Modern Mythologies: Part I
by Bradford
Science is dangerous because it makes people question everything and is particularly harsh on supernatural tracts and anything canonical.
agam
This assertion is a useful starting point for a series on modern mythologies. Science is not dangerous unless spin-off technologies are used for destructive purposes as is the case with wars. Science does not make us question everything either. Experiments are the offspring of thinking about physical phenomenon. The thinking process can be profound at times but is generally limited to the scope a specific test. What is noteworthy is how unresponsive social canonical ideas can be to science. More on that in another post.
Is science "particularly harsh on supernatural tracts and anything canonical." No on both accounts. Science presumes a predictable regularity to nature which allows for testing to derive theories about it. Newton's laws allow us to predict that a pencil will fall to the ground and ascribe an explanation for it. Predictable regularity is termed natural law. But natural can induce a linguistic sleight of hand deceiving one into thinking that predictable regularity signifies a causal derivative that excludes rational inferences of a conscious intelligence first cause (it does not).
A priori exclusions based on the word natural are common to atheist folklore. If we are able to test physical phenomenon in the present, based on a presumption that natural laws are not arbitrary and in a state of constant flux, then we need only look back in time to point of origin and presume the same. Sure there are gaps but they will be filled in time. A first or initial cause does require a philosophical predicate namely, that matter and energy are in some sense eternal. Not with respect to time perhaps but that they preexisted the universe in some manner or form. Always was. No causal antecedent required.
Puny. That is man and his investigative tools with respect to the universe. That can also describe man's explanatory visions of origins. If the universe is finite and had a big bang moment, speculation is an apt term describing our attempts to explain. Presumptions of predictable governing laws are of limited utility.
As fellow TTer Nullasalus points out demarcating the natural from deviations from it in advance of discovered knowledge can be problematic. Miracles can be defined as deviations from natural laws. From antiquity they were recognized as evidence of one with the ability to control and alter natural laws. Rising from the dead in three days following a brutal death is the quintessential miracle known throughout the world but not the only one.
Cosmological bylaws have been discussed at Telic Thoughts before. Top Down Information would be the perspective used to assess causality from a divine source. But what of miracles? Are they still evident? Not only evident but commonplace. There is no scientific explanation possible for free will. Free will enables rational choices. Choices between a paradigm holding that conscious intelligence arises in some indefinable way from unconscious matter, that eternal refers to a property and mass and energy and not its creator and that predictable regularities of nature owe their causal origin to nothing other than nature and unexplained physical pathways which generated it in its present form.
In recognizing there is a rational alternative to the previously described materialist, just is, paradigm, believers accept natural laws and bylaws as derived from an original conscious intelligence- the source of free will and laws of nature.
telicthoughts.com
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Salvador T. Cordova Says:
October 29th, 2010 at 3:22 pm Science is dangerous because it makes people question everything
I don't think questioning things is dangerous
and is particularly harsh on supernatural tracts and anything canonical.
Yes, and thus cannonical beliefs that survive the harsh tests of science become believable and cannonical beliefs that don't will not be believed.
That's why witchraft and witchdoctoring and paganism have mostly faiedl and the Abrahamic religions have persisted.
Science is dangerous because it makes people question everything
And along the line of questioning, is why would the belief that there is no God be a hopeful message for humanity. What's the scientific answer to that question.
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