A New Foundation for Positive Cultural Change: Science and God in the Public Square

Human Events ^ | September 15, 2000 | Nancy Pearcey

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so very much for these additional book recommendations! I'm going to be a very busy gal.

[Jaguarbhzrd]

Poke fun at a Christian around this forum, and you'll either get banned, suspended, or called a marxist atheist pig.

And what the Creationists do on this forum is not "poking" fun at scientists, it is literally telling them that they are wrong for not using supernatural excuses in their work.

Science is science, not what you wish science would be.

If science used some of the things that I have seen bandied around on this thread, it would be completely and absolutely useless.

[blowfish]

After Jim Robinson referred to those who believe in evolution in such terms as "socialist dogma" and "Marxist lies," it became pretty clear that the FRevos were on the "wrong" (as in "politically incorrect") side of the "debate."

I hadn't seen that! That actually explains a lot...

[.30Carbine]

Thank you so much for the ping to your worthy post! Just gazing at the sky and thinking, "He chose blue," or at the fall leaves and thinking, "He chose orange! and red! and yellow!" can keep me enthralled for hours at a time. I study flowers with hungry eyes like Georgia O''Keefe! Now if I had the opportunity to sit down with someone studying His Magnificence at the cellular level, I think I'd feel drunk with the pleasure. (:

[FreedomProtector]

"... the aims, methodologies and presuppositions of science cannot be validated by science. One cannot turn to science to justify science any more than one can pull up oneself by his own bootstraps. The validation of science is a philosophical issue, not a scientific one, and any claim to the contrary will be a self-refuting philosophical claim."

Yockey has mastered the art a of good story/illustration :^), thanks for sharing.


How do you know something to be true?
How do you know that that you know?

questions of epistemology...

Experimentalism is one way to discover knowledge, but it isn't the only way. It is actually quite limited in its scope. One reason a conversation is difficult with an evolutionist is there is usually not an agreement on epistemology. There are understood rules like not violating the law of non-contradiction etc, but as a whole both sides usually have different presuppositions regarding how one can know something to be true.

[FreedomProtector]

Thanks for the post [you inspired me to read a book I have been meaning to read], I ordered the Jaki book The Road of Science and the Ways to God last night ...found it in paperback for 10.00 used.

This printing (hardcover), the cheapest is $100

This printing (paperback), the cheapest is $10 [to $125]

[Jaguarbhzrd]

Epistemology?

Is that what you think the problem is?

I don't think so, the problem is this, to you science is whatever you wish it to be, whereas with a person that understands science, science is what it is.

You wish it for something, we know it for something.

There is a difference, and we have attempted to explain that difference, but you guys always claim to never get it, and go straight back to your, this is what I wish science was arguments.

Our view is the rational understanding of science, yours is the wave your hands, wish as hard as you can, pretend it's religion, and wish whatever you think that science is, irrational definition.

[FreedomProtector]

Epistemology?

Is that what you think the problem is?


I believe a difference of epistemology is only a piece of the puzzle. I merely stated that experimentalism is limited in its scope of knowledge it can discover. In history, there are eyewitness accounts which provided historical documents, etc. In rationalism, there is the law of non-contradiction, etc. Although valid rational thinking and the study of historical documents are limited in scope as well. Limiting ones self to one method of discovering what is true is limiting ones ability to only discover truth found inside a limited sphere of knowledge, and ignoring truth that is outside the sphere.


I believe the root of the issue is often found in ones heart, the religious presuppositions of ultimate reality of the observer.


The religious presuppositions that evolution by chis a 'fact', that matter came before mind, etc are false.

The religious presuppositions of evolutionary scientists color what they think and do. Some are incapable of even acknowledging that they have presuppositions, let alone are they able to rationally discuss them.

Matter before mind presuppositions result in conclusions which are contradictory to the world. The materialist cannot be consistent to the logic of their presuppositions, because the materialist lives in a reality which was made by something external to matter...God. This being so, materialist is in a place of tension.

Materialists build up walls of protection to shield themselves from the point of tension. The materialist then erects barriers, even if completely irrational or improbable, to try to deal w/ the contradiction of how he observes the world.

I believe one of those barriers which you have erected is telling people that you have never met and have no idea what feilds of study their respective graduate degrees are in that they are not in the category of people which "understand science".

Because I care about you, I will try to lovingly and with true tears try to remove the layers of protection and allow the truth of the created world to shine upon the you. God's creation, the world you live in, is a reflection of His glory and divine nature. I believe that if those wall of protections are removed you may see the world as Francis Bacon did when he noted that the book of God's word and the book of God's world were written by the same author.

Here is an experiment:
Try to consciously change your presuppositions for a couple of days.
It's ok to ask God for help with this experiment, or even consult the historical documents of the eyewitness accounts found in the book of John.

[FreedomProtector]

someday I will learn to proof read...

evolution by chis a 'fact' -> chance and natural process is a 'fact'

[Cicero]

Sir Francis Bacon was the great exponent of experimentalism, and of induction as opposed to Aristotelian induction. He is often considered to be the father of the technological revolution.

He supposed that you could perform violent experiments upon nature (he emphasizes the importance of power and violence), move up from the details to ever more general truths, and thus climb a sort of scientific ladder of control over nature, which would bring mankind back into the Garden of Eden (a metaphor he uses several times).

Pico della Mirandola (oddly, an ancestor of mine) uses similar imagery in his Oration on the Dignity of Man. You can work your way up the ladder toward eternal truths--but it becomes quite confusing toward the end whether he prefers a Platonic ladder up to God or a demonic ladder down into the depths of magical control over nature.

Experience since those times, however, has confirmed that science seldom progresses by Baconian induction, but instead by conjecture and confirmation or conjecture and refutation.

Where do these hypotheses or conjectures come from? A scientist wakes up from sleep, remembers a dream, and discovers some important new scientific principle. For example, the benzene ring. Experiments simply confirm what he dreamed up in his sleep. It becomes evident that the way our minds work corresponds in some mysterious way to the way the universe works.

The only really plausible explanation for all that--other than sheer coincidence that is statistically unlikely on an astronomical order of magnitude--is the Logos, a general principle of order and rationality that pervades the universe. God made our minds to accord with these rational principles underlying His universe. Mathematics, which is purely theoretical, somehow accords with physics, describing the actual nature of things. I just can't conceive that human minds capable of these perceptions evolved by sheer chance. There's no way to explain it. It's all very well to say that given enough time monkeys on typewriters could produce the works of Shakespeare, but if we turn our common sense on this proposition we have to say, no, the monkeys could never do that, not in 20 billion years.

[ZeitgeistSurfer]

A fascinating thread, much due to your insightful posts, Cicero. Here are some questions that have always perplexed me.

[1] The modern scientific position is that consciousness (or mind) is what the brain 'makes'. Through an amazingly complex network of electrochemical interactions (and possibly even quantum effects), the brain causes the mind to manifest as the subjective experience of a person. If there is more to the creation of mind/consciousness than that, what is it? In other words, is there a demonstrable phenomenon that yields consciousness other than the material working of the brain?

[2] The complexity and order of life is such that any rational and unbiased person contemplating it would conclude that it is impossible for it to come about by random processes. However, is that position mostly due to our inability to imagine or grasp the vast time frames involved, and the size of the material canvas? In addition, the process is random only in the sense that a Monte Carlo simulation is random. It is governed and constrained by physical laws which ultimately manifest themselves as biological laws.

[3] The naturalistic view of ethics is that it arose out of our fears - death, oblivion, injury, starvation, etc. This Kantian conception of ethics (viz. the Golden Rule) requires no God. Why isn't that satisfactory?

[betty boop]

It becomes evident that the way our minds work corresponds in some mysterious way to the way the universe works.... The only really plausible explanation for all that--other than sheer coincidence that is statistically unlikely on an astronomical order of magnitude--is the Logos, a general principle of order and rationality that pervades the universe. God made our minds to accord with these rational principles underlying His universe.

What a splendid essay/post, Cicero! Thank you ever so much!

The above italics explains why analogy is not just a literary device....

[FreedomProtector]

Sir Francis Bacon was the great exponent of experimentalism, and of induction as opposed to Aristotelian induction. He is often considered to be the father of the technological revolution.


FWIW, in my humble opinion, Novum Organum and the Advancement of Learning are two of the greatest works ever produced in history.

Novum Organum (english)
Novum Organum (latin)
Advancement of Learning

Pico della Mirandola (oddly, an ancestor of mine)

Very cool. Elder William Brewster was an ancestor of mine. Whenever I go the the capital rotunda in Washington DC and look at his picture on the wall I get that "I'm really really proud he was my great (x11) grandfather" felling. One interesting note: He was a fugitive in hiding when he boarded the Mayflower on charges of printing illegal books....I inherited some of his genes : )

[FreedomProtector]

The fitness algorithm of the spelling checker was not intelligent enough to remove an unfit correctly spelled word rendering an unfit sentence. I will insert a carefully designed "e" so the sentence does not become extinct.

felling->feeling

[Cicero]

The Cartesian mind-body problem arose when people ceased to believe in the concept of a soul.

Historically, Christians have believed in two (not incompatible) versions of immortality. One is the resurrection of the body, which is frequently mentioned in the Bible and verified for Christians by Christ on Easter. The Catholic and common Christian belief is that the dead will rise on the Last Day and be judged by Christ, then go to their eternal rewards.

Along with this is the idea of the immortality of the soul, a concept that goes back to the ancient Greeks, most influentially Plato. The immortality of the soul has been believed by Catholics from early days, but was not officially defined until fairly late in the middle ages. So the traditional Christian view was that the soul left the body at death and went immediately to judgment--heaven, hell, or purgatory. Then the souls of the dead will be reunited with their bodies at the end of time. Most Christians, Catholic and Protestant, have believed this, although there was a movement toward a form of weak mortalism in England, from Tyndale to Milton, and especially during the 16th and mid 17th centuries, which argued that the soul "slept" until the Last Judgment, when it rose with the body. This has never been orthodox, however.

If you posit an immortal soul, then there is an "I" that is not quite the same thing as the electrical activities in the brain. It is a self that is "in" the body but not material. So if the brain is damaged, you can speculate that the soul is still whole and entire within, but simply lacks the material means to express itself.

Traditionally, the Catholic Church still uses the Aristotelian formulation, that "the soul is the form of the body." This relates to Aristotle's whole definitional structure of form and matter. So the soul isn't somewhere inside the head or the brain; it is the "form" of the entire body. It is the principle of life. At the same time, it is an immortal soul. When it leaves the body, the body dies. All the cells die, more or less at once.

So you can speak of the self as if it were in the mind, or as if it were in the heart, or sometimes as if it were in the reins--the Platonic picture of the soul as a chariot driver with mismatched horses.

I think that unless you posit or believe in something like the human soul, it's impossible to explain many things about what we know humans are like.

In ancient times through the Renaissance, people spoke about three kinds or levels of souls: vegetative, animal, and rational. Also sometimes a fourth level, spiritual. C.S. Lewis writes about this helpfully in his small book, "The Discarded Image." Human beings have vegetative souls insofar as they live and reproduce; animal souls insofar as they have senses and locomotion, and rational souls insofar as they think and love.

No easy answers to the questions you ask, but there's no question that many of them didn't often arise until Descartes declared "I think, therefore I am." That is not a sustainable proposition.

[Cicero]

Elder William Brewster was an ancestor of mine.

Also of mine, in the female line. My claim to Mayflower fame.

[FreedomProtector]

[1] The modern scientific position is that consciousness (or mind) is what the brain 'makes'. Through an amazingly complex network of electrochemical interactions (and possibly even quantum effects), the brain causes the mind to manifest as the subjective experience of a person. If there is more to the creation of mind/consciousness than that, what is it? In other words, is there a demonstrable phenomenon that yields consciousness other than the material working of the brain?

I picked up two books at the book store a while back.

The Problem of the Soul: Owen Flanagan
Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief

Both are written by authors who begin with the presuppostion that that God does not exist, that all there is is matter, and explores the question that you are asking in 1). What is interesting is how many times the books themselves contradict the stated presuppositions found on the same pages. An attempt also is made at arguing the 'traditional' (weak) arguments for atheism in the books. Both books are at home now and I am not, or I would type a few interesting contradictory quotes...

[FreedomProtector]

Elder William Brewster was an ancestor of mine. Also of mine, in the female line. My claim to Mayflower fame.

wonder how close of cousins we are...?

The closet somewhat notable relative of mine is Ray Q. Brewster who served as chairman of the department of chemistry at the University of Kansas.

[Cicero]

Not very close cousins, I think. I find that the last person named Brewster in my family tree, according to a genealogy my cousin put together, was Anne Brewster, the daughter of Simon Brewster, born 1720, and Anne Andrus. Simon was the son of Benjamin Brewster, born 1683. Benjamin was the son of William Brewster, the son of Love Brewster, the son of Elder William Brewster. After that it goes through several female connections and name changes.

[FreedomProtector]

My great (x10) grandfather was Jonathan [son of Elder William Brewster]. Love would have been my great, great, great...uncle.

Oh well, although distant, nice to meet you cousin [as well as a brother or sister]