At 01:53 AM 5/5/00 +0100, Richard wrote:
>From: Brian D Harper <bharper@postbox.acs.ohio-state.edu>
>
>Hello Brian,
>
> >At 11:49 PM 5/2/00 +0100, Richard wrote:
>
> >>On the other hand, I don't agree that science must reject ideas like
>demonic
> >>spirits and omnipotent creators out of hand. It should reject them because
> >>they are poor explanations (they explain very little), and science is
>about
> >>find the best (most explanatory) explanations which are consistent with
>the
> >>facts.
> >
> >I disagree here. It is not that science rejects these ideas, science simply
> >cannot address them at all. It is impossible to evaluate them as good or
> >poor.
RW:==
>Why can't science address them (in principle)?
Answering this question will land me in trouble because, to do so, I
would first have to answer Steve's question "What is science". I've
read enough philosophy of science to appreciate how difficult that
question is :).
Basically, I'm a Methodological Naturalist (MN) who tends to be prejudiced
towards the experimental side of things. As far as definitions go, I like
Phil's the best:
MN: "... the principle that science can study only the things that
are accessible to its instruments and techniques." PJ
Phil later said he would no longer express the idea this way. I don't
want to get into all that. The point here is that this is a great summary
of my own position.
I take MN to be a recognition of the limitations of science, rather than
the limitations of reality. I consider it foolish, for example, to say that
all physical reality is accessible to the "instruments and techniques"
of science. How could one ever know this (from the instruments and
techniques of science)? So, if we have no guarantee
that science can even study all of physical reality, how can we possibly
hope to say anything about demonic spirits and omnipotent creators?
More specifically though, the problem one generally encounters with
Design is that sooner or later, if you want design to make a unique
contribution, you have to formulate hypotheses about the intentions,
purposes, motivations of the designer. These hypotheses cannot be
evaluated by the instruments and techniques of science.
Here's an analogy. In information theory we can measure the quantity
of information but not its quality. Would we take our inability to measure
the meaning in a message to imply that the message has no meaning?
OK, I've spent a lot of time and energy and haven't actually answered
your question :). The problem is that I generally have a hard time
understanding "in principle". I guess my short answer to your question
would be "how should I know".
Let me give a little anecdote I read somewhere, I think in a biography of
Feynman. A conversation between two famous physicists, unfortunately
I can't remember who (I want to say one is Bohr). One physicist is explaining
quantum mechanics to the other. When it gets to the part about indeterminacy,
the other objects "But surely God can know". The first replies "In science, we
are not interested in what God can know, only in what man can know."
[anyone know if this conversation really took place, and if so, who the
physicists were ?]
This is a nice illustration of my views on MN. I cannot really grasp what
it means
to say something is possible "in principle", I want to see if it works in
practice.
> >If one were to adopt explanations which are consistent with all the
> >facts, then Last Thursdayism (God created the world last Thursday)
> >would have to be a serious contender.
>
>Last Thursdayism should be rejected because it's an extremely poor
>explanation (about as bad as you can get). Superficially, it may seem like
>good explanation, in the sense that it accounts for everything. But the
>value of a scientific explanation is not in how many phenomena it can
>account for, but in how testable it is (which means how well it can draw a
>line between those phenomena which will be observed and those which won't)
>and how little it appeals to complex unexplained mechanisms. Last
>Thursdayism is extremely poor on both counts: (a) it does not rule out any
>phenomena, and (b) it requires a very complex unexplained mechanism capable
>of creating last Thursday's universe from nothing and giving us false
>memories.
OK, you win on this one. How about Tuesday?
"I will gladly pay you Tuesday,
for a hamburger today."
We'll call it nextTuesdayism.
Brian Harper
Associate Professor
Mechanical Engineering
The Ohio State University
"One never knows, do one?"
-- Fats Waller
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