Does Romans 1:20 Mean There is Scientific Evidence for God?

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It’s true that in current philosophy of science there’s a modesty on this question; sometimes it is a healthy modesty having to do with issues of knowing something with certainty, other times it is an overblown hyper-skepticism that just wants to refuse calling a spade a spade. Some of the arguments used toward this conclusion are that than which no lamer could be conceived, like Feyerabend who argues for a relativism of methods where hunter-gatherer tribes who believe they can turn into birds have equally valid methodologies as practising Western scientists. This is drivel.

The original claim was that science is “not a project for assessing the truth of a statement”. My point about verisimilitude states the opposite: we are tracking truth, we do it all the time, this is why verisimiltude is important, even if our limitations prevent us from knowing the true nature of reality with 100% certainty and 100% with respect to nature’s primary qualities. There are plenty within the philosophy of science who continue to hold on to a robust realism. There are even some who reject the Kantian influence that underlies a substantive portion of the popular theories in contemporary philosophy of science. Take Michael Huemer, for example, who goes so far as to argue for the old “naive realism” of sense perception, contra Kant. Or David Stove.

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Here is a quote from “Darwinism Defeated? The Johnson-Lamoureux Debate on Biological Origins”,

“Thus we reach the peculiar position where the design of creation, based on physical evidence, is less evident to Denis than the design of a neighbour’s flower bed, where the design of creation is more apparent to atheist Fred Hoyle than to Christian Denis Lamoureux.”

With no hint of disrespect to Joshua Swamidass, replace Denis’s name with Joshua’s in the above quote. As I understand Hoyle, he was so disillusioned with the inadequacies of naturalistic explanations for biology (among other features of the universe) that he resorted to the theories of panspermia.
It certainly doesn’t appear that Hoyle ever acknowledged God (or to use Joshua’s words, see God) but one is inclined to ask why did he see the inadequacies of naturalistic explanations.

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Can you expand on the meaning of “correspondence”? What is supposed to correspond to what?

I’m pretty sure that is something that I said. But it was not an original claim. The discussion and disagreement with your view was already under way before I said that.

I’ve been told (by a philosopher) that I am an anti-realist. That’s mainly because I take the view that scientific theories are neither true nor false. They are pragmatic constructs. We judge scientific theories by their usefulness, not by their truth.

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“Truth-adjacent”?

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As several people have said on this thread, just because a Christian scientist doesn’t think that the methods and criteria of modern science as it is practiced in the 21st century can lead to evidence for God’s existence, doesn’t mean that they think that the design of creation is not apparent. It’s just that such arguments are not properly part of natural empirical science as we refer to it today. Science is not the only method to ascertain truth.

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Even if one holds to some sort of realism, there is dispute as to which parts of science should be held as real and existing in the physical world, as opposed to just being a provisional calculational tool to predict phenomena. Even scientists themselves may not be able to cleanly demarcate between those (because their interest is primarily in producing more science and predicting new phenomena, not judging whether these phenomena are real).

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So, what do you think people like Hoyle struggle with and why?

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I don’t know much about Hoyle’s thinking in particular (and the quote you brought up didn’t actually express Hoyle’s thinking in his own words), but I agree that there are several reasons why naturalism is inadequate as a philosophy.

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I disagree here. I think this is incorrect from a practical point of view.

Physicists don’t understand quantum mechanics, and many of them don’t even try to, but I don’t think you would argue the field of quantum physics is worthless. All that matters to most physicists is whether their equations work. In this sense, science is not about finding truth, but making useful theories or models.

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Then you misunderstood Joshua.

In ancient Nigeria, it was believed (and still believed, in mainly many rural areas) that parents who had kids that died only after living briefly, were considered cursed by those kids. It was believed those kids were spirits (“Ogbanje” in Igbo language) who decided to torment their parents by being born into a particular family, dying at a young age, and repeating this birth-death cycle. Fast forward to 2020, this view has largely faded thanks to science. Many of these Ogbanje kids were usually sickly before their death, and we know today that many of them died due to illnesses (like sickle-cell anemia) unknown at the time. So you could imagine two ancient AS African parents birthing 4 SS kids out of six at different times and these four kids died. This would have only reinforced their belief in the Ogbanje narrative.

Even today, many people think incorrectly about many things like the ancients. I was a flat-earther when I was really young. At the time, I observed that people don’t fall off of a flat surface, except at the edges, but when they stood on spherical surfaces it took serious effort not to fall off. I also found it hard to believe people would not fall off the surface of a spherical earth at the equator, or the pole positioned at the bottom of the earth. Based on these points, I logically concluded that the earth was flat. However, if I had tested my belief like the ancient Greeks did, I would have figured out the truth. I gave up my flat-earth belief when I saw astronauts floating on the spherically shaped moon without falling off, and pictures of our beautiful, spheroid planet.

If my ancestors had developed testable models on what caused those deaths in certain families, they wouldn’t have spent their hard-earned resources on herbalists to release them from imaginary curses.

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Thanks for your response.
I will try and message you the short chapter from the book I quoted.
You are correct that the quote I brought up didn’t actually express Hoyle’s thinking in his own words. Here are Hoyle’s own words from the source Behe used and a link to the article.

Edward Blyth, who wrote on natural selection as early as 1835-37, remarked that when the idea first occurred to him “a variety of important considerations crowded on the mind.” So it is here. Suppose you were a superintellect working through possibilities in polymer chemistry. Would you not be astonished that polymers based on the carbon atom turned out in your calculations to have the remarkable properties of the enzymes and other biomolecules? Would you not be bowled over in surprise to find that a living cell was a feasible construct? Would you not say to yourself, in whatever language supercalculating intellects use, “Some supercalculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be less than I part in 1040000.” Of course you would, and if you were a sensible superintellect you would conclude that the carbon atom is a fix.
From 1953 onward, Willy Fowler and I have always been intrigued by the remarkable relation of the 7.65 Mev energy level in the nucleus of 12C to the 7.12 Mev level in 160. If you wanted to produce carbon and oxygen in roughly equal quantities by stellar nucleosynthesis, these are the two levels you would have to fix, and your fixing would have to be just where these levels are actually found to be. Another put-up job? Following the above argument, I am inclined to think so. A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.

Please note that the number in italics should be superscript, but I don’t know how to maintain the superscript in this comment.
Here is a link to the piece by Hoyle, https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.aa.20.090182.000245

I just find that Joshua’s restrictive definition and timeframe (quote from Joshua, “Science is a recent and peculiar way of studying the world” [emphasis mine]) (another quote from Joshua, Science is a specific way of studying nature to find provisional explanations of how the world works, without invoking God.[emphasis by JS]) for science to be unjustified. I don’t even find it logical. My reason for this last claim is. that as I think I’ve heard Joshua claim that science is post Frances Bacon, that would exclude even Bacon’s work as science since it is not post Bacon. Joshua says that we can’t make claims, calling them science, while invoking God. Can we invoke a superintellect as atheist Fred Hoyle does and call it science? Is counting science? When atheist, Fred Hoyle calculates, “the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be less than I part in 1040000” is that science? Would it be science if a theist made the same calculation?

Another quote from Josh, Science is “not something that you kind of think about a little bit in your garage”. What is the important point he is making here? I don’t know. Is it the quantity of thinking, ie. it needs to be more than a ‘little bit’? Is it the location, ie. it can’t be in your garage?
Have you got any idea why this following observation in the bible should not be considered science?

“A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured them. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and immediately they sprang up, since they had no depth of soil, but when the sun rose they were scorched. And since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and produced grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. He who has ears, let him hear.”

I don’t know how much it was thought about? A ‘little bit’? I doubt it was done in a garage. Although it definitely appears to be pre Frances Bacon.

Now, if you are still with me, may I suggest to you, that both Hoyle and Behe were driven to make conclusions based on the same evidence alone. The inability of naturalism to even posit viable theories to explain the specific reality that they address. I’d suggest that Behe was very happy (Catholisim allows for it) with the naturalistic explanations until he came to the end of what these explanations could account for.
As Behe has said, “Certainly, it might have religious implications, but it does not depend on religious premises.” https://youtu.be/gn5yh0GpKkw?t=3739
Best regards,
Sam

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By the way, it would be better if you could learn to use the quote feature of the forum software, by appending the symbol “>" in front of a text you want to quote.

Thank you for sending me the chapter. I will need time to take a look at it and think about it. I would like to warn you that my position on natural theology is likely very different from both Behe and Denis Lamoreaux.

Regarding Fred Hoyle’s comment, it seems that he is basically talking about fine-tuning. First, even if Hoyle’s argument has merit, it does not mean that it is a strictly scientific argument. Simply suggesting that there are interesting and inexplicable relations between certain physical quantities is not enough to establish any scientific thesis. Rather, such an observation is better understood as an invitation for deeper investigation, forming hypotheses to explain them and testing the hypotheses.

I don’t know Joshua’s exact view, but even if modern science was deeply influenced by Bacon, Bacon’s science is not the same as science in the 21st century. Just as society has changed a lot since then, so has the practice of science changed. Back then scientists were not even called scientists, but natural philosophers. Now we see a clear demarcation between science and philosophy which would be surprising in the time of Bacon and Newton. That’s not to say that truth or nature has changed - rather it’s just to say that what is classified as “science” has changed.

Scientists in general don’t like to appeal to the authority of “superintellects”. While Hoyle was a great scientist, we want to analyze his arguments. And just because Hoyle is a scientist doesn’t mean that everything he said and wrote about science is strictly speaking, actually part of science. (Just like an argument by atheist scientists like Dawkins that “science has removed the need for God” is not a scientific argument, but a philosophical argument.) The argument from fine-tuning can be made by atheists or theists, and it could be right or wrong (I’m agnostic about it), but I tend to think most forms of it is not a truly scientific argument.

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Can someone spoon-feed me where Hoyle’s calculation of 1 part in 10^4000 comes from?

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Actually this was a very clear line between theology and science for centuries leading up to Bacon.

Theologians were allowed to do both theology and “natural philosophy” (i.e. pre-modern “science”). Natural philosophers were allowed to do natural philosophy, but they were not allowed to do theology. It’s in that context that Bacon is arguing for natural philosophers to have autonomy from theology.

Put in our parlance, back then theologians could do science, but scientists were not allowed to do theology, and they had to answer to theologians too. Bacon argued for scientists to do their work without answering to theology, but not for scientists to do theology. Of course the use of “science” and “scientist” here are anachronisms.

@TedDavis might refine this somewhat, but the basic idea is that the distinction was in fact real and a key element of the context out of which science ends up arising.

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From the linked paper: “Thus the number 10^40000 was obtained from a calculation
in which less than twenty amino acids were required to be in specific sequential positions for each of two thousand enzymes”

It seems like that same old “Texas sharpshooter fallacy”, I think: the notion that a particular very specific arrangement had to be arrived at, in only a very specific sequence, and through purely random processes, which essentially excludes selection.

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Well, I’m confused. The original claim, about “such an atom”, referred to the existence of carbon. How does that relate to specific peptide sequences? Is somebody misquoting?

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OK, Ted enters on command as a “deus ex machina” to distribute the truth, at least as he sees it. :laughing: (I’ll leave it to the philosophers to answer Pilate’s question about what constitutes the truth.)

Josh briefly but accurately describes the situation in medieval universities, which allowed theologians to do natural philosophy (a “lower” discipline they had all studied prior to earning doctorates in theology), but forbade natural philosophers from doing theology (for which they lacked the requisite training).

But, during the early modern period this quite dramatically changed, as natural philosophers began to do theology in earnest. This is the famous thesis of Amos Funkenstein: https://www.jweekly.com/1995/11/17/renaissance-man-amos-funkenstein-dies-at-age-58/, particularly this book of his: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691181356/theology-and-the-scientific-imagination.

Some obvious examples–obvious long before Funkenstein’s work–include Newton’s statement that arguing for God’s existence “is the main business of natural philosophy,” or Boyle’s rock solid conviction that science can prove the truth of Christianity specifically, not merely a generic theism.

As for Bacon, I recommend this debunking of the widespread (false) belief that Bacon sought to secularize and separate theology and natural philosophy: Francis Bacon's God.

As Bacon said, natural theology was useful for refuting atheism. He urged caution, that people don’t “unwisely mingle together” science and religion, but not to the extent that some have (mis)read him to say.

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To clarify this for my education:

You write this, but that isn’t in conflict with this, is it?

I suppose the caveat is that he does think there is some legitimacy to natural theology, and other bridges between science (anachronistic) and theology. He does this while strongly cautioning against illegitimate bridges, which do harm to both theology and science (anachronistically). Am I understanding this correctly?

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I think Romans 1:20 points to scientific evidence of God, but not in the way science likes. The scripture proves the existence of God in the things that we have not discovered, not in the things we have. So, when science discovers a quark, God laughs and asks, “what makes a quark?” The scientific evidence of God lies in what is undiscoverable, and not in what we can explain. In a billion years, if we make it that long, man will still be seeking an unattainable scientific explanation for the mechanics of existence. (We should still keep seeking it).

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Romans 1:20 , NASB: “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.”

How can anyone claim that the functional complexity evident in even the simplest cell is the result of a purely natural process? Science has made the existence of a Creator more obvious than ever.

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