I wouldn’t object if it wasn’t painfully obvious that those offering the metaphysical explanation are ignoring the vast majority of the evidence while lying and claiming familiarity with all of it.
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What does it mean to take this into account? In what way should our conclusions change, and why? Research capabilities have increased “exponentially”(it’s not clear how one quantifies this, much less so well you can say it follows an exponent) - therefore if there was an explanation for the origin of life, we should have found it by now, and since we haven’t that means there probably isn’t one? That seems to me what you are saying, but I don’t see how that follows or is implied. Can you try to develop this argument more extensively for me?
Science, and by that I mean working and practicing scientists in the relevant fields, are all fine with saying there is currently no model for the origin of life known to be able to produce life. As in there are many different proposals, but it has not been demonstrated experimentally, or by inference from evidence, that these models are how life could have come into existence. There are many candidate explanations, but it isn’t known whether any of these explanations are actually correct.
There are people who claim to know enough to say that most or all these models are wrong or will fail in one way or another, but they don’t actually know this, and their arguments are rather weak and limited in scope, and often constitute appeals to ignorance or incredulity when analyzed in any detail.
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Nope. Wrong answer. Your answer turns the words of the Book of Job into childish jibberish.
Try again.
There is irony in your demanding “a little more humility” from others, just before you imply that, in your opinion, “unreasonable” claims are being made by experts in a field about which you know next to nothing.
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I think MN is a permanent part of science. If you aren’t using MN then you aren’t doing science. The real question is what counts as natural? Personally, I define “natural” as anything that interacts with the empirical universe in a detectable and testable way. Therefore, if a deity interacts with nature they could be a part of the natural world.
As others have mentioned, the basic feature of MN is empirical measurement and a testable hypothesis (i.e. you need a null hypothesis). There is nothing in those definitions that excludes deities. Some may argue that God may not make himself known in a way that is detectable through scientific means, but that is a choice on God’s part from what I can tell. As it is, we use science because it works, and we will continue to use it until it doesn’t work.
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This seems to be a fitting quotation for this thread:
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One of the key aspects of MN is one does not have to bother with that question. If something can be observed, measured or detected, it is considered “natural”. Basically, the “supernatural” is restricted to things that give no evidence of their very existence.
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Very fitting. Truth should come first, theology afterwards. Not the other way around.
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Actually it is intrinsic to the scientific method, not Gods choice but ours.
Wrong. The scientific method is not designed to avoid detecting any particular thing even if it exists. It is designed to detect the existence of as many things as possible, while avoiding false positive results in which things will appear to exist that actually do not.
If you disagree, please cite where someone has devised a method by which God’s existence was determined, but then rejected this result because it was not allowed under the rules of science.
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Truth and theology should be the same thing, if theology worked. No?
I don’t understand what this means. Theology should constitute conclusions which are based on truths. There’s no way of doing theology which is true, if you’re not basing it on truths.
That’s a better way of wording it.
The point is, if theology was a valid and useful discipline, there would be no question of whether “truth should come first, theology afterwards.” They would be the same thing, with the only limitation being the specific truths that could be determined thru theology.
You’re conflating “theology” as “discipline”, with “theology” as “religious beliefs”.
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Who’s that?
It appears I am. Thanks for clearing that up.
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You’re welcome.
You don’t know who Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is?
Yes, of course, I know who he is. If you had just typed his name, I would have known who you were talking about.
I am not aware of his work as a theologian, so I have no opinions on that.