From: Terry M. Gray (grayt@lamar.colostate.edu)
Date: Wed Aug 27 2003 - 14:35:02 EDT
Brian Harper wrote:
>
>This issue does seem to be problematic. Is methodological naturalism
>really the way of doing science or is it just a way to circumvent ID?
>If it is (and I agree that it is), then why is it one sided? Why doesn't
>MN also constrain the atheist scientist?
>
>This lack of symmetry will continue to provide fuel to the
>flames of rhetoric until its corrected.
I'm having some difficulty in this thread understanding why we don't
think that Dawkins violates MN. (I'm going to leave Gould out--I'm
somewhat surprised at how hard we're coming down on him--he's a
totally different beast than Dawkins in my opinion.) When Dawkins
promotes atheism (or anti-theism) in the name of science, he is NOT
doing MN. He's not constrained by it because he's not just about
promoting a science agenda, but also a religio-philosophical agenda.
(There's this "life is religion" part of me that says that he is
being more honest and wholistically human about his religious view
than we Christians and others who encourage the elimination of
religion-talk from our science-talk.)
Personally, I enjoy and find myself agreeing with 90% of what Dawkins
says. For that 90% I suspect he is adhering to MN.
Don't take this to mean that I'm a support of MN. I don't
particularly like that way of casting the problem. I'm much more
inclined to talk about our shared experience in God's created, God's
normal way of governing the universe, patterns and methods rooted in
these two ideas--this leads to the practice of science that has
significant common ground with those who admit that there is pattern,
regularity, law, etc. but deny the theistic claim as to the origin
and ontological basis of those things. One radical way of saying this
is that atheists (even Dawkins) ARE practicing science
"Christianly"--they just don't know it.
TG
-- _________________ Terry M. Gray, Ph.D., Computer Support Scientist Chemistry Department, Colorado State University Fort Collins, Colorado 80523 grayt@lamar.colostate.edu http://www.chm.colostate.edu/~grayt/ phone: 970-491-7003 fax: 970-491-1801
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