about nature. Only a truly transcendental Creator could be thought of as being powerful enough to create a nature with autonomous laws without his power over nature being thereby diminished. Once the basic among those laws were formulated science could develop on its own terms."The Origin of Science2) "The Christian idea of creation made still another crucially important contribution to the future of science. It consisted in putting all material beings on the same level as being mere creatures. Unlike in the pagan Greek cosmos, there could be no divine bodies in the Christian cosmos. All bodies, heavenly and terrestrial, were now on the same footing, on the same level. this made it eventually possible to assume that the motion of the moon and the fall of a body on earth could be governed by the same law of gravitation. The assumption would have been a sacrilege in the eyes of anyone in the Greek pantheistic tradition, or in any similar tradition in any of the ancient cultures."
3) "Finally, man figured in the Christian dogma of creation as a being specially created in the image of God. This image consisted both in man's rationality as somehow sharing in God's own rationality and in man's condition as an ethical being with eternal responsibility for his actions. Man's reflection on his own rationality had therefore to give him confidence that his created mind could fathom the rationality of the created realm."
4) "At the same time, the very createdness could caution man to guard agains the ever-present temptation to dictate to nature what it ought to be. The eventual rise of the experimental method owes much to that Christian matrix."
The beginning of science as a fully fledged enterprise took place in relation to two important definitions of the Magisterium of the Church. The first was the definition at the Fourth Lateran Council in the year 1215, that the universe was created out of nothing at the beginning of time. The second magisterial statement was at the local level, enunciated by Bishop Stephen Tempier of Paris who, on March 7, 1277, condemned 219 Aristotelian propositions, so outlawing the deterministic and necessitarian views of creation.These statements of the teaching authority of the Church expressed an atmosphere in which faith in God had penetrated the medieval culture and given rise to philosophical consequences. The cosmos was seen as contingent in its existence and thus dependent on a divine choice which called it into being; the universe is also contingent in its nature and so God was free to create this particular form of world among an infinity of other possibilities. Thus the cosmos cannot be a necessary form of existence; and so it has to be approached by a posteriori investigation. The universe is also rational and so a coherent discourse can be made about it. Indeed the contingency and rationality of the cosmos are like two pillars supporting the Christian vision of the cosmos.
The rise of science needed the broad and persistent sharing by the whole population, that is, the entire culture, of a very specific body of doctrines relating the universe to a universal and absolute intelligibility embodied in the tenet about a personal God, the Creator of all. Therefore it was not chance that the first physicist was John Buridan, professor at the Sorbonne around the year 1330, just after the time of the two above-mentioned statements of the Church's teaching office.
Buridan's vision of the universe was steeped in the Christian doctrine of the creation; in particular, he rejected the Aristotelian idea [in De Caelo] of a cosmos existing from all eternity. He developed the idea of impetus in which God was seen as responsible for the initial setting in motion of the heavenly bodies, which then remained in motion without the necessity of a direct action on the part of God. This was different from Aristotle's approach, in which the motion of heavenly bodies had no beginning and would also have no end. Buridan's work was continued by his disciple, Nicholas Oresme, around the year 1370; impetus theory anticipated Newton's first law of motion.
Hmmm. I think I'll go make a name for myself and write a thesis supporting the "10 to the 499th" perspective.
So you figure 10500 universes is just too danged many, eh? (smile)
The first or second paragraph of the article you posted. I don't waste my time with amoral intellectuals.
Speaking of obsession, do you always bring homosexuality into political discussions?
Not really. It could be more. We could be the only one.
I was just making a sarcastic remark about how scientists pluck numbers from the air and then try to back them up. Estimates from the "Population Bomb," which was considered fairly accurate science when it was written, come to mind.
Don't forget that it was Galileo's arrogance and refusal to swallow Aristotelian physics (as filtered through Aquinas, mostly) that really started modern physics.
You didn't answer the question I asked, but that's okay. We all need to vent now and then.
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