Is science starting to misrepresent itself?

[Sherlock Holmes]

Over the past thirty, perhaps even forty years, it's become increasingly clear to me how what is sometimes presented as "god vs science" or "creationism vs science" and so on, is actually the root of many of the perceived problems with these two areas of human thought. Because these are presented as contrasting, as alternative ways of interpreting the world, many people just assume that there is an underlying incompatibility.

But there is no incompatibility at all, there never was and the false implication that there is arose quite recently in fact. The vast majority of those who contributed to what we today call the scientific revolution and later the enlightenment, were not atheists - this might surprise some but it is true and should be carefully noted.

The growth of militant atheism (recently spearheaded by the likes of Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens) has seen increasing effort placed on attacking "religion" and discrediting those who might regard "god" and "creation" as intellectually legitimate ideas, by implying that the layman must choose one or the other, you're either an atheist (for science) or a theist (a science "denier").

It is my position that there is no conflict whatsoever, for example God (an intelligent agency not subject to laws) gave rise to the universe (a sophisticated amalgam of material and laws) and we - also intelligent agencies - are gifted by being able to explore, unravel and utilize that creation.

There is nothing that can disprove this view, there is no reason to imply that those who adopt it are deluded, incompetent, poorly educated or any of that, that attitude is a lie and its reinforced at every opportunity in this and many other forums.

[Sherlock Holmes]

My answer - after careful consideration of what you've said here, is: Have you stopped beating your wife?

If that's the best you can come up with after "careful consideration" then it is quite clear that you are relying too heavily on the Claytons response.

I wonder to what extent the application of critical thinking skills and greater freedom to express one's personal beliefs can be attributed to the increasing number of people losing their faith in Christianity. Keep teaching it I say.

I referred to "have you stopped beating your wife" because (as explained here) your question too, was a loaded question.

[Sherlock Holmes]

I think we should also teach kids how to reason and discover things on their own too, more self reliance in how they decide what they believe.

Do you think that should begin before or after they have received their religious indoctrination?

How dare you keep insinuating that I am in favor of religious indoctrination? I am not, please quote what I wrote that gave you that idea? can you?

Often when I confront "atheists" (however this is defined this year) and they realize I have a greater knowledge of science, mathematics, its history and so on, they are left with only one weapon - to keep interjecting "religion" into the discussion.

My question does not imply that you are necessarily in favor of religious indoctrination. People have their ability to "decide what they believe" compromised by having certain beliefs inculcated at a very young age. So, trying to teach them critical thinking after that has happened can be somewhat undermined by what they have already learned. There is no question that the majority of religious beliefs are instilled rather than achieved through rational thought and evaluation. My question stands.

Good so as is now clear I personally do not advocate indoctrination be it "religious" or "atheist".

[Sherlock Holmes]

Why did you post this video? are you making some kind of proposition? are you trying to emphasize some point?

Yep. And in case you didn't notice, my post was in reply to Bust Nak. It's not all about you. There are others reading these threads too and I think they will get a lot out of that clip.

By the way - I am not a young earth creationist, if you think I am its likely because you were not paying attention, if you want to claim I am then the onus is on you to present evidence that I am, so go ahead, you have all my posts in this thread to pick and choose - show me, show us all where I said I was a young earth creationist?

You are a creationist. The flavour is irrelevant to me.

Yes I am, but I am not a young earth creationist - let that be clear to all.

[Sherlock Holmes]

You'd not fare well in a referred one-on-one in person debate with me Jose, constantly retreating into ad-hominem, you'd never get away with it.

What is it with creationists and trash talking? Again, I'm reminded of the kid at the playground, yelling at the people on the basketball court "I can kick y'all's butt with one hand behind my back! You can't handle my game!" But when it's time for next game, suddenly the kid isn't wearing the right shoes, his mom is calling, he's hungry, the other players would just cheat anyways.....

Grow up SH. Please.

I mean really....if you're really this confident in your position, why are you restricting it to anonymous postings on an obscure Christian message board? Write it all up into a manuscript and submit it to a relevant journal. Anything less than that and you're no different than the trash talking kid at the playground.

More ad hominem.

[Sherlock Holmes]

Consider:

[pic cropped]

If I connect some of the dots to end up with a wire outline of a car, does that justify the claim that the original set of dots was trace evidence of a genuine prior image of car and not something else entirely?

Not much, but a little bit I guess.

OK so you don't know.

How can we distinguish between that claim and the claim we have a large number of disconnected dots and we merely chose to interpret it as traces of an image of a car?

By coming up with alternative ways of connecting the dots and comparing which way makes the best fit of the dots.

Well why assume they are connected at all? what does "best" mean please, where you say "best fit" what must we assume first in order to evaluate what is "best"?

How can we show that the relationships between the dots we choose to connect represent actual historic relationships?

With a time machine? Failing that, the best we can do is do lots of dots connecting and figuring which way is the best way so far, of making sense of the historic dots. Would this a problem for you? It shouldn't be, unless you are treating scientific theories as if they are presented as the one and only absolute truth again, rather than as tentative working models of the universe that they are.

You need to define "best" and "making sense" creationists like me think that best includes a way of resolving missing data like Cambrian precursors and making sense is exactly what a supernatural intelligent agent is when we confront the otherwise chaotic fossil record.

Is your idea of "best" better than my idea of "best"? who's best is best?

More importantly it also encourages the ignorant to refer to creationists as "pseudoscientists" if they propose a supernatural cause for something.

That's a small price to pay, since it encourages everyone, ignorant or otherwise, to refer to creationists as "pseudoscientists" if they propose a supernatural cause in a scientific context.

I see so being a creationist is not the issue for you, it is proposing a supernatural cause. Well accepting the reality of supernatural causes is what creationists do, so your contradicting yourself.

Creationists - like me - believe that God is the reason there's a universe, that God is the reason we can even do "science", that God is the reason the universe is structured and mathematically describable, none of these things can (even in principle) be explained "naturally".

All of these creationists contributed to the scientific revolution and are not considered pseudoscientists, historically, creationists actually have a track record of being excellent scientists.

Then what's the problem? Apparently even the ignorant is discerning enough to realise that Faraday isn't automatically a pseudoscientist for thinking God is behind the science, seems like a non-issue to me.

Good, we are in agreement - being a creationist does not hinder one's ability to do scientific research and "pseudoscience" is nothing whatsoever to do with being a creationist, glad we cleared this up.

By the way, I am still interested in hearing why an empirically demonstrable entity shouldn't be classified as "natural" simply due to the fact that it is empirically demonstrable; and the distinction between "X being a scientific explanation" and "science reveals X as the explanation."

I'll explain then.

Natural means something arising from laws and initial conditions, where we can predict a future state from a current state - because of these laws (like differential equations for example where time is a variable).

Supernatural means something not arising from laws, not governed and foreseeable from laws, like the existence of the laws of physics, we cannot attribute these to other laws else we get infinite regress, far better - I and many others think - to postulate an intelligent agent with a will, an ability to create laws.

The latter is an entirely rational thing to postulate, this is why almost all of the noted scientists for the past few centuries were successful, being creationist is fully rational and in keeping with being a scientist.

[Difflugia]

More ad hominem.

That's because you haven't actually made an argumentum, ad which we can direct our replies.

We've been asking you to support any of your theses since you joined the forum and all you've given us thus far is a misrepresentation of the one book you claim to have read. Rather than provide any other justification for your claims, you've instead told us all about yourself. You've told us what a staunch and informed atheist you were, how you know all of our tricks, that you know both the science and religion much better than the rest of us, and why you'd never let us get away with anything in some other forum. You haven't even supported those claims, to be honest, either explicitly or implicitly, but until you've provided something of substance to address, I don't suppose it matters which of your unsupported claims we pick on, now does it?

[Sherlock Holmes]

More ad hominem.

That's because you haven't actually made an argumentum, ad which we can direct our replies.

We've been asking you to support any of your theses since you joined the forum and all you've given us thus far is a misrepresentation of the one book you claim to have read. Rather than provide any other justification for your claims, you've instead told us all about yourself. You've told us what a staunch and informed atheist you were, how you know all of our tricks, that you know both the science and religion much better than the rest of us, and why you'd never let us get away with anything in some other forum. You haven't even supported those claims, to be honest, either explicitly or implicitly, but until you've provided something of substance to address, I don't suppose it matters which of your unsupported claims we pick on, now does it?

This is a very broad ad-hominem attack on me, a set of broad very general accusations.

If you have a specific issue you want to challenge me on then do so, but sweeping generalized attacks on my character do not strengthen your position here.

You - recall - insinuated that I was an "anti vaxxer" your willingness to resort to insults is a matter of record.

Your post above is nothing to do with the OP it is all focused on me and my perceived misdeeds.

[Bust Nak]

Well why assume they are connected at all?

I would assume they are connected if a certain way of connecting them makes a lot of sense.

what does "best" mean please, where you say "best fit" what must we assume first in order to evaluate what is "best"?

"Best" in the case of dots means using all the dots with straight lines and making a picture that resembles something. I have to assume there is a pattern to the dots to evaluate this.

You need to define "best" and "making sense" creationists like me think that best includes a way of resolving missing data like Cambrian precursors and making sense is exactly what a supernatural intelligent agent is when we confront the otherwise chaotic fossil record.

Is your idea of "best" better than my idea of "best"? which best is best?

First of all to be even considered for "best" in the case of scientific endeavour means falsifiable, testable, repeatable, verifiable. "Best" means not contradicted by any observation; making predictions that matches closely with observations, the more precise, the better; explaining/accounting for more kinds of observations; explaining/accounting for observations that was not explained/accounted for by existing models; has fewer unknowns, more parsimonious.

I think this "best" is better than your "best," but that's neither here or there; suffice to say that this "best" is the scientific "best."

I see so being a creationist is not the issue for you, it is proposing a supernatural cause. Well accepting the reality of supernatural causes is what creationists do, so your contradicting yourself.

You seemed to have missed the all important "in a scientific context" caveat. Being a creationist in a scientific field is not the issue for me, it is proposing a supernatural cause in a scientific context. Not all creationists do that, so there is no contradiction.

Creationists - like me - believe that God is the reason there's a universe, that God is the reason we can even do "science", that God is the reason the universe is structured and mathematically describable, none of these things can (even in principle) be explained "naturally".

I've gathered that much already, but have you ever invoked the supernatural as a scientific explanation? If you can set those beliefs aside when you are writing your papers, you would not be called a pseudoscientist.

Good, we are in agreement - being a creationist does not hinder one's ability to do scientific research and "pseudoscience" is nothing whatsoever to do with being a creationist, glad we cleared this up.

It's cool we have some common ground, so back to my question, what's wrong with adding "seeking natural explanations" to explicitly ruling out supernatural causes in a scientific context as pseudoscience?

I'll explain then.

Natural means something arising from laws and initial conditions, where we can predict a future state from a current state - because of these laws (like differential equations for example where time is a variable).

Seems overly narrow, can you predict the time a particular radioactive atom would decay?

Supernatural means something not arising from laws, not governed and foreseeable from laws, like the existence of the laws of physics, we cannot attribute these to other laws else we get infinite regress, far better - I and many others think - to postulate an intelligent agent with a will, an ability to create laws.

The latter is an entirely rational thing to postulate, this is why almost all of the noted scientists for the past few centuries were successful, being creationist is fully rational and in keeping with being a scientist.

Okay, that seems to be answering a different question, so you'd rather appeal to a supernatural entity to ground reality, rather than appeal to infinite regression; not seeing how that means an empirically demonstrable entity shouldn't be classified as natural.

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to Sherlock Holmes in post #175]

Creationists - like me - believe that God is the reason there's a universe, that God is the reason we can even do "science", that God is the reason the universe is structured and mathematically describable, none of these things can (even in principle) be explained "naturally".

This is just god of the gaps reasoning, and the reason gods were invented in the first place by earlier humans. They could not understand how the sun could move across the sky, how the earth could shake with such force, what caused thunderstorms, etc. so they invented gods as the source behind them. Science has progressively explained most of these natural phenomena and the corresponding gods mostly disappeared.

All you are doing is making claims that things you don't understand must be caused by a god being because you can't fathom how they could occur naturally. It simply is not true that "none of these things can (even in principle) be explained "naturally"." You've made this claim many times but have yet to make any rational arguments as to why it is true. It is a baseless claim that is simply asserted over and over.

No god being has ever been demonstrated to exist, so resorting to using gods as explanations for anything is premature (and certainly has no place in science).

[Difflugia]

If you have a specific issue you want to challenge me on then do so, but sweeping generalized attacks on my character do not strengthen your position here.

You've yet to support that a supernatural hypothesis is compatible with science, which is your original claim. You've repeatedly given us examples of creationists that can successfully do scientific work in areas not impacted by their creationism, but that was never in dispute.

You - recall - insinuated that I was an "anti vaxxer"

I didn't.

your willingness to resort to insults is a matter of record.

I suppose I would be insulted if I were called a creationist, so I guess so.

Your post above is nothing to do with the OP it is all focused on me and my perceived misdeeds.

Your misdeed is that you haven't supported the claim in your own original post. If you remedy that, then we'll have something else to focus on.