What science teaches about the truth

Saturday, February 24, 2007

What science teaches about the truth

1 comment:

August said...: JD, yes, depending on your persuasion tis argument is valid. I have used it myself a few times. However, except for some radicals, most scientists, even Dawkins, are careful to avoid absolute truth claims from the scientific method.

After all, the scientific method is mostly inductive, with maybe a a bit of abduction thrown in, but almost never deductive, which is what would be required to make the absolute claims.

In debating this with people who support Marshall Brain (God hates amputees) for example, the question is really simple. For you to make an absolute claim, like God hates amputees, because He never makes their limbs grow back, and therefore He does not exist, you would have to show that you have examined every amputee, everywhere, and throughout history. Because just one example of a regenerated limb will defeat the argument.

Of course no human can claim that he has seen all the evidence everywhere, at all times during history, so inductive scientific truth claims are always framed very specifically around the conditions under which the data was gathered and interpreted.

Along the same lines as the cideo, one might also ask skeptics to use the scientific method to prove that the science itself is necessarily scientific. It is a bit of the demarcation argument, which has proven to be very troublesome for materialistic scientists.

Anyhow, good little video, and good advice.; Saturday, February 24, 2007 at 3:15:00 PM PST

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It is a battle between worldviews, and we are looking to see which worldview can account for itself best. In that battle, there is no neutrality or default position. (August: Circular Reasoning; July 07)

While many in the church today, who having bitten off the principles of the world rather than swallowing the word of God, fail to recognize it, the truth remains that CHRISTIAN SKEPTICISM is not only our great heritage and long standing tradition, but also our Christian calling! (Swordbearer: Christian Skepticism – Our Great Heritage and Calling; July 07)

The key is how the different schools of thought withstand internal critique. Naturalism struggles with internal critique, because it is inductive by nature. Any of its conclusions can be viewed with skepticism, because we can never examine all the evidence in all relationships in all senses. It further refuses to admit to its own metaphysical components. For example, how can the naturalist prove the laws of logic by use of the scientific method, without being viciously circular? It is a metaphysical assumption held to by a groundless faith. (Puritan Lad: Team CS and the clash of the worldviews!; July 07)

If you say that God is “unnecessary in everything we know about”, how do you know that? Do you know “everything we know about”? Who are “we”? How did you come to know the meaning of the word “be”? You said that you don’t know where the universe comes from. How does that remove the necessity for God? At the very least, it is equally an explanation as any other if you don’t know. So then God is not removed from everything we know about, since the universe had to come into existence in order to exist. (Puritan Lad: Team CS and the clash of the worldviews!; July 07)

You mean to say that you actually have evidence that the universe wasn’t created? That would be monumental. Can you point us to this evidence? (Puritan Lad: Team CS and the clash of the worldviews!; July 07)

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Saturday, February 24, 2007