Certainly, but they’ve failed to provide any evidence for their claims.
As well, even their claims, if true, aren’t nearly enough to qualify as evidence of a God. Even if Earth life was proven to be wholly artificial, that would more plausibly point to extraterrestrials and not a god, since ETs don’t violate physics.
All they’ve managed to do is assume their conclusion, that there is a creator, and then fail to provide evidence for their claim.
Apparently not. 
Well, use the opportunity to educate me, then – provided there can be a concise and complete formulation of natural law, in what way does that not constitute proof of a lack of necessity for a metaphysical agent?
(And besides, IDers typically just set out to prove their conclusion, which really wouldn’t be fair to attribute to me.)
I think it’s just a matter of keeping in mind what the tool of science is for.
Look at it this way. Consider the tool of mathematics. It can examine many things, and is useful for doing so. But what can mathematics say about a singularity other than that it is undefined? It’s fine if you want to discuss the philosophical implications of X/0, but math isn’t going to help you even though it is a division operation. The operation breaks down, just as physical laws break down inside the sinularity of a black hole or the Big Bang.
With the tool of science, same same. Again, there is nothing magical about science. It is an epistemological tool for studying nature. But ONLY nature. It’s fine if you want to wax philosophical about metaphysical agents, but reaching for science to examine them is like reaching for a hammer to saw a board in half. You can smash the board and crack it in two, but the result doesn’t achieve what the proper tool — a saw — would have given you.
I realize it’s a common foible. People all the time are talking about natural selection’s “guiding hand”, or the universe’s “cruelty”. But these are only metaphors, and we should keep in mind that that is all they are. They are not scientific comments; they are poetry.
You’re right; it wouldn’t. And I don’t really mean to lump you in with them, but the onus is upon you to take care that you use science properly. Although there really isn’t anything wrong with setting out to prove a conclusion. People do it all the time. They get a hunch, and then they start testing. What isn’t allowed is presuming the conclusion as a basis for drawing the conclusion.
What we should do if our experiment demonstrates that we could find no natural cause for X, is announce simply that we could find no natural cause for X. A step beyond that is a step too far. Science did its job. It examined nature. It concluded that it could find no answer. That is enough.
Since there’s no rational reason to think that there’s anything else, that’s hardly a limitation.
Science can’t examine “metaphysical agents” because they don’t exist. And if they did, faith and religion wouldn’t be the method of doing so, either. Faith and religion, judging from their track record are a very good way of being completely and utterly wrong.
No, it’s not. If science doesn’t find an answer, it should keep looking indefinitely. And any attempted “religious explanations” can safely be dismissed out of hand, since they will ( being religious ) lack any evidence, and be far less likely to be true than a random guess. Science may or may not always be the way to discover something; religion never is.
If history teaches anything about the search for truth, it teaches that one of the most important steps is to toss out religion.
There are frameworks within mathematics where such a thing isn’t problematic at all, like the projectively extended real numbers (where X/0 = infinity). Bottom line being that finding a place where your mathematical reasoning breaks down might just imply that your understanding of mathematics is incomplete, not that mathematics itself must remain mute on the issue.
Which is currently taken as being merely a sign of the incompleteness of our physical laws; yet even if there are actualized singularities within spacetime (points where some physical quantity becomes infinite, in this case), it’s not a given that we can’t reason meaningfully about them.
Right, and I do not wish to do anything but study nature. It’s you who claims that the metaphysical can influence nature, yet still be immune to/hidden from scientific inquiry. I think that to be inconsistent; every influence is a pathway of measurement, thus the interface between the metaphysical and the natural at least should be subject to scientific inquiry.
I think a stronger statement can be made, because I see nothing that explicitly prohibits finding that no natural cause for something is possible (though saying ‘cause’ is not quite right here, since causeless events aren’t in and of themselves difficult to handle scientifically) – if the complete set of natural laws were known, and were also known to be unique, anything contradicting these laws could not possibly have a natural cause, i.e. that there could not be a consistent purely natural world that includes X.
It can tell you what the limits are, an infinitesimal distance to either side of the singularity. It can tell you what kind of singularity it is. It can also use the singularities to tell you things about the function or system as a whole.
Science can only be used to study nature
The use of this sentence pushes three ideas that cannot be supported by evidence:
Please pardon my second grade edjukatshun, but even I can see a couple small flaws in this line of “reasoning”.
As long as X is not 0, yes, but that’s beside the point. There are speculations in physics about multiverses. There are logics that have fuzzy truth values. There is even a logic whose postulates compel the existence of a supreme being, but I’m not invoking that here because we aren’t talking about that sort of logic, and we’re not talking about pseudosciences. At least I’m not.
The metaphysical is immune, but not the influence, as I explained before. It’s just that science cannot say that the influence IS metaphysical. It is META-pause-PHYSICAL. I don’t understand why this is controversial at all, since it is the foundation of every kind of crackpottery — from scientology to astrology — that a scientific determination about metaphysical phenomena can be made.
In fact, with all due respect, I’m leaving this discussion at this point because we’ve both made our points, and the whole notion of this new scientific religion or religious science gives me a headache. Plus, I have some work to do. But I enjoyed our discussion, HMHW. All the best to you.
I hadn’t noticed Kanicbird much before, but after looking at this thread about Ouija boards, I see that he’s as useless as Lekatt, and equally opposed to fighting ignorance. Amazing, the people that don’t get banned.
Okay, I’ll bite: what are the flaws you see there?
Um, he pointed out some right in that very post :
There’s no evidence for anything besides nature; there’s no evidence that if such a thing exists, science can’t study it; and even assuming the first two there’s no evidence that another method would do better.
I’m asking this in good faith (eh): what is your definition of nature?
I especially liked when he told me that I hadn’t been loved enough by an “authority” and that’s why I suffered from depression when I started college. (And I still don’t know what the fuck he meant by “authority.”)
The physical world. Matter, energy, space, time, the laws of nature, etc. Basically, everything.
Yup. That which can now (or potentially in the future) be measured.
Wait, are you saying that the physical world is everything? Do you consider 1+1=2 a statement about the physical world?
One edit, in reply to Czarcasm, how do you measure “1”?
Put a load of crap in one hand, put a load of crap in the other hand. Now, how many loads of crap are you holding? 1+1=2 is a statement that describes what just happened. Now, before you hand off any loads of crap to us, realize that these word games won’t convince anyone of anything.
Sometimes, because it’s useful in the aspects of the physical world we work with; it matches what happens in many cases. So, we use that version of addition all the time.
But if you add one cloud to one cloud, you end up with one cloud; 1 + 1 = 1. We don’t normally bother calculating things that way, because if everything adds up to one there’s no need to calculate anything.
Mathematics is abstract; it matches reality in some ways, it doesn’t in others. We just happen to concentrate on the parts that happen to be useful.