[FoRK] Faith and/or Science dingding redux

[Lion Kimbro]

    "However, I am not aware of any religion that repeatedly tests
    its propositions—either in terms of small details, or the broad
    foundations—with experiments and observations."

  I actually think there is the seed of an interesting idea here;
  What could that be like?


  As a point of comparison, consider:  "Help us revise the Pluto parable."

  http://co-intelligence.org/newsletter/Dec-06.html#pluto
  http://www.thegreatstory.org/Pluto.html


  Incidentally, time recently covered "Atheist Sunday School."

  http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1686828,00.html?xid=site-cnn-partner



On Nov 26, 2007 12:52 PM, Tom Higgins <tomhiggins at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.edge.org/discourse/science_faith.html
>
> "1. Contrary to Davies' assertion, science is not based on "faith"
> that physical laws will apply forever, or in different places in the
> Universe. This is an observation—an observation that has not been
> contradicted by any other data. Davies is completely off base when
> claiming that "to be a scientist, you had to have faith that the
> universe is governed by dependable, immutable, absolute, universal,
> mathematical laws of an unspecified origin. You've got to believe that
> these laws won't fail, that we won't wake up tomorrow to find heat
> flowing from cold to hot, or the speed of light changing by the hour.
> " This is not a matter of faith. It's a matter of experience. In
> contrast, the tenets of religion are truly based on faith, since there
> is no empirical data to support them."
>
>
> " To argue that physics is on the same level as religion is to ignore
> the fact that religious faith broadly does not admit that it could be
> wrong! Consequently, it performs no experiments or observations.
> Religion is a broad topic of course, and there are myriad disparate
> theologies and philosophies so it is impossible to generalize too
> much. However, I am not aware of any religion that repeatedly tests
> its propositions—either in terms of small details, or the broad
> foundations—with experiments and observations. Surely this is not the
> case with any Christian theology that I am aware of. "
>
> "Davies lost my respect for his thesis early on, from the first
> sentence actually, but I'll focus instead on this claim from his
> second paragraph:
>
>     All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a
> rational and intelligible way. You couldn't be a scientist if you
> thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends
> haphazardly juxtaposed.
>
> Perhaps this is where not being a physicist has the virtue of a
> different perspective, because I can say without reservation that he's
> completely wrong—in a historical science like evolutionary biology, we
> have no problem when we encounter a phenomenon that isn't orderly or
> rational, and that has all the appearance of haphazard
> meaninglessness. We're accustomed to seeing simple chance as a strong
> thread running throughout biological history."
>
> _______________________________________________
> FoRK mailing list
> http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork
>