Posted by alexandra_k on September 10, 2005, at 17:00:24
In reply to I'm with you » messadivoce, posted by Dinah on September 10, 2005, at 7:58:34
> And I wish that everyone would admit that atheism is a belief system just like any other
I agree. Atheism, theism, agnosticism, deism are belief systems. But none of these are *scientific* belief systems.
A scientific belief system would be beliefs about the natural causes of natural (i.e., observable, measurable) phenomena.
God is a super-natural phenomena in the sense that God lies beyond or outside the natural world. So god isn't an appropriate subject matter for the natural sciences.
(Neither is ethics or aesthetics or subjectivity so to say that something isn't a fit subject matter for the natural sciences isn't to imply that it is rubbish. It is just that science only works within a limited domain - natural explanations for natural phenomena).
Science... Is agnostic. It is silent on whether there are any supernatual phenomena, it is silent on whether there are any (true) supernatural explanations for natural phenomena. Those very questions lie beyond science.
Scientists just focus on natural explanations for natural phenomena.
You can study religion, god, spirituality, ethics, aesthetics, meaning, consciousness etc. They are fit topics for rigorous investigation. But once again, they are not fit subject matter for science because we haven't worked out how to construe them as natural phenomena in order to be able to give them a naturalist explanation yet.
Science only deals in natural explanations. That isn't to say that they disregard super-natural phenomena because they don't believe there aren't any. It is to say that the methods of the sciences (where observations of the natural world are a crucial test for the adequacy / inadequacy of natural explanation) aren't suited to the topic of supernatural phenomena (i.e. god) or super-natual causes (i.e. god).
> Then we could apply the same rules about separation of belief system and state that are applied to those with a belief system not in keeping with the atheist doctrine.Perhaps agnosticism (I don't know whether there is a god or not) is the middle way...
And given that none of us really knows...
(Or that most of us admit that we don't really know)
It might be wise for science to limit itself to natural causes for natural phenomena.
The people who say that the intelligent design hypothesis is a legitimate scientific alternative hypothesis to evolution by natural selection...Don't really understand the nature of science.
God lies beyond science.
If you want to consider reasons for being a theist, atheist, agnostic then you are dealing with an a-priori subject matter rather than an a-posteriori (empirical one based on observations - which is what science is about).
For example...
(1) In the natural world nothing can cause itself and every event is caused by a prior event in the natural world (science goes with this)
(2) There are no infinitely long cause and effect chains (so the natural world can't be infinitely old)*
(3) There must have been a first event in the natural world.
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C1) A supernatural event must have caused the first event in the natural world
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C2) That is god.*A seperate argument is offered for this:
1) If a causal chain lacked a first member then the subsequent events in the chain could not have occured
2) But they did occur! (We are here now, for example)
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C) There must have been a first event in the natural world which is to say that the natural world can't be infinitely old.So you can study god and you can study the question of whether god exists, whether the concept of god is coherant (if something is incoherant it cannot possibly exist), whether it is more rational to believe than to not believe, whether belief in god is a matter of reason or a matter of faith, the nature / role of faith etc etc. But that is an a-priori investigation (looking into arguments and reasons to believe rather than looking to the world for a naturalistic investigation of the phenomena)
None of this is a scientific investigation.
And... If it turns out that there is a true super-natural explanation for natural phenomena (i.e., that an intelligent designer designed the natural world) then that does not show the scientific explanation to be false. The scientific explanation is still a true explanation of the natural causes for natural phenomena.
This is an interesting topic...
But I'm not sure that there is the time to address it adequately at high school level...
And I'm not at all sure that it should be made compulsory...
poster:alexandra_k
thread:551237
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20050909/msgs/553320.html