The Nature of Scientific Inquiry - Contrasted with Creation "Science"

Are you agreeing that under some circumstances the inclusion of a supernatural entity in an explanation is not in violation of occam's razor? I am going to change (or better articulate/understand) my position - I now understand how unsupportable the statement "there can be no naturalistic explanation" is.Out of all the explanations I have heard, all of them fall down except for one supernatural one, which I therefore tentatively hold.[added in edit - forgot about this]What exactly is supernatural physics?This message has been edited by JT, 08-18-2004 05:58 PM

Ahh, wise man. If supernatural explanations can (maybe) be allowed to pass occam's razor, then they could be compared with each other. The vast majority of the "infinite amount of simpler" explanations are completely speculative; we have absolutely no evidence relating to them. Cutting these explanations, and going with more complex ones, is not violating occam's razor because we need to disregard them.We are left with others, including the Judeo-Christian God. We can examine these different ideas and discard those which are necessary to disregard, so as to not break occam's razor. In the end, I believe the Judeo-Christian God is the only idea which remains. By definition noone can win that bet. If something actually is supernatural, it is impossible to prove it is supernatural, so nobody wins that bet. If something isn't supernatural, that will be shown sooner or later, and the "supernaturalist" loses. I do agree, though, that many things formerly thought of as supernatural have been shown to be natural.

If the supernatural explanation wasn't offering salvation/damnation it wouldn't matter.[added in edit]In terms of how it would affect life, it wouldn't matter, although I would prefer the less-useful truth. The other explanation could be used to make predictions and stuff, but not believed.This message has been edited by JT, 08-18-2004 07:02 PM

Ok, then I would not "hold it tentatively." That doesn't change my point.

I understand that according to scientific method, you cannot prove a theory/hypothesis, you can only falsify it. But I am not trying to prove a theory, I am trying to falsify one, so I don't see my mistake. I agree that it is possible that we know nothing of the real world, and that everything is an illusion, but I don't see how that applies here. I just drafted an opening post for a thread involving genetics/cellular biology, and will be posting it soon-ish.This message has been edited by JT, 08-20-2004 01:33 PM

What do you mean by "religious truth?" Is "religious truth" similar to metaphysical truth? Thanks for the reminder, and I agree with you.

"Problems with Chromosomal Evolution - From Circular to Linear" is a thread I just opened up.