God and Science

@kellyjay said
How you view the world is based upon what you think is true in it, you deny that? We can fool ourselves by looking for confirmation of our biases over things that contradict them. You will not correct someone's way of thinking if you don't think they are doing it wrong, for crying out loud you are doing it here with me and you fail to see that?

The way science and real ...[text shortened]... ructions, mindlessness doesn't, can you show the facts that dispute that without running in circles?

How you view the world is based upon what you think is true in it, you deny that? We can fool ourselves by looking for confirmation of our biases over things that contradict them. You will not correct someone's way of thinking if you don't think they are doing it wrong, for crying out loud you are doing it here with me and you fail to see that?

That one views the world based on what one thinks is true is trivially correct (are people supposed to hold views of the world not based on what they take to be true of the world — how would that work exactly?). The point that you keep evading is the following: if what you take to be true is a blanket, pet presupposition of divine agency conceived of arse-pulling and having the properties of being unfalsifiable, having no prior empirical evidence or basis whatsoever, being profoundly non-parsimonious and the like; then you do not get a seat at the explanation table. Sorry, them’s the breaks. You can hold your view, but do not expect others to take it seriously in matters of explanation. Explanation is not just a matter of projecting what you believe to be true onto phenomena just willy-nilly; there are rules to the methods of explanation, which neither you nor Lennox seem to grasp.

@lemonjello said

How you view the world is based upon what you think is true in it, you deny that? We can fool ourselves by looking for confirmation of our biases over things that contradict them. You will not correct someone's way of thinking if you don't think they are doing it wrong, for crying out loud you are doing it here with me and you fail to see that?

That on ...[text shortened]... ly-nilly; there are rules to the methods of explanation, which neither you nor Lennox seem to grasp.

Nothing that you can say as truth, can be shown as true, if you are not willing to accept some things on faith, you cannot suggest because things always behaved uniformly over time before now, that they always will, that is faith. You cannot say someone is wrong about anything without first knowing what is correct, you cannot say that every view is good while disagreeing with some who hold views contrary to yours, you cannot say this is up, down, right, or left without a fixed reference point.

Without a reference point that transcends us, we are afloat untethered to reality, and are left to our own devices to make it all up as we go. If we are making it up as we go then we are the sole arbiters of right and wrong, that may sound and feel good until you run into someone else, who thinks they, not you, should have the things you own, or have unwanted desires for your body.

A transcendent creator is required for all things created from space, time, energy, and mass these things didn't create themselves. Those are not the only things we see in the universe that weren't here in the universe before either such as the immaterial, thoughts, logic, math, love, hate, joy, peace, beauty, consciousness, and a host of other things.

So which is primary, the immaterial, or the material, which was first, meaning did come from the living Word (Jesus Christ), whom I give all created to for all of creation. You cannot say there is no evidence when the entire universe is evidence, the fine-tuning to a very exacting degree, the complex nature of biology where life is made up of highly complex subsystems integrated into one living organism because chance and necessity are not capable of that, if you disagree show it can be done with what we see in the here and now.

@kellyjay said
If you are living in an illusion why bother those of us with physical bodies living in the real world?

Your Jesus was the one living in the real world, the unseen heaven, and he came down to the physical world to save the world by making all the souls aware that it's all an illusion.

The real Jesus was not the physical body he took on. Even you, your real self, is not the brainwashed and fully deluded physical body you are wearing. Your soul is the real you. But can you see yourself as you really are? Your soul is invisible. But an illusion is meant to be seen; otherwise, it cannot be an illusion if it cannot be seen.

You simply are not understanding the true meaning and intent of the Word of God, which is an illusion within the grand illusion.

What will it profit a man if he gains the whole illusive physical world but forfeits his soul? The real meaning here is that the unseen is the reality, and the whole physical world is just an illusion.

It's the physical world which is the illusion. Jesus reiterates the point that we are living in an illusion with this other gem:

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

An illusion will decompose and fade away with time, and it will be taken away from you. Instead, look to the unseen, where reality lies, which is a timeless world, an eternal world, where everything is indestructible and immortal.

@pettytalk said
Your Jesus was the one living in the real world, the unseen heaven, and he came down to the physical world to save the world by making all the souls aware that it's all an illusion.

The real Jesus was not the physical body he took on. Even you, your real self, is not the brainwashed and fully deluded physical body you are wearing. Your soul is the real you. But can you s ...[text shortened]... lies, which is a timeless world, an eternal world, where everything is indestructible and immortal.

The real world, was created by the real Jesus, who is the real Word of God, who entered into the real world He created, as the real incarnate Word of God made fully human.

The real God revealed by giving us a revelation in how Jesus acted, by being the express image of the Father. Jesus also pointed to scripture saying it spoke of Him, talking about what He was to do, was doing, and about to do not through an illusion, but reality. In addition sending the Holy Spirit to lead and teach us in the here and now!

In human history a man rose from the dead and He changed the world. His life was foretold, His death, and why God did that can be accepted or rejected. We can be saved from the wrath of God by God, by being justified by His grace or condemned but justice will prevail.

@kellyjay said
Nothing that you can say as truth, can be shown as true, if you are not willing to accept some things on faith, you cannot suggest because things always behaved uniformly over time before now, that they always will, that is faith. You cannot say someone is wrong about anything without first knowing what is correct, you cannot say that every view is good while disagreeing wi ...[text shortened]... y are not capable of that, if you disagree show it can be done with what we see in the here and now.

All of the challenges to objective inquiry and explanation that you and Lennox raise are nothing new. They touch on things like the demarcation problem, the problem of induction, confirmation bias and the like, which have been around for centuries. Science as a collective enterprise for the most part has done its duty to address these and implement mitigation strategies, such as emphasis on falsifiability, testability, replicability, peer review, healthy scrutiny and skepticism, and so forth. This is the honest due diligence approach, and it stands in stark contrast to your own approach, which appears to be just muddling everything together into the same “faith” bucket and rationalizing acceptance of your own impoverished view on the basis that we are all just “making it up as we go” with equal merits. Well, speak for yourself. Your “faith” approach is a product of your own failing, and do not presume to project this failing onto other inquirers who do not share it. Lennox’s view of “explanation” via divine agency is laughable, but at least it is not so disingenuous as yours. Lennox does not go out of his way to selectively denigrate science but rather just claims that such science can be synergized with his proposed manner of “explanation” (of course failing to either realize or disclose that his “explanation” is just post hoc stipulation that explains nothing). Your view, however, not only explains nothing but is perniciously disingenuous in its selective dismissal of scientific method.

@lemonjello said
All of the challenges to objective inquiry and explanation that you and Lennox raise are nothing new. They touch on things like the demarcation problem, the problem of induction, confirmation bias and the like, which have been around for centuries. Science as a collective enterprise for the most part has done its duty to address these and implement mitigation strategies, ...[text shortened]... y explains nothing but is perniciously disingenuous in its selective dismissal of scientific method.

You seem to be pushing something that you are not willing to look at in your own life the same way! You are presuming how you view things is somehow different than anyone who believes in God, a real issue for you, you have to borrow from a theistic worldview on faith, to even settle on what is true in reality!

We believe God set the universe up with law-like normality in how things behave, and you have no reason to accept that is the case, so without cause you have to say, "That is just the way it is," so without a reason to think so it's an unreasonable stance that is still taken on blind-faith. It just is, is not a reason, it's an acknowledgment of I don't know.

You see law like normative activity in the universe and assume it will always be that way, you assume it has always been that way so you then take that on faith. When we are applying tests we do so on the faith that the universe will act as it always has, and will continue to. We work things out with science looking at the universe in our faith that it will remain as it is, otherwise, there are no strategies that we could use, for it would be unpredictable. The foundation for doing science is that what we are looking at can have facts, if not what is the point?

We do not think in the universe that if I do an experiment in my lab, using X, Y, Z, and another in their labs using the same X, Y, and Z if we get different results it is because the universe is somehow different in one lab than the other, we look at what is different between the experiments, what was true in one, can not also be true in the other with different outcomes, something was different.

If you want to reject the worldview there is a reason, there is a cause for everything, you have undercut the very thing you claim you are doing with science. How do you know you can trust your mind if it is the end product of a mindless process thrown together without a reason other than chance? We really cannot even say chance and necessity, because necessity implies law-like activity where causes produce results.

@kellyjay said

You seem to be pushing something that you are not willing to look at in your own life the same way! You are presuming how you view things is somehow different than anyone who believes in God, a real issue for you, you have to borrow from a theistic worldview on faith, to even settle on what is true in reality!

It is absurd the way you continue to insist the scientific and Lennoxian approaches are similar. They are complete opposites, as anyone should be able to see. I am not sure if you are just trolling or if your intellect had taken a holiday or what, but I will humor you just once more and explain it slowly. If you still persist in this mischaracterization, then I will know you are trolling.

The Lennoxian approach is basically that one brings into the exercise a predetermined, ready answer; that answer is then carried forward and retained completely regardless of what evidence or information happens to be gained relative to the inquiry. This is all helped by the fact that the proposed answer has no falsification conditions and tends to be ill-defined to begin with. An example is that one can hold the view that God’s agency explains gravity (whatever that even means). Then regardless of what physicists actually discover over time regarding gravity, this person can just say yeah, and that just shows how clever my God is regarding gravity. Dumb to say the least, explains precisely nothing and adds precisely no value.

Scientific explanation, on the other hand, works in just the opposite way. There is no sympathy toward ill-definition, and hypotheses have disconfirmation conditions; there is an actual bar to be reached for retaining the hypothesis, etc. We do not enter the exercise with a predetermined answer; rather there is a range of potential hypotheses that are considered, and testing and data, along with other metrics of explanatory goodness, determine winners or at least outline directions. Pretty much everything is defeasible, and we can also say we do not know when that is all the evidence warrants.

Those two approaches are about as different as they can possibly be, so again, I find it hard to believe that you genuinely cannot distinguish the two.

You see law like normative activity in the universe and assume it will always be that way, you assume it has always been that way so you then take that on faith. When we are applying tests we do so on the faith that the universe will act as it always has, and will continue to. We work things out with science looking at the universe in our faith that it will remain as it is, otherwise, there are no strategies that we could use, for it would be unpredictable. The foundation for doing science is that what we are looking at can have facts, if not what is the point? …..

Again — and I find I have to repeat myself in this conversation with you quite a bit — what you are outlining throughout the rest of your post is nothing new. It is related to the problem of induction, diagnostic challenges with falsification, and the like. As I said (go back and read), science as a collective has tried its best to implement methodological controls for such worries. At least scientific explanative approaches try, whereas the Lennoxian approach does not even bother trying.

@lemonjello said

You seem to be pushing something that you are not willing to look at in your own life the same way! You are presuming how you view things is somehow different than anyone who believes in God, a real issue for you, you have to borrow from a theistic worldview on faith, to even settle on what is true in reality!

It is absurd the way you continue to insist ...[text shortened]... t scientific explanative approaches try, whereas the Lennoxian approach does not even bother trying.

We are all creatures who live by faith, and no matter how you view the world and its history that will not change. What is real is not defined by me or anyone else accept the One who created everything. Regardless of our worldview we are forced to accept on faith how we define the world, right or wrong, are we seeing it as it really is. Once we make up our minds then our judgment calls follow.

You don’t think it matters if what we believe is true isn’t? You can’t apply logic to validate anything without properly understanding of what you’re looking at. You can use mathematics to run your numbers and get a correct complication, but unless you looking at things properly the only thing you are doing is showing your math is correct.

Is it your opinion that life could spring up through mindless indifferent processes? Can you explain what it is we all are and see? Without a predetermined explanation you have nothing to compare evidence to for validation.

@lemonjello said

How you view the world is based upon what you think is true in it, you deny that? We can fool ourselves by looking for confirmation of our biases over things that contradict them. You will not correct someone's way of thinking if you don't think they are doing it wrong, for crying out loud you are doing it here with me and you fail to see that?

That on ...[text shortened]... ly-nilly; there are rules to the methods of explanation, which neither you nor Lennox seem to grasp.

My views are based on what I think is true, are you any different? Nothing willy-nilly about the things I have been saying, your explanations don’t also share the same frailty of being either true or false? You assume what you are saying is correct because it aligns with your own interpretation of the universe, it must be true therefore?

@kellyjay said
My views are based on what I think is true, are you any different? Nothing willy-nilly about the things I have been saying, your explanations don’t also share the same frailty of being either true or false? You assume what you are saying is correct because it aligns with your own interpretation of the universe, it must be true therefore?

As already explained, it is a truism that one’s views are based in what one takes to be true. That has exactly nothing to do with the Lennox video. You’ve completely lost the thread, which is not easily done on a thread of one’s own initiation. The discussion here is not about how one’s views are constituted; it is about what counts as a method of explanation. You and Lennox can hold your views of divine agency; go ahead and hold them to your heart’s delight, and I urge you to do so if that is honestly what garners the assent of your intellect (maybe I would also urge you to do more study on stuff though). But please do not insult the intellect of others by suggesting that imposing your view on the universe sans any evidence or any sane methodological controls is an act of explanation. After all, you’ve pointed out many pitfalls like confirmation bias and the like. Yes, that’s why you need some basic rules to the methods of explanation. Science by and large gets it right. You and Lennox do not even try to get it right.

@lemonjello said
As already explained, it is a truism that one’s views are based in what one takes to be true. That has exactly nothing to do with the Lennox video. You’ve completely lost the thread, which is not easily done on a thread of one’s own initiation. The discussion here is not about how one’s views are constituted; it is about what counts as a method of explanation. You and ...[text shortened]... f explanation. Science by and large gets it right. You and Lennox do not even try to get it right.

You again complain about the very thing you do as well, we speak about things we believe are true and give reasons for them. That is no different for you than me, implying that there is no God as true is also pushing a point of view as well, and making that a point of failure is quite circular, and hypocritical.

The positive evidence far outweighs a case for the Creator than not. Conformational bias we both share that possibility, and suggesting science gets it right assumes just those things that you want to believe are validated are. Ignoring those things that show what you believe is on shaky ground.

@lemonjello said
As already explained, it is a truism that one’s views are based in what one takes to be true. That has exactly nothing to do with the Lennox video. You’ve completely lost the thread, which is not easily done on a thread of one’s own initiation. The discussion here is not about how one’s views are constituted; it is about what counts as a method of explanation. You and ...[text shortened]... f explanation. Science by and large gets it right. You and Lennox do not even try to get it right.

YouTube

If you want to talk about evidence, here is a speaker whose life was cold case murder investigations looking at evidence. He started as an Atheist and turned into a Christian based on investigating the claims of Christianity as it was a cold case murder where all of the people involved in the murder from the witness to the investigators at the time of the crime, are all long dead. Unlike Lennox, this is about the evidence, not the nature of an explanation, you can shoot at the points this guy is making to prove his points.

@KellyJay

We are all creatures who live by faith, and no matter how you view the world and its history that will not change.

Yeah, we get it: you think science is just an alternative belief system which has a god-shaped hole in it. You don't understand how science works, although this has been explained to you numerous times, with the patience of saints.

Scientific truths are all in principle revisable, given evidence to which we may someday have access. This means that a hypothesis, in order to be scientific, must be falsifiable (under some conceivable testable or experimental conditions).

That God (any god, yours or some other) created the universe, or anything in it, is not a falsifiable hypothesis. There is no test or experiment which could establish this or its contrary.

For example, in order to establish that God (some god or other) was necessary to get life started, we would have to have access to a statistically significant sample of alternate universes, 1,000 of them let us say, half of which had been created by a god (some god or other) and half not, wait until each universe collapsed back into a Big Crunch or dissipated into cold dark nothingness, and then see whether a) life occurred spontaneously through mindless processes in any universe not created by a god, or b) life existed only in those which had been created by a god. That is how science works.

What you claim to be evidence for the existence of a creator God is not evidence in any sense relevant to science. What you offer is speculative, but not testable. It evidently seems compelling to you, but it isn't falsifiable, and therefore not scientific.

@moonbus said
@KellyJay

We are all creatures who live by faith, and no matter how you view the world and its history that will not change.

Yeah, we get it: you think science is just an alternative belief system which has a god-shaped hole in it. You don't understand how science works, although this has been explained to you numerous times, with the patience of saints.

Scie ...[text shortened]... table. It evidently seems compelling to you, but it isn't falsifiable, and therefore not scientific.

I'm not the one thinking science is an alternate belief system, I do not lambast science as something less than, I am saying it has limitations, and you have to believe things in advance to come up with specific answers. You have to take on "FAITH," what we see now is as it always is to encapsulate logical answers about the past, you have to believe what is going on now always will to predict what will take place in the future, and you deny faith is involved. You have repeatedly said the facts are on your side, without producing any "facts" validating your side. You are long on being dismissive but short on coming up with things that give you a positive reason to believe what you do and make no mistake you do believe things to be true without good cause.

You cannot falsify anything about your beliefs for the beginning of anything from the start of the universe or life, you cannot even claim you know there was one, yet you make definitive statements of how and why things are taking place now without knowing anything about the beginning. You have to deny the informational properties in life-directing processes and the formation of forms, without explaining outside of maybe saying, well that is just the way it is, which is not a reason it is a joke of an explanation.

You have to take on faith that the universe acts law-like in its manners to trust conclusions when experiments are done. If that wasn't true you could not take any experiment as evidence or proof of anything, because the same experiment done someplace else could give different outcomes. Science can only be trusted if it is taken on faith that the universe can be intelligently understood, which means the "FACTS" are not on your side, you only get facts when facts are possible.

@kellyjay said
https://youtu.be/9R7bdVcK0hk

If you want to talk about evidence, here is a speaker whose life was cold case murder investigations looking at evidence. He started as an Atheist and turned into a Christian based on investigating the claims of Christianity as it was a cold case murder where all of the people involved in the murder from the witness to the investigators at the ...[text shortened]... ot the nature of an explanation, you can shoot at the points this guy is making to prove his points.

There is no need to respond to this speaker’s points, since the scientific community has already refuted them. The only relevant “evidence” presented here is regurgitation of Behe’s claims of irreducible complexity (IC). Behe’s arguments never made much sense to begin with, since it follows rather straightforwardly from his very own definition of IC and some basic evolutionary concepts that IC does not entail an inability to have evolved. But at any rate, all putative examples of IC proposed by Behe (such as blood clotting, bacterial flagella, etc) have been refuted. In fact, if you look at the record of Kitzmiller v. Dover, the court even had to break it to Behe as part of their factual finding that his claims have been refuted by his peers and rejected by the scientific community! Remember when I told you that science implements methodological controls regarding peer review and such scrutiny as other people trying to prove you wrong, etc? Behe’s claims did not pass muster. Yay! for science, for having standards and whatnot!!! Oh, right, you only root for science selectively when you think it does not conflict with your theological commitments. You’re fine with science when it comes to DUT testing or actually any number of things you take for granted every day. But when it comes to evolutionary theory, which has an overwhelming body of scientific evidence behind it, suddenly you do not respect science. I am not sure why you should erect this facade anyway — like I said before, you could just be like Lennox and not denigrate science but just layer your God’s agency on top of scientific discovery like a sauce. It’s a fool’s errand but at least you do not add the disingenuity of having an embarrassingly selective commitment to scientific methods!