How do you do methodological naturalism, science, the actual hypotheses, testing and data recording, and include or allow for God in the process, the practice of science?
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Christians, of course, have in the back of their minds, and hopefully frequently the front, that God is the creator and who is ultimately behind our ability to do science. But isnāt it like mathematics? You donāt have a variable āGodā in any equations. Many of the early scientists in modern science were Christians, and maybe they didnāt actually, like Bach, put SDG in the margins of their work, but easily could have. Likewise, with current-day Christians in the sciences (maybe some have and do).
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Are you claiming that Joshua Swamidass isnāt a good scientist?
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What evidence supports your placement of an X under crocs and birds, then?
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I vastly oversimplified, didnāt I?
If you regarded each mutation as a feature, you could apply the same homoplasy analysis to human individuals and generate a nested hierarchy under maximum likelihood expectation, right? In the end, for small numbers of generations you would end up with a tree pretty similar to the one you would generate purely by distance measurements, I would think. And you would even see phenomena like incomplete lineage sorting (ILS) emerge.
But yes, I agree it is important to generate the tree by minimizing a homoplasy loss function rather than by distance measurements. And I appreciate the education I always receive from getting biologistsā feedback.
Thanks,
Chris
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Humans always fall short of their ideals, to some extent. Does that mean we should abandon ideals?
In the case of scientific practice, does the imperfection of humans mean that the ideal of methodological naturalism should be abandoned?
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Yes, and I thought that needed correction. There are phylogenetic methods that just cluster by similarity, UPGMA being the best known. And they will work to the extent their assumptions are not violated by the data, the chief assumption being that evolution is perfectly clocklike. The less the data depart from that model, the better UPGMA will perform. These methods are seldom used because real data tend to violate that assumption often. There are also distance-based methods that donāt assume clocklike evolution, such as neighbor-joining and least-squares fit. But itās better to use methods that donāt reduce the data to simple pairwise distances, such as maximum parsimony and maximum likelihood models.
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Itās not about confession. As a scientist, itās my duty to try to falsify my hypotheses. This is the standard to which grant applications and papers are held. The standard is strictly enforced by my peers.
Contrast that with the pseudoscience of IDCreationism, in which no such duty exists, and in which the existence of scientific duty is strenuously denied.
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If something, like the creation of the universe or the first life, was done directly by God, they wonāt be able to discover it using science, right? The science itself is still neutral. Those afflicted with scientism will just keep saying āWe havenāt found it yet.ā
Iāve known a great many scientists (including those who were my colleagues early in my career when I was a science professor) and I canāt think of even one who believed that the scope of science is unlimited.
So Iām wondering if there is a very different viewpoint among scientists in your part of the world??
The Scientific Method (and methodological naturalism, for those who are fine with that term) is by its very definition limited in its scope. Indeed, weāve discussed those limitations many times on Peaceful Science.
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Me neither.
Misrepresenting the thoughts and words of others is all @Ashwin_s seems to be capable of recently.
I worked in Indian science for 5 years, and I encountered no one who believes what Ashwin claims we believe.
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To be fair, thatās kind of different than what @Ashwin_s said right? While most scientists affirm the limits of science, some would say that it is not worth believing in anything that science cannot detect. The limits of science are the limits of knowledge.
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Iāve known Christians who made claims similar to @Ashwin_sā, and so I usually asked them to give me examples of scientists who believed what they claimed. I typically got answers like āRichard Dawkinsā and āNeil Degrasse Tyson.ā I doubt that they accurately understood Dawkins and Tyson but even if they did, I would not assume that someone like Richard Dawkins speaks for all or even most scientists. (I have scientists friends who are decidedly atheist and yet they tell me that they strongly disagree with Dawkins on many topics, often to the point of extreme annoyance.)
I canāt speak for Ashwin_s but the Christians Iāve known who held a view similar to Ashwin_sā seemed to be expressing an opinion about what they perceived as the attitude of particular anti-theist scientists rather than anything actually published on that topic by āmost scientists.ā
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If that is their claim, they are woefully ill-informed. The rules of logic are not from the methodological naturalism of scienceāyet the academic study of logic is valid knowledge. And I donāt know any scientists who doesnāt ābelieve inā logic.
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If you canāt do methodological naturalism without assuming that God isnāt involved in the āprocessāā¦ then how is it neutral with respect to God?
I am just acknowledging the fact that methodological naturalism is not neutral with respect to God. It takes a clear stand that God is not involved/relevant to understanding whatever is being studied.
I am asking a question. How is that a claim?
I can think of quite a few.
The very minimum would be to believe that finding the answers to whatever they are studying is within the scope.of science. And overall, Scientists are studying pretty much everything.
Atleast everything worth studying.
Edit: think about practical thingsā¦ like a scientist studying consciousness or the origins of life. He/She has to believe there is a ānaturalā reason for these phenomenon. They need to convince influential people who give grants that this is the case.
Do you consciously involve God when adding 2 + 2? No? Are you therefore declaring him irrelevant?
In a creationist, non-evolutionist worldview, God may have called forth the entire order of primates at the top of creation day six (whether one desires a day 24 hours in length or millions of years) with a single command, based on genetic information contained in a Common Creation Template. Species would erupt and branch over a pre-determined span of time based on an advancing molecular clock (one greatly accelerated in a YEC view). The project would culminate late on day six with Godās personal creation of Man using the same Template and concurrent with the eruption of the species chimpanzee.
