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To: puroresu
That's a nice protected position to be in.

It's not a "protected position", it's a statement on the fundamental limitations (or rather, scope) of scientific inquiry.

Science can neither prove nor disprove God, nor His relationship to the events we see in the universe, so we're to assume God's irrelevant and the events we observe have nothing to do with God.

To which "God", out of the thousands of deities worshipped and acknowledged throughout human history, do you refer and why that one to the exclusion of all others. I can presume that it's a male deity, but even that doesn't narrow it down.

See, when you start demanding that science address deities, you run into sticky questions like "which one and why?"

And, no, we're not to assume that God is irrelevant. We're to acknowledge that science cannot give us any information regarding any deities and that any events that have a supernatural cause can never be fully explained by science. These are limits on what can be determined by science, not limits on our knowledge in general.

Surely you can see that people of faith find that anything but neutral.

I'm sorry that science doesn't accomidate your personal religious beliefs, but that's the nature of science.

Is science so fragile that it can't function if someone even so much as suggests that one possibility is that God designed things?

Science is unable to test such claims. That doesn't make the claims false, but there's no means for science to test the supernatural, and it's fundamentally unscientific and intellectually dishonest in general to demand that science accomidate the possibilities implied from a single specific religious faith to the exclusion of all others.
344 posted on 01/03/2006 11:29:00 PM PST by Dimensio (http://angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif <-- required reading before you use your next apostrophe!)
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To: Dimensio

What difference does it make which God we're talking about? If I were suggesting that we teach kids specifically in the public schools that Allah from the Koran or Yahweh from the Old Testament, or Zeus or Kali created the universe you'd have a point. All I'm suggesting is that science remain open to the possibility that the billions of people who believe there's more to life than natural processes which work simply of their own accord not be dismissed on a tautological technicality (i.e., "We've defined science in such a way as to exclude the possibility of the supernatural, therefore only purely naturalistic explanations for our origins and development are potentially true").

You're correct, science can't test the supernatural, so therefore it can neither determine nor disprove its existence. So it should not operate on the sole assumption that it doesn't exist.

I could understand you fellows getting upset if Christians were demanding that a big chunk of science education be composed of religious teaching. But all that's usually asked for is a simple suggestion that maybe there is a God and maybe He had something to do with all this, or as in Georgia a sticker asking kids to keep an open mind. The hysteria that erupts over such usually modest requests is what leads many of us to think there's an agenda behind what you're doing.


356 posted on 01/04/2006 5:57:49 AM PST by puroresu (Conservatism is an observation; Liberalism is an ideology)
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