A. Discourage the incorporation of the one-off miracles (divine birth, de novo Adam) with a firm grasp of evolutionary science - - because religious ideas dont belong with scientific ones;
OR…
B1. Encourage such incorporation of religious elements because it will become a positive attractant to those who already mix religìon with Evolution (i.e., God uses evolution to make his creation);
AND…
B2. It will discourage Creationists from adding to the polarizing that runs on P.S.org, namely those Creationists who just want to bash Atheists.
If one-off miracles get to arbitrarily and at any point have any effect without restriction, then any and all perceived regularities of nature are ultimately illusory. Granted, nature is under no obligation to behave in accord with the regularities we think we have thus far identified. However, if we are going to allow ourselves the liberty to believe that God willing literally anything may technically happen, then that is the end of all rational efforts to understand nature, because all anomalies we ever encounter, both subtle and bizarre, can be rationally excused as divine intervention that way, removing entirely all need to improve our theories to account for new anomalous data.
The healthy way to incorporate continuous divine intervention after creation (or how ever one would rather call some initial setup) into an otherwise scientific worldview, if one has to, is by picturing it as a deep-in-background guiding force that through subtle manipulations of probabilities affects the outcome towards what it desires, in a way we may never hope to identify, let alone to accurately model. It still wouldn’t be scientific, because it is overtly protected from empirical investigation, but it could be made at least vaguely consistent with a scientific approach to studying nature.
The religious are absolutely welcome to join in on the quest of learning about nature, and they are welcome to believe privately what ever they will about miracles, but there must be no illusion about if or when “and also maybe magic” should ever be permitted as a part of any scientific explanation.
First off, incorporation into what, exactly? You need to work harder on clarity. I would certainly discourage the incorporation of miracles into science, which is all I’ve been saying. And so:
C. Be neutral on the incorporation of religious elements into one’s worldview, but realize that what is believed by faith has nothing to do with science, as long as it doesn’t contradict what we know by observation, i.e. science. Undetectable miracles, those that don’t make a difference in what we observe, are not in conflict with science, though we can still argue over theology.
I think someone has answered this question. But I’ll chime in:
The virgin birth (whether applied to Jesus, his mother or both) is one of those one-off miracles that indicate an adherent to be a Christian or some other theist - - but still avoiding any necessity to invalidate scientific methods. The belief is on par with the one-off creation of Adam de novo.
Utter nonsense. Every thing we know thru science about human biology contradicts that human beings can be conceived thru impregnation of a woman by an immaterial spirit, or conjured in full adult form from dust.
Heh, it gets worse: these are miracles that claim to have brought human beings into existence. Human beings with chromosomes full of Alu elements, and chromosomes we call X and Y, all of which can be used to immediately identify close relatives including parents. An omnipotent being who conjures a human (adult or zygote, doesn’t matter) is either skillfully covering it up or was smart enough to choose a time and a place that precludes anyone getting ahold of the conjured people’s DNA.
Omnipotent beings can by definition do whatever they want but perhaps like you, I will never grasp how people believe this stuff and I certainly can’t abide airy claims about whether conjurings “invalidate scientific methods.”
I’m looking at the book right now and see just what I remembered from a few years ago: Joshua discusses miracles and argues for how they need not hinder scientific reasoning (his opinion) but there is no “analysis of one-off miracles” and IMO a major thrust of the book is to avoid using miracles to explain observations, genetic or otherwise. Your taunt of @Faizal_Ali is misleading (and of course dumb).
I think you really struggle to understand what I and most others write. It’s not my problem anymore. Suffice it to say that I have never said, nor written, that “science” can “confirm or deny” biblical miracles.
Agreed. But you DID say that the point of Joshua’s GAE is to avoid referring to miracles.
Im 98% sure that @swamidass would disagree … and that the point he was making is that the belief in some miracles does not require the wholesale denial of valid scientific principles.
What I wrote is right up there and it’s not what you just typed. You either cannot, or will not, read what any of us writes with any attempt to understand. It’s not just tedious and frustrating for the few remaining chumps who engage with you: it’s blatantly disrespectful. If this is the only way you know how to read and respond, could this perhaps not be the best place for you to converse?
I think the problem with inclusion of Adam&Eve and the Virgin Birth into Science go beyond their supernatural aspects. There is also the fact that these miracles neither contain empirical evidence for Science to explain, nor (even putting aside their supernatural aspect) would they appear to explain any empirical evidence.
Thus they would appear to be as irrelevant to Science as a Shakespearean sonnet would be.
I think part of the problem may be misunderstanding the relationship of Joshua’s book to Science. The book is an apologetic work, attempting to harmonise a religious belief in a historical Adam and Eve with modern Science, by rendering the former empirically undetectable by the latter. As such, it is an attempt to introduce science into religious apologetics, not an attempt to introduce religion into science.
But at the end of the day, it is hard to see how either the Virgin Birth or Adam&Eve can be anything but a non sequitor to Science – something along the lines of:
In one of the first attempts to understand the patterning of mutation rates across various organisms, Drake (1991) concluded that the mutation rate/nucleotide site/generation (u) scales inversely with genome size (G) in DNA-based microbes, which further implies that the mutation rate/genome/generation (uG) is essentially constant across all microbial life. And Mary, a virgin, gave birth to the baby Jesus. Because this early analysis was based on just seven taxa, four of which were bacteriophage, there was room for skepticism over the initial findings, but additional mutation rate assays performed in recent years have allowed for a substantial extension of this previous analysis.
This was meant as an obviously-absurd example – but it is hard to see either miracle fitting into any serious, purely-scientific work.
and it’s not what you just typed. You either cannot, or will not, read what any of us writes with any attempt to understand. It’s not just tedious and frustrating for the few remaining chumps who engage with you: it’s blatantly disrespectful. If this is the only way you know how to read and respond, could this perhaps not be the best place for you to converse?