Yep. Non-scientific explanations are not useful for explaining anything, or at least any natural phenomenon (such as how life originated or how common it is in the universe). So there’s no way to rationally and usefully connect any ideas about supernatural beings like deities to the existence of life in the universe, from my point of view.
I’m unaware of any phenomenon ever that’s been successfully and demonstrably explained by ideas about supernatural beings.
This is all on topic, right? Was my “what use are they” question out of bounds, or something? I’m genuinely curious, continuously, how these ideas can possibly be rationally connected to things like the origin of life.
The question is not “out of bounds”, but you need to keep track of context. You’re conflating two separate issues:
[ul]
[li]Whether non-scientific explanations can be inferred from scientific evidence[/li][li]Whether non-scientific explanations are themselves “useful” in explaining things.[/li][/ul]
Unless you can appreciate that these are logically distinct, there’s no point of any discussion.
Just to make this clear, your best example for where non-scientific explanations are “useful” in explaining things has to do with forming people’s worldviews. But what does that even mean? By that reasoning, a square circle or a 2D cube could help form worldviews, even though they’re not even coherent concepts.
It’s hard for me to know whether I’m understanding your question because the answer seems so obvious that I wonder if perhaps you’re really asking something else.
People who believe in God - whether due to suppposed “scientific evidence” or on any other basis - believe in a Being who is above the laws of nature (and can and has overruled them on ocasion) and in fact created these laws of nature. If this Being couldn’t do and hadn’t done this it would not be a god.
And from this perspective, this non-scientific explanation is simply the facts as they are/were, and insisting that they should be treated as untrue when in fact they are true would be insisting on a falsehood.
[Note again: this relates solely to the usefullness of non-scientific explanations which cannot be demonstrated, and not to the accuracy of these explanations.]
My 2 cents: The usefulness of non-scientific, supernatural explanations is psychological. In a view with no God, some people experience the unanswered questions that view leaves behind as the rushing, frenetic wind of the Void through their minds. Believing in God makes it stop and they feel better, and maybe it also keeps them from smoking or cheating on their wives or what-have-you. And bully for them, I’m not on a mission to destroy religion for everyone. I just don’t like to see a once-respected paper get dragged down by claptrap.
Yeah, that’s the thing. If someone said to me that they believe the world was created 6,000 years ago and that God made it look like it was created billions of years ago, I wouldn’t bother them. At least that viewpoint doesn’t twist the science. It acknowledges what the science says and the person making this statement is stating they believe that there’s some other truth out there other than the science.
Okay, that’s not a scientific viewpoint, but the person holding the viewpoint isn’t trying to do science. They’ve decided to ignore it (or they’re ignoring it in very specific areas).
But people like Metaxas aren’t content to leave it at that. They don’t just say “we know what the science says, we just don’t think science is telling us everything.” Instead, they twist and lie about the science in order to confuse people.
If I understand this correctly, this seems to pretty definitively answer your question from the OP (from your perspective at least): no, any supposed minute odds for life arising do not actually count as scientific evidence for the existence of God.
If I don’t understand this correctly, then how does it relate to the question of whether the (supposed) minute odds for life count as scientific evidence for god?
Okay. I still don’t understand how such explanations are at all useful – you can expand on this if you want.
Your OP asked if the supposed low odds for life arising count as scientific evidence for God. Isn’t this pretty clearly a “no”? How can anything at all count as “scientific evidence” for a non-scientific explanation?
The faithful should not seek validation of their beliefs in science. Scientific theories change with refinements in technology and human thought. But faith is fixed. It’s not supposed to change.
Until we can ground-truth other solar systems and verify that our notion of “inhabitable” truly means “not inhabited”, we don’t really know that life is so rare. This is speculation based on the evidence we have right now, based on the telescopes and the brilliant minds we have right now. We could be in for a new paradigm shift tomorrow, for all we know.
Is the writer willing for such a shift? Or will he keep seeing the same pattern no matter what the scientific facts point to?
I’ll go along with Try2B Comprehensive, in that religion is useful, in the way many (most?) cultural or societal practices are useful. They help us get along with each other in our civilization.
The trouble is that the explanations aren’t true. They’re Kiplingesque “Just So Stories” that may make people feel better – and that is useful – but they are only myths – and that can be dangerous.
The best that can be said for this approach is Sherlock Holmes’ dictum about eliminating the impossible. If it could actually be shown that a “natural” origin for life is impossible, then a “supernatural” origin would start to become more inviting.
The problem is that the facts show exactly the opposite. Habitable worlds are being discovered right in our own stellar neighborhood, and the “abiogenic” hypothesis for the origin of life on earth has been viable at least since the Miller-Urey experiment.
Those who are looking for proof of God are coming up against another of Holmes’ dicta: the dog did nothing during the night time.
I think they twist and lie about science in order to confuse people because that transgression is nothing compared to what they intend to do.
Take an example. Say you are an Afghan male who would like to get away with the forcible gang rape of his cousin, and also wants to get away with killing her if she runs away. For this goal, it doesn’t matter if the rapacious Afghan male believes in Allah- everybody, or at least an overwhelming majority, has to be on the same page. From here:
I’m not saying the evangelicals are working towards the exact same thing, but I do strongly suspect they would fuck everything up for all of us if they got the chance. Connect the dots- look at what is in the constellation of Murdoch-promoted ideas- the government is fully bad and needs to be eliminated; there is scientific proof for the existence of God; “liberals” (if you aren’t with us, you’re against us) aren’t on the same page because they are Soviet scum who are plotting evil against us all, when they aren’t too busy freeloading off of hard working, Real Americans.
The evangelicals would bring America to a condition closer to that of Afghanistan- one where the government is too weak to defend the weak, too weak to promote common sense, and anyone who disagrees can be safely and effectively shut out. Not all religious goals are along the lines of “don’t smoke or cheat on your wife”. Say you are the leader of ISIS and need a claque of gunmen to go on a murderous rampage in the service of the goal of conquering Syria and the Levant. Are you going to convince them to do that by means of reason? No, you are going to appeal to religion, and you can’t do that if the proles don’t believe.
Same with the evangelicals. I don’t know exactly what they are plotting, but it would seem that violence against sound reasoning pales in comparison to what they have in mind. So these non-scientific explanations are useful in a sense, but sometimes in the service of the most unpalatable (and unreasonable) of ends.
This is a good point. I’ve never understood the “for life to exist you must have carbon and you must have liquid water…” argument. Unless of course you are saying only carbon based life is the only real life.
Given that I can hand any scientist on earth the raw materials for life and they can not create it, why would you assume that life can’t be created by any number of chemical compositions?
It’s mainly that we know of no other chemistry that forms the complex molecules that carbon does. Silicon comes close, but it isn’t as flexible, and the bonds form and break more slowly. Silicon-based life would be s…l…o…w…
This certainly doesn’t prove that other kinds of life are impossible. But most chemists (as I have read it) don’t have a decent working model of any other chemical basis for life.
Just so we are clear, this article was not an editorial by the editors of the WSJ (which is pretty much the best newspaper in America) but an opinion piece in a section called Houses of Worship.
I need to check the letters section and hope that they published a response similar to some of the great responses in this thread.
It was the “pretty much the best newspaper in America” part here that caught my eye!
Not to digress, but all I want to say here is that there is a vast difference between “an opinion that I disagree with” and an opinion that is objectively demonstrable to be a pile of driveling nonsense. A column that is just plain factually wrong cannot legitimately hide under the guise of “opinion”; it’s just simply deceptive nonsense. Unfortunately at least since the Murdoch takeover the WSJ has seemed to specialize in far too much of that. Case in point: Matt Ridley Returns With Error-Riddled Articles, As Wall Street Journal Discredits Itself.
Matt Ridley is a mendacious idiot. There’s no other way to say it. Of particular note here is that Ridley has been a regular WSJ columnist, not just a one-off, and as noted in that article one of his worst pieces of drivel was preceded by an endorsement from the WSJ editors. As journalist Steve Royko once famously said, no self-respecting fish would allow itself to be wrapped in a Murdoch paper.
I kind of disagree with this, in the sense that things which are often called miracles are barely distinguishable from typical confluences of improbabilities. If that piece of the windshield had been a half an inch to the right, it would have sliced my throat right open and I would have bled to death right there. Must have been because I confessed, had communion, prayed and got the big guy happy with me. Or it just missed me by a half an inch because that was how it happened.
