I don't think I suggested that it was. I have discarded mechanism, but
for theological reasons that have nothing to do with this discussion.
My point wasn't that mechanism is anti-theistic, but that non-mechanism
is anti-scientific. Or to say it positively: science requires mechanism
(or at least the appearance of mechanism).
> But science can be viewed much differently from a Christian perspective, I
> believe. I believe that Christians are right to fight extreme reductivism,
> or the tendency to believe that all things can be explained by physics or
> mechanistically. On the other hand, I have a great problem with Christians
> who insist that the creation of life is not to be understood at all by
> science because it is miraculous. If God is the creator of nature, and the
> originator of miracles, what difference does it make to Christians whether
> or not a phenomenon can be explained in naturalistic terms?
I completely agree with this assessment. However I think the fight against
extreme reductivism is not a scientific fight. Reductivism in science
will succeed only as far as the universe appears to be mechanistic.
Statements of faith by scientists that all things can be explained by
mechanism should be challenged. But such a view is just a statement of
the *ambitions* of science. Whether or not it is a true statement about
the universe is in the realm of philosophy and theology. It is more
than the former saying how and the latter saying why. It is that science
is an inherently limited view. The limitation is the requirement for
a completely mechanistic description of the universe to exist.
The major conflict between theology and science is where the boundary
lies. Ambitious scientists believe science can in principle provide
a complete description of the universe, and thus theology is unnecessary,
and exists only to address areas that science has not *yet* demystified.
Christian Scientists believe that the investigations of science are
bounded, but in their own scientific investigations they *must* assume
that they are within science's bounds [I couldn't tell whether you
really disagreed with this point, so I am trying to restate it].
Francis Crick's astonishing hypothesis is that consciousness can be
explained by known mechanisms. Roger Penrose believes the mechanisms
are not quite known. Both are scientific positions. Theology generally
believes that consciousness derives from something transcendent.
The problem for theology is that it is difficult to say where science's
boundary lies, as science may make progress and identify apparent
mechanisms in areas that theology didn't anticipate. For example,
theology's non-mechanistic view of consciousness might become
obsolete in light of new scientific discovery. Theology has occasionally
been wrong on these types of points before.
My own view of the universe is that the issue is not drawing the line
between areas of application, but the level of description. I think
that the relationship of science to reality is like the relationship
of newtonian mechanics to quantum mechanics. Further resolution
revealed that newtonian physics was largely adequate for computation, but
inadequate as mechanism. I believe that at the ultimate resolution of
the universe all mechanism becomes inadequate. But I believe this
for theological reasons (as I described to Glenn).
However such an outcome might not be any more astonishing than the
view that the seemingly deterministic universe appears at heart
to be non-deterministic.
--Dave