Hey @Gisteron, thanks very much for that response. It was a clear outline of your position and helps me see that you and I hold different views about how to understand science, its laws, what it “says,” and how to think about the concept of a miracle. I sometimes elicit frustration from some of my loved ones when I shrug off any report of the “spiritual” or supernatural, and yet I don’t believe — not intellectually, not even in my heart — that such a belief undermines the reliability of “science.” It’s not that I don’t understand your argument. I just don’t think or feel that way. Maybe I’m just too soft and want to continue to live with and love people who do believe in miracles and who work as professional scientists.
And look, I can see how one could argue that friendliness toward miracles is a gateway drug to a life of credulous consumption of bullshit, a path that leads to a democratic republic threatened by evangelical Christianity. I just don’t think the explanations are that simple.
It has been a pleasure, and I’m looking forward to many more chats.
Regarding practical realities about believers in and around science, I’ll say I don’t particularly mind if someone has a private spirituality, maybe even believes in miracles and also knows to separate such things from their scientific inquiries. Indeed, I’d even go so far as to say I respect it. I do not necessarily understand particularly well how they do it. I do not know how robust the barriers they erect to stop such beliefs from getting in the way of their critical faculties can be against raw logical consistency, but it seems for the most part to work. I don’t know how the placement of those barriers can be something other than arbitrary either, but again, somehow, it works.
What I have a much easier time understanding is people who search for and find meaning in things beyond the immediate. People who feel connections with things, who allow themselves the pleasure of art, the symbols and narratives and teaching within the texts of the ancients, and the spiritual fulfilment of religion more broadly. I’m not a religious person myself, and have never been, particularly, but for what it’s worth, I think this, ultimately, is where their greatest riches reside. The search for kernels of literal historical truths within literature is in its own right respectable, but it is a shame people break their own relationships and spirits over finding too many or too few. There is plenty more than that to find within those tales, and the test for if particularly magical events ever happened may just be the least of it all.
Well, this would be a lot more fun in person with a carb-heavy brewed beverage but here are some thoughts from my own life and head.
I was a serious believer for three decades and a laboratory scientist (biologist) for almost all of it. I did think about miracles, and talk about their implications with colleagues who shared most of my religious commitments. Many of these colleagues worried to some extent about barriers and separation and so on. Many others, like me, simply did not. For me, it was because I didn’t care about miracles. I was not a believer because of miracles, indeed I was probably a believer in spite of stories of the miraculous. Now, of course I knew that the miraculous reanimation of Jesus’ corpse was a brute “fact” of my faith, and in retrospect it seems to be the only miracle that I thought was worth worrying about. (Maybe also the ascension, but for me the “virgin birth” was not a big deal since Jesus had to have a Y chromosome from somewhere.) Even more important, I think, is the fact that I never believed (or, frankly, understood) the supernatural works of the Christian god, however rare or common, were any more noteworthy or awe-inspiring than the natural ones. It never mattered to me, not once in my 30 years as a bible-believing Christian, whether the wonders of the human brain could be completely naturally explained. To me, that was just as cool as — or frankly more cool than — some tinkery intervention story.
All of which is to say that even though I carried around in my head a belief that a deity once reanimated the corpse of his “son,” then brought that guy up to “heaven” to be a “ruler,” I never ever expected anything in the world to require supernatural explanation. So I didn’t need any barriers.
I have definitely revisited those years in my now ten years as an apostate, and asked myself all the hard questions about why I ever believed. I know this much: I thought god should be not just great but good. I had expectations. He failed them spectacularly.
I agree, virgin births don’t happen naturally. But science can’t tell us that there was never a point in human history at which God intervened to supernaturally cause a woman to become pregnant. How could it? All it could say is there is no natural/physical mechanism for it.
I’m an atheist and I have no problem saying this. I think we have no good reason to think there is such a thing as divine intervention, but I also can accept the fact that there are conceivable cases of divine intervention that, if they really happened, they would be undetectable to us. So I would just respond with an appeal to the burden of proof when people come arguing we should believe in supernaturally-caused virgin births. Tell me why I should believe so!
People say things; science does not. All formal scientific conclusions are provisional, so even if we start by accepting your metaphor, science cannot, by design, “say” that “virgin births don’t happen.” You are conflating observations or the lack thereof with scientific conclusions.
Virgin births are observed all around us, just not in humans. Have you really never heard of parthenogenesis?
There is no official glossary.
Great response! Did you try it after considering it?
They are in no way mutually exclusive. Do you often invoke such obvious fallacies?
There you go again. ID isn’t science, so any reference to its scientific merits, poor or otherwise, makes no sense and helps with their deception.
A major component of those lies is their use of a scientific vocabulary when promoting something that is not scientific.
What appears to have escaped your notice is that a significant component of the corruption they so purposefully contribute is using the vocabulary of science to describe something that is profoundly anti-scientific.
The point of my hypothetical story is that the GAE is the center piece of what we should be discussing - - instead of creating a retirement home for cranky atheists like you.
But if you wont read my postings do yourself a favor and cease commenting out of ignorance!
That’s the great thing about stories – you, as the author, can make them end up any darn way you want them to.
The downside of that freedom is, that your reader is not under even the slightest compulsion to accept your story as representative, realistic, or anything of the sort.
I already gave you my opinion of GAE three and a half years ago:
@tim looks at these vacuous pieces of school-yard name-calling, shrugs and walks away.
Cool, let’s hear your comments and questions about it! You lack the credibility to enforce your preferences for what PS should be. But, like literally everyone else here, you can shape the discussion by… and just hear me out here… discussing things.
I.D. Proponent
(Starts thread with):
"When we examine the locomotive machinery of some one-celled creatures, we find a complex SET of gears which intuitively suggest God designed these creatures, rather than conclude evolutionary processes unknowingly started with a few useless gears - - until, finally, a working flagellum was complete.
Christian Evolutionist
(Responding in thread):
I’m not surprised that you see God’s divine creativity at work. As a fellow Christian, I know we are taught to interpret the amazing aspects and events of nature as divine “signs” and the providential nature of God’s worth.
But are you not replacing the vastly incomprehensible nature of God with your brittle and limited comprehension of the mortal brain? Why should we reject the idea that God used evolution to execute his creation?
[End of Christ.Evol. answer, part 1]
@John_Harshman , please offer your version of the ID proponent’s response, and I will then respond in kind.
In the beginning there was no light. So i tapped the light bulb hovering over my head with one of my car keys. There was a buzz, and then a blinding spark … and now the bulb remains lit!
I have little interest in arguing with your hypothetical characters, so thanks, but no. I can discuss things with you, though.
How is that an example of faith and science working together? There’s no science involved in your hypothetical Christian’s response. It also raises uncomfortable theological questions, such as “Why would a benevolent God create, though evolutionary means or whatever else, a host of human parasites and diseases, e.g. malaria, river blindness, COVID?” And once we try to import God into scientific explanations, we are at once, and unavoidably, confronted with questions of God’s nature and intentions.
Anyone is free to believe what they like. I only ask that you be willing to adjust your beliefs about the natural world based on observation of that world. Feel free to believe that God is using evolution as long as you don’t claim that there’s evidence of such a thing.
I’m skeptical of any interest (or ability) to discuss “faith and science working together” on George’s part. If anyone else thought the topic (or a variant) worthy of discussion, they might consider things like E.O. Wilson’s book The Creation. It’s one person’s practical answer to the question, and explicit attempt to encourage “science and faith working together.” I haven’t read it, and I’m not sure that practical answers will please the vast public that scours every word at Peaceful Science. But… there it is.
The 1st question is inevitable no matter what. So the Christian Evolutionist can say what the Creationists say: Either Original Sin, or the same thing the Eastern Orthodox argue (not relying on Original Sin, the Ortho’s say the exposure to these evils are a necessary step in the spiritual growth of humanity).
Your 2nd question quoted above invokes the parity that 2 Christians
The Atheist solution is to eliminate God; hardly a good solution.
We could discuss theology, but my point was that trying to introduce God into science turns it into theology and destroys it as science. I see that you have scrubbed that point, failing to address the first question at all, to concentrate on something you may find more convenient. You also seem confused about which of my questions was first (it’s the one you elided) and which was second (the one you responded to).
Unable to parse that.
The atheist solution to what, exactly? “Eliminate” in what sense? Being unsure what you’re trying to say, I will nevertheless throw some words. Science is not in any way, under any circumstances, aided by trying to stuff God into it. This is not to say that God doesn’t exist (though I of course think he doesn’t); the point is that, for many reasons, God is not a useful feature of any scientific hypothesis and in fact would be the death of science.
Must it ALWAYS destroy Evolution as a science? Are you saying that any Scientist who attends Easter services should be demoted because of incompetence or because of religious feelings that are to be driven out of science.
May we not observe a little bit of faith goes a long way to inoculate modern minds from the extremism we find in some sectors of the population?
I think this compulsory bias is wrong-headed. And it certainly wouldnt win any points with the millions of Americans who find a little faith does nothing terrible to a strong grip on science.
No, I’m saying nothing remotely like that. I have to wonder if you are at all trying to understand what you read. You understand, I hope, that most religious scientists do not incorporate their religious beliefs into their practice of science.
No, we may not observe that. We may perhaps hypothesize that, but I see no evidence for such a thing, and I don’t know how it would work.
What compulsory bias? As is so often the case, your meaning is obscure.
