I’d probably say it was more motivated by a dislike of religion than MN.
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You are in error. It is not “the mind” (or “agency”) that is disqualified.
What is disqualified is the same thing that disqualified the work of Christian Alchemists!!!
There is no way to control for ANYTHING involving God’s supernatural participation in the Natural order.
It is epistemologically impossible.
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I totally agree. They are not the same question at all.
The second question is a scientific question which looks to the scientific method for answers. The first question is a much broader philosophical/theological question where no specific methodology or empirical tools are demanded.
Genesis 1 is one of many responses to the first question—but that text is not very useful for answering the second question. Of course, considering the differences between theological questions and scientific questions, that is not at all surprising.
It sure seems like we keep circling back to the historical fact that the Christian philosophers of past centuries—who developed Natural Philosophy and brought us modern science—understood the differences far better than some people today.
Yes, philosophy and science are not the same thing. They address different questions.
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Isaac Newton, Opticks, Book III:
“How came the Bodies of Animals to be contrived with so much Art, and for what ends were their several Parts? Was the Eye contrived without Skill in Opticks, and the Ear without Knowledge of Sounds? How do the Motions of the Body follow from the Will, and whence is the Instinct in Animals? Is not the Sensory of Animals that place to which the sensitive Substance is present, and into which the sensible Species of Things are carried through the Nerves and Brain, that there they may be perceived by their immediate presence to that Substance? And these things being rightly dispatch’d, does it not appear from Phænomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent, who in infinite Space, as it were in his Sensory, sees the things themselves intimately, and throughly perceives them, and comprehends them wholly by their immediate presence to himself: Of which things the Images only carried through the Organs of Sense into our little Sensoriums, are there seen and beheld by that which in us perceives and thinks. And though every true Step made in this Philosophy brings us not immediately to the Knowledge of the first Cause, yet it brings us nearer to it, and on that account is to be highly valued.”
Complete text here:
This appears to be right. By what means do we test scientific assumptions? When can scientific assumptions lead us down the wrong path?
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On Saturday, September 12, I will be presenting a national online seminar for the Discovery Institute chapter organizations. Here is the title and abstract:
The Promise of Design Triangulation for Biological Discovery
If you have ever successfully figured out how something complicated worked, by observing the system carefully, and then inferring from what you can see to what you haven’t yet seen, you have used a method of reasoning we can call “design triangulation.” Design triangulation is widely employed in biology, in practice if not in name, to predict the functional features of cells or organisms, before those features have actually been observed. The method employs key assumptions about designed rationality that really only make sense if intelligent design is true.
I will link here at PS to the extended pdf version of this talk (with much more detail than I can present online) following September 12.
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Please tell your friend that I don’t believe him. You can tell him who I am and what I do.
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Yes, scientist-philosopher-theologian Isaac Newton often posed philosophical questions and speculations concerning the scientific phenomena he observed. Don’t we all agree on that?
Indeed, Newton calls it philosophy in the very passage you posted! Notice the last sentence in the quotation:
And though every true Step made in this Philosophy brings us not immediately to the Knowledge of the first Cause, yet it brings us nearer to it, and on that account is to be highly valued.
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When Scientism takes over. When someone assumes that scientific answers are the only valid answers, going down the wrong path is certainly possible.
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Be fair, now. Newton didn’t have the word “science” available to him. Up until some time in the 19th Century, what we call science was just natural philosophy. Newton wouldn’t have seen the difference.
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In the same way we test any hypotheses. What assumptions did you have in mind?
You’re going to have a hard sell, because it already sounds bogus based on the abstract. It’s really unfortunate to see you waste your time on this sort of thing.
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That’s exactly my point.
Of course, that does NOT mean that he did not recognize any difference between empiricism and theological discourse. (For example, his Law of Universal Gravitation and his Laws of Motion did not require presuppositions about God in order to be empirically sound. Newton loved to write long theological discourses but theology didn’t seem to interfere with his best physics.)
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Methodological naturalism.
You’re going to have to define it before I can judge whether it can be tested. A hypothesis must at the least be well-formed and clearly expressed in order to be testable or even to determine whether it can be tested.
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I can answer only for myself. I do not ask or care to ask about the religious commitments or beliefs of authors of papers at Cell Reports. No editor at Cell Reports does this. Ever. We don’t care what authors think about MN. We don’t care what WE think about MN.
This means that we would not even ASK an author whether they worship the J Man or the Morrigan or whether they think aliens could have helped with the pyramids. That point is important because those three stories (your “episodes” above) are really different. The last two are about scientists being told that support for ID is professionally Bad News. Those two stories are likely to be about warning young scholars to avoid doing crap scholarship (the vast majority of ID “scholarship” is embarrassing crap), or about warning young scholars to avoid using their science to advance religious ideas. I do think that there is bias against religious belief (and especially against apologetics) in the academy, and I think that bias is usually indefensible, but it’s not about MN. (Nobody cares about MN. Sorry.)
But that first story is about a person having a paper pulled from a journal, after peer review and production, based on what they believe. If that happened, it’s a scandal and I would condemn it unequivocally. It would not happen, indeed it COULD NOT happen, at Cell Reports as I explain above. I doubt it happened as you described.
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Then you really ought to have said so up front. I think what you actually said was the opposite of what you intended.
I disagree. I doubt I can watch live but I will be very interested to see if there are any new ideas in the talk. It’s actually about design, which is something that is rare from the DI.
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The key to this quote is: “… and though every true step made in this philosophy brings us not immediately to the knowledge of the first cause…”
Yes… it is highly valued… but it is not scientific proof… and it never will be.
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Scientific assumptions can lead us down the wrong path when we think science has eliminated the possibility of the super-natural.
This is NOT the same thing as saying science can help us identify the super-natural. Science will never be able to do that.