Well, no. A scientific explanation does not invoke God but that is not at all the same as saying that it rules out God. It tries to explain things as well as possible in terms of things that can be observed, (in this case by techniques used by sociologists), leaving open the question of whether or not some deity or deities may be behind those things & who/what such deities might be.
& the same can be said, mutatis mutandis, for physical phenomena such as those studied by Laplace. The fact that he didn't need the "hypothesis" of God to explain planetary orbits doesn't mean that he ruled out God cooperating with gravitational interactions to bring about those orbital motions.
Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
----- Original Message -----
From: "Alexanian, Moorad" <alexanian@uncw.edu>
To: "George Murphy" <gmurphy@raex.com>; "Gregory Arago" <gregoryarago@yahoo.ca>
Cc: <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Saturday, July 21, 2007 12:59 PM
Subject: RE: [asa] Science's Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism
George, I was not really answering the question you posed to Gregory. Rather I was enunciating, I believe, the same question in a different fashion. I suppose if you invoke God as one of the prior information used to explain sociological data, then God may be involved either directly or indirectly. However, if one excludes God from any sort of prior information that is used to analyze sociological data, then by fiat God does not play any action whatsoever. The question is then if the latter supposition can truly answer all sociological data. After all, one is dealing here with the actions of human beings and their exercise of their free will, which system is not purely physical and thus is open to entities, like God, that transcend Nature. Surely, in describing the purely physical aspect of Nature by mathematical models, one need not invoke God as Laplace said some time ago.
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Received on Sat Jul 21 13:47:33 2007
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