You please talk gooder? Me is not understanding easy you talking about.
I dont think I would necessarily equate ‘scientist that believes in a higher power’ with ‘scientist being superstitious’ - it really depends on the individual and what field they are working in.
It is not logically impossible: the existence of a deity could reasonably be demonstrated given sufficient evidence. It’s just that all deities proferred so far in history are either logically inconsistent, or contradict known facts, or are unnecessary entities because they explain nothing.
Glad to see you loosening up a little … give some of what you’re smoking to Marley, and we’ll all have a good time.
nm
It’s starting to sound like you’re wasting people’s time on purpose, and insulting other posters (mods or not) is a bad idea. Don’t do it again.
I wouldn’t word it this way. There are lots of things that science hasn’t quite figured out that could be explained by “god did it”. The problem is that such a claim isn’t falsifiable, and so can’t be verified.
Because that is not the real driving reason behind creationism. The real reason is that people feel threatened by social change and want to return to a (largely but not completely imaginary) time when a husband/slash father bought home enough money to support a family from his steady, secure job, and ruled his family with firm authority, when a wife/mother was content to stay in the kitchen, took care of her man and her children, and knew her place and did what she was told, and the blacks stayed down on the plantation and the Mexicans stayed in their own country and did not take “our” (i.e., white men’s) jobs. Science in general, and evolution in particular, caused and represent the “progress” that has led away from this supposedly idyllic state, so it is bad, and must be resisted. Fundamentalist, Biblical literalist Christianity is an ideological tool invented to provide a rationale for this resistance to science and evolution. (Historical investigation has shown that the Biblical literalist version of Christianity was invented quite recently, in the early 20th century, as a perversion and distortion of traditional Christianity, and was designed as an attack on evolutionary theory from the beginning. The traditional, long established Christian denominations had never taught that the Bible is all to be understood literally, and most of them had fairly rapidly come to terms with evolutionary theory back in the 19th century.)
The causal chain does not go:
Fundamentalist religion ===> Hatred of science ===> Reactionary social conservatism;
it goes:
Reactionary social conservatism ===> Hatred of science ===> Fundamentalist religion.
If you want to cut off the movement at the roots, attacking the religious rationale for it is the least effective place to start. What need to be attacked are the root causes of the reactionary social conservatism, which leads so many people to be deeply uncomfortable with the modern world and the direction in which it is going. Admittedly, that is a tall order, but one obvious way to begin tackling it wold be at the economic level, by ensuring the economic security of the people at or near the bottom. It is probably not a coincidence that science hatred and fundamentalism flourishes most in America, the first world nation with the most rudimentary welfare state, where people have, chronically, had very little protection form the more negative effects of socio-economic “progress”. It is also probably not a coincidence that those politicians who draw their support from fundamentalist reactionary conservatives expend much of their energy in attacking and tempting to roll back even the limited social welfare provision that America does make for its poorer, less lucky citizens, and in making sure that the economy is not reflated, so that jobless levels and job insecurity remain high. Economically comfortable and secure people generally won’t be voting for the Tea Party, and soon will not be so angry about that durned scientific progress ruining their world.
He is referring to the problem that nothing is really explained by “god did it”, because then you have to explain who created god and so on. By contrast, natural selection (for example) does not require an explanation. We don’t have to propose some unknown force that accounts for variations in reproductive success.
I don’t want to waste your time or anything, but allow me to re-word that for clarity’s sake.
“So far, ‘God’ has never been a reasonable interpretation of Science, and Science has never reasonably been applied to Magic except to debunk it,”
Better?
Not really…unless you meant to ignore what he said and create a strawman to argue against. Many have tried to use science to investigate magic. The fact that magic has failed in all such investigations has absolutely nothing to do with the intentions of those using the science.
You cab apply Science to any idea, and your experiments will show that there is, in fact, no evidence of a Flying Spaghetti Monster. The fact that you can ask "“How” or “What” regarding every item or idea in creation doesn’t mean that Science and Religion are somehow connected. Science can’t validate religious beliefs because there are no testable theories that don’t involve faith. I guess you could keep testing those communion wafer blood samples or try to observe the the stigmata victim 24/7.
Trying to use Science to investigate superstition doesn’t equal: superstition and Science are consistent with one another in any way, and in the original post upthread, I used the word consistent,
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘common use’. In my experience the word creationism is misused more by opponents of theism to create an illusion of theism as being anti-scientific. The term evolution is also very broad and oft misused and misunderstood. Most theists I know have no beef with evolutionary biology, but reject pure naturalism.
Clearly you’re not familiar with the various Creation Museums where the approach is “The evidence says X, the Bible says Y, therefore the evidence is wrong”. To put the blame onto “opponents of theism” is to ignore the fact that a lot of other creationists - and ID proponents - adopt exactly this methodology (if you can call it a methodology); the rest of us may be fighting the more irrational adherents but let’s not pretend that this is an entirely unfair characterisation.
I suggest you are creating your own definition of creationist and creationism based on your own experience. My definition is based more on the historical position taken over centuries of theistic thought. The early Church fathers for the most part affirmed a universe that was very, very old, and treated the Genesis creation account as being about the who, not the how or when. While YE creationism is not knew, it is even today the minority view in theistic thinking. As to the evolution of humans, there are a large number of theists who believe in bio-logos or theistic evolution. These folk believe that an external agent created using evolutionary biology. Perhaps by your definition they are not creationists, but by the historical definition, they are.
I’m not sure why a creationist would need to sound scientific. Science cannot speak to the existence of the supernatural, it can only speak to the natural world. Yet the two are not incompatible. There are many scientists who hold creationist beliefs because of what they observe in the natural world. That doesn’t mean they must believe in a 6,000 year old universe or reject evolutionary biology in it’s entirety.
Current usage is not constrained by historical origin. It does not matter if there is a long-standing tradition of theistic natural philosophy in Western thought because the title of “Creationist” has been claimed by narrow-minded intolerant heretics over the past century.
I am familiar with the museums, although I haven’t visited any. I accept what you say about apportionment of blame. I take a more historical view of what creationism is, but I accept that for some, particularly in the US (I live outside of the US), being a creationist means a strict adherence to the YEC stance, and that may be what you have been exposed to more commonly. I guess my point is simply that the YEC position is actually a relatively recent one as far as it being mainstream is concerned. In fact it’s contemporary history can be traced to a reactionary response to the development of acceptance evolutionary theory in the late 19th century.
Science cannot speak to the existence of the supernatural, it can only speak to the natural world
I completely agree with you here.
Yet the two are not incompatible.
I disagree, so I look for a suitably twisted definition of “incompatible” …
** There are many scientists who hold creationist beliefs because of what they observe in the natural world.**
I know there are scientists who are religious. I have no problem with religious. My problem is with …
" … because of what they observe in the natural world."
What are they observing that inspires Creationist beliefs? Why would these observations hinge on Science, and how is it that, since “Science cannot speak to the existence of the supernatural …”, that science and creationism are compatible? Can you explain the contradiction … are the scientists observing miracles? Are they observing particularly inspiring sunsets?
I suggest that may be the case in the US, but not everywhere. Where I live someone can call themselves a creationist without having to explain why they believe the earth is only 6,000 years old, or how the diversity of life on the planet happened without evolution.