Replies

Your description of how the sun rises (the earth rotating away from the sun, etc.) is an observation. It doesn't explain where the earth or sun came from, where the laws came from that govern orbits and rotations, etc.

The sun apparently rising is an observation. The rotation of the earth is an explanation of the observation. We don't directly observe the earth rotate. There's no doubt the explanation begets other questions (why does the earth rotate?, etc); anyone who's talked to a bright four-year old is familiar with the infinite chain of questions and answers. And ultimately we get back to the really fundamental questions of where the universe came from, and so on. We can't yet answer those questions with confidence. But what we can answer are the immediate questions, and the immediate questions all have natural rather than supernatural explanations. It is therefore reasonable to expect that the harder and more distant questions will have natural explanations, and to exclude supernatural explanations, because the imminent problems, without exception, do not have supernatural explanations.

This argument, incidentally, is not mine; it was recently posted on Panda's Thumb by a Christian philosopher by the name of Bob O Connor, who feels that science can exclude ID on pragmatic grounds, and without making any contentious distinctions between science and non science. I found it a persuasive argument, because I worry about demarcation criteria.

You're a chemist. I'm sure you can describe all the elements, their properties, the effects of combining them in different quantities (H2O = water), and so forth. But that's not an explanation for how those elements exist or why they behave the way they do. No one can objectively explain the "whys" of those things.

Actually, I can give you a reasonably good explanation of why some elements exist and others don't; and I can give you excellent ones why they have the properties they have.

There's no doubt the explanation begets other questions (why does the earth rotate?, etc); anyone who's talked to a bright four-year old is familiar with the infinite chain of questions and answers. And ultimately we get back to the really fundamental questions of where the universe came from, and so on. We can't yet answer those questions with confidence. But what we can answer are the immediate questions, and the immediate questions all have natural rather than supernatural explanations. It is therefore reasonable to expect that the harder and more distant questions will have natural explanations, and to exclude supernatural explanations, because the imminent problems, without exception, do not have supernatural explanations.

I really like the image of the 'bright four-year-old'. You are very right that we can more easily explain the more immediate questions, but that our answers get less sure the farther back we go. One of the aims of science is to push along the line of questions, just like a determined four-year-old, until we get to some kind of end. Of course, there is the chance that there IS not end, and simply more questions await us.