No. “God is not needed” is an infuriating response to Evangelicals everywhere!
If I said: “Ask Behe! He will tell you that all true evolution comes at God’s hands.”
So what do you think the ID man/woman would say in answer?
No. He is saying that he doesn’t think Christian theology is meaningful to non-Christians.
Why don’t you ask one? My guess is they would agree. Is that the point you’re trying to make?
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Yes… they would have to. But what would they say next? Whatever they said next would probably get the following from us: “Prove it.”
So … what does he want from PS.org?
I don’t think I am understanding your point. How is that a religious idea, as opposed to other ideas pertaining to morality like “murder is bad”, which have historically been incorporated into religious rules and norms, but which can exist in the same form without religion?
Why, if that is what they seem to be?
I still do not see why science cannot be used to dismiss that idea. If someone were to claim that, say, Alexander the Great had been conjured out of dirt by a god, should that idea also be taken seriously as a “one-off miracle”? Or should it not be dismissed out of hand, because the scientific evidence tells us that is not how humans are born?
I think you are saying that because an idea was “historically incorporated into religious rules and norms,” after existing outside them, it isn’t a religious idea. I don’t grant that premise and I don’t claim that a “religious idea” has to have originated with religion.
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Is that theme purely, or even primarily, scientific though? It would seem to be primarily philosophical, at least in part because it rests on matters that are subjective more than emprical.
Yes, let us consider ethics. Whilst they are applicable to science, as they are to any human endeavor, they do not seem to be discoverable by the scientific method. In fact some ethic considerations that are applicable to science are also applicable to other academic fields, and even the arts – take plagiarism as an example.
I would agree that Science “accepts” ethical constraints (as well as Occupational Health and Safety rules, etc, etc) from the rest of human society. I would even stipulate that some religious ideas have to do with ethics. I am not however confident that those two points of agreement are sufficiently transitive that I would agree that “science accepts religious ideas”. And I think the transitivity is lessening over time – as science considers things like “remov[ing] the top of the skull of a non-human primate …” to be increasingly ethically problematical, and finding little in (Christian, at least) “religious ideas” to support that view.
Also I would suggest that the problem goes beyond contemporary American conservative Christians. If it is okay to genocide whole tribes (and even the vast majority of the population of the Earth) as the OT suggests, and massacre unbelievers by the thousand because ‘God wills it’ (Deus vult!), what really is the problem with infecting a few hundred members of an oppressed racial minority with Syphilis?
This in turn leads to another issue. Scientific acceptance of (a certain set of) ethical standards is not absolute – it is conditional on these standards continuing to reflect societal standards. These societal standards are becoming more secular in their tone and content.
I do not have a problem with this. I do however distinguish between “coexistence” and “acceptance” (let alone unconditional acceptance).
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That’s not quite what I am saying. Rather, it remains unclear to me what you are considering a “religious idea” in the first place. Could not scientists discuss ethical issues about experimenting on human beings without considering religion at all? What is gained by thinking of it as a “religious idea”?
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No. You consistently misinterpret what other people are saying.
I’m also saying that Christian theology isn’t meaningful to science and has nothing to contribute to science (except, potentially, as a source of hypotheses). I’m saying also that it isn’t a “way of knowing”.
Entertainment, mostly. But I consider my role to be one of keeping the science honest, which includes keeping it science.
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I have been taking it as metaphorical.
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Well George, I in turn ask you to
STOP making this INSULTING and UNSUBSTANTIATED strawman claim about atheist behaviour on this forum
In spite of repeated rebuttals and repeated requests for substantiation you just keep repeating it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.
Repeating it ad nauseam does not help to convince anybody of it. It just convinces us that (i) you are really annoying & (ii) that your thinking is very “muddled” and incoherent.
I will conclude by pointing out that, whilst you spend an inoridinate amount of time telling everybody to put GAE front and centre, you seem to spend very little time actually discussing it (or anything other than how atheists need to ‘get off your lawn’) yourself. Curious.
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It all comes down to whether you are avoiding being dismissive of beliefs that are ALSO held by Christian Evolutionists…
Vs. being dismissive of beliefs usually held only by YECs and I.D. proponents.
Speaking of:
avoid[ing] responses that dismiss … “Evangelical … beliefs about God [as] irrational and void.”
It occurs to me that I need a caveat to my earlier rebuttal.
Many Evangelicals believe that God sent Trump to them as a protector. I will admit that I would consider that this “belief about God” is “irrational and void” – but then so do a large number of Christians.
It is, I think, very important to be clear what beliefs are under discussion and whether these specific beliefs are held by the majority of “Christian Evolutionists”, or simply just by one very muddled and incoherent one.
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Of course.
The company and goodwill of religious people.
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Thanks for those comments. The only thing I will add is that I meant to write about coexistence, maybe dialog etc., but not “accept” in the sense of “add to the corpus of knowledge.” I was reading “accept” to mean something like “consider reasonable within scientific culture.” I do view “science” as a large diverse culture and not as a recipe book.
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I tend to more view science as a methodological system – at least in terms of what it should, or should not “accept”, either as part of its “corpus of knowledge”, or as a valid topic of scientific inquiry.
I think viewing science as a culture, although valid for many lines of inquiry, will tend towards results that are more descriptive than prescriptive. This is because (i) scientists, like everybody else, are fallible, and (ii) because all cultures change and evolve.
Could be either, depending on context. Or a body of knowedge, or a discipline, or, of course, a magazine.
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