RE: [asa] Re: ID without specifying the intelligence?

Peter writes:

That is not accurate historically - science did not proceed on an MN base -
and to accept MN is to rig the outcome. Logically, this has to be faced.

Ted replies:
Actually, what is historically accurate is something like this: Since
ancient Greece, science has done its best to invoke natural causes. If/when
"supernatural" causes have been inferred, it's been when there seemed no way
to account for a given phenomenon naturally. This has mostly happened in
two contexts: (1) origins, up to the latter part of the 19th century; and
(2) medicine, roughly the same story. Witchcraft, another interesting
context (some 17th century scientists were very interested in witches),
became just implausible by the early 18th century, if not earlier. The
spectacular inability to demonstrate the reality of a "supernatural" realm
in this latter sense was, IMO, a factor in establishing naturalism more
generally.

The Hippocratic physicians wrote a treatise against "the sacred disease,"
(ie, epilepsy), pushing the view that we ought not call a disease "sacred"
simply b/c its causes are (as yet) unknown. Medieval natural philosophers
tried not to invoke God as an efficient cause; Boyle stated that, in natural
philosopher, we ought not fly unto God's absolute power (though he also
believed that we could know *some* of God's purposes in creation, ie, we
could infer final causation from creatures), but focus on the properties and
powers created by God; and Whewell said that design was far better seen in
general laws, not in "insulated interpositions of divine power, exerted in
each particular case" (or words very close to that). The problem is that
non-natural causes are "science stoppers." The opposite problem is that, if
God has acted "above the sphere of nature" (as Boyle put it), then so much
for our science--the best we can do is to infer such and leave it there.
And we do that, Boyle thought, by knowing what the laws of nature (our
descriptions of divinely ordained properties and powers) can and cannot do.
They can't raise the dead or feed the five thousand or perform the events of
pentecost (pentecost was something Boyle was very interested in), so we
infer divine action in such an instance. This tension between requiring
natural causes and also knowing their absolute limits, while being open to
situations in which those limits must be invoked, is IMO a reality for
Christians in science. It can obviously be tough to make the call in
specific cases.

Ted

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Received on Thu Sep 13 08:57:39 2007