On 1/22/2013 8:00 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 21 Jan 2013, at 22:20, meekerdb wrote:
On 1/21/2013 9:11 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
It is only recently, as the limitations of the narrow Western approach are being
revealed on a global scale, that science has fallen into a fundamentalist pathology
which makes an enemy of teleology.
Yes, it is only the recently, since the Enlightenment, that science has displaced
theology as the main source of knowledge about the world.
This is non sense. Science is not domain. It points only to an attitude. Science cannot
displace theology, like it cannot displace genetics. It can give evidence that some
theological theories are wrong headed, or that some theories in genetics are not
supported by facts, but science cannot eliminate any field of inquiry, or it becomes
automatically a pseudo-religion itself (as it is the case for some scientists).
Of course it can't displace a field of inquiry. But theology wasn't a field of inquiry,
it was apologetics for revelation and dogma.
Coincidentally is only recently that the sin theory of disease was replaced by the germ
theory...that the geocentric model of the solar system was replaced by the
heliocentric...that insanity has been due to bad brain chemistry instead of possession
by demons...that democracy has replaced the divine right of kings...that lightning rods
have protected us from the wrath of God...that the suffering of women in childbirth has
been alleviated...
OK. This shows that religion provides answer, and then the scientific attitude can lead
to corrections, making those answers into abandoned theories. This really illustrates my
point. Now some go farer and make "primary matter" the new God. that's OK in a treatise
of metaphysics, when physicalism is explicitly assumed or discussed, but some
scientists, notably when vindictive strong atheists I met, just mock the questions and
imposes the physicalist answer like if that, an only that, was science. This is just
deeply not scientific.
Can you cite any physicists who use the term 'primary matter'. I've never come across it
except on this list. Of course almost all physicists believe in some kind of matter which
is the subject of their study and they may hypothesize that it is primary, that there is
nothing more fundamental which explains the matter, but that's just an hypothesis. John
Wheeler was not criticized for talking about "It from bit." Max Tegmark is still highly
respected after suggesting a mathematical universe. I think you have just been unlucky in
running into some close minded atheists who probably suspected that your use of "God" to
mean "Truth"(and I'm not sure what that means) was an attempt to slip Christian dogma into
science by the back door - it sounds very much like what, as John K. Clark pointed out,
liberal theologians do in order to pretend that physics or mathematics supports their dogma.
Brent
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