Creation, Evolution, and faith

Hi kbertsche, Are you kidding me? Nature is real kbertsche. No-one wrote, composed, edited or redacted nature. Books can be made-up, imagined. They can be full of lies. They can be written in honest error. Nature cannot. Your retreat into solipsism does not solve this problem. Even in the internally consistent world of the matrix, your book could still be fiction. You must worry not only that reality is fictional, but that the book is fictional, even within that reality. Science need worry about neither. I am noting that one is logically valid, the other is not. This undermines your claims that religion and science use logic and reason in comparable ways. First, this is nonsense. The presence of creationists on this very board who deny evolution and claim that the world is 6000 years old is enough to refute this piffle. Religion does make claims about the natural world. About its history, its cosmology, its origins. I could go on.Secondly, you posit the existence of a "spiritual world", but you do so with no reason. WI ask you what spiritual world? Where or what is it? How do we know it's not a figment of theist imaginations? Science does not concern itself with studying what cannot be evidenced. Religion does and your "spiritual world" is a prime example. This is another huge difference between the two and it undermines your contentions of similarity. Addressed above and completely untrue. You must know that this is not true. You know perfectly well that religion does make claims about physical reality, you have simply chosen to ignore it. The claim that Christ rose bodily from the dead is a claim about physical reality. You are only deceiving yourself. Except that the evidence for quarks is experimental, repeatable, observable, falsifiable, etc. The evidence for God is non-existent. Bullcrap. I have already addressed this and you ignored it. No scientist need believe in quarks, not even those who study them. Christians must believe in God. There is a major difference which you seem to want to ignore. And there is your problem. You must assume a divine Bible, which assumes a divine. you must assume a God to find evidence of your god. You must assume that the Bible is accurate and appeal to its authority. Science need do no such thing. You have failed to show any similarity. But both, you claim, use logic and reason in comparable ways. It seems though, that the only logic and reason that you can show us is appeal to the authority of your sacred text of choice. This is pathetically short of the levels of logic and reason employed by science.Mutate and Survive

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In message 32 you also said:

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"But many aspects of religious faith ARE based on reason."

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Yes. The Christian faith, for example, is based on the claims of the Bible. Figuring out these claims requires reason. (How many times have I said this so far?)

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We are talking about religious faith. You have stated that it is based on reason, but the only argument that you have put forth so far is "because the Bible says so".

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No--I have argued for reason and evidence in figuring out what the Bible says.

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That is not reason. That is blind faith. Nowhere in science is a theory upheld "because the textbook says so".

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We uphold theories in science "because nature says so." Analogously, we uphold theological claims "because the Bible says so." A Christian theologian deals with the Bible analogously to how a scientist deals with nature.

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In science claims are tested independent of the claim. In religious faith the evidence is the claim. It is circular. It is blind.

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I am trying to explain the analogies between nature and Scripture, between science and theology. In the DOING of science, nature is taken as a given. In the DOING of Christian theology, the Bible is taken as a given. It is analogous.Many here don't like this, because they don't take the Bible as a given. Perhaps there are mystics who analogously don't take nature as a given. Belief in the truth of the Bible and the reality of nature both require a step of faith, as the OP and my Message 25 mentioned. There is evidence (but not proof) for both the truth of the Bible and the reality of nature, of course, but that's not the topic of this thread.I realize that many here want to pull this thread into a "why should we believe the Bible" argument. I'm not really interested in yet another argument on this topic. I'm more interested in discussing the topic of the OP. If you REALLY want reasons to believe the Bible, there are many threads here which have discussed the topic, and many other good websites and good books.

However, it doesn't appear that anyone is using reasons to conclude that these claims are true. Instead, these claims are believed to be true through blind faith. Which is the same as saying, "Because the Bible says so." Science determines how reality is from reality itself. Religion is a dogmatic belief of how reality is without any reference to reality. That's the difference.You want to pretend that the beliefs derived from the Bible only pertain to the Bible. They don't. They apply to everything outside of the Bible. Religious beliefs states that nature is a certain way because the Bible says so. This belief is dogmatic and based on blind faith. This is the opposite of science. They are not analogous. They are opposites. Then why did you state that belief in the Bible as being true is based on logic and reason? That is what we are discussing in this thread. This thread is not Theology, Evolution, and Faith. It is Creation, Evolution, and Faith. The act of Creation is about nature, not figuring out what the Bible says. Creation is about God being a real entity outside of the Bible.

Hi kbertsche, Not as many times as it has been answered and addressed, so you needn't act as though your point is being ignored. It is not. But this has nothing -absolutely nothing - to do with the logical basis for religious ideas. Sure, you use reason to interpret the book. What we keep pointing out to you is that you are not using reason as the basis for the actual religious beliefs themselves. Interpreting a book is one thing. Deciding whether or not to believe what the book says is quite another. That is the distinction that undermines your comparison. A false analogy. Compare and contrast;A scientist studies reality in order to find out what exists in reality.A Christian studies the Bible, not merely in order to find out what the Bible says. He studies the Bible to find out about reality.Example; the divinity of Jesus. You can study the Bible. You can see what it says about the divinity of Jesus. Let us suppose that we reach the conclusion that, yes, the Bible does say that Jesus is divine.This would be fine if Christians claimed only that "The Bible says that Christ is divine.". But that is not what Christians claim. They claim that Christ actually is divine. That he is absolutely real, that he really is divine, that this is all much more than some story in a book.If Christians restricted themselves to drawing conclusions about what the Bible says, your comparison would be valid. In practice though, they do not. They use the Bible as a springboard for making claims about actual reality. No Christian I have ever met regards Christ as merely a character in a book. They regard him as real, not just historically real, but usually real and contemporary, a very real divine presence. That is clearly a claim about reality, not just a claim about what it says in a book.Scientists on the other hand study reality directly. They make claims about reality (usually far more tentatively than theists do), but this is justified, since they are studying reality. Science has cut out the middleman.In summary, science makes claims about reality based upon observation of reality.Religion makes claims about reality based upon observing what it says in a book.If you can't see the distinction there, then I despair for you kbertsche, I really do.Mutate and SurviveEdited by Granny Magda, : typo

And what do logic and reason tell us about the biblical claims of a worldwide flood?

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

I think what kbertsche is saying is that logic and reason will tell you what the Bible means in those passages. Is it talking about a worldwide flood ? a local flood ? other humans survived ? everybody perished ? etc.Since the author had one intended meaning, the passage can only have this one meaning in reality. He is saying you use reason and logic to determine what that meaning is.

That's nice.But what do you do when empirical evidence contradicts the "logic and reason" that the bible leads you to?That is the real question we have here.All the logic and reason in the world can't make the biblical flood story agree with the facts produced by scientific investigation. The early creationist geologists seeking to "prove" the global flood gave up just about 200 years ago. It's been downhill ever since.So what do logic and reason lead you to in this case?

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

I'm coming into this thread quite late, and I'm not able to review all the ground that has presumably been covered. I appreciate kbertsche's participation here, and his first post in this thread deserves close attention. So that's where I'm starting now. I would consider this line of argument to be a misuse of the term "faith", and a misrepresentation of scientific endeavor.I'll grant that a hard-line atheist's use of the term "faith" will be skewed to draw attention to the absurdity of beliefs held in direct contradiction to observed facts. (To the extent that there are people who indulge and promote this sort of absurdity, such skewing does not constitute a "straw man".) But with respect to people who hold religious beliefs that do not conflict with observable fact, that skewed view of "faith" is a distortion; in any case, this non-absurd form of faith has nothing to do with science.Meanwhile, kb's argument is an attempt to equate the non-absurd form of religious faith (involving, say, beliefs about afterlife, the soul and other intangibles) with the thought processes that are involved in scientific research, and I would say this is wrong. Apart from the familiar notion of "Non-Overlapping Magisteria", I would cite an important difference between the cognitive realms of "building a mental image of the unknowable, based on current awareness" (religious faith) vs. "predicting outcomes of real events, based on incomplete knowledge" (empiricism).Kb's reference to "evidence... finally becoming overwhelming" has nothing to do with any established definition of "faith". When measurements of acceleration due to gravity, radioactive decay rates, the speed of light, etc, keep coming up consistently in agreement with established formulas, we are not switching to accepting those formulas "on faith" -- they are solved problems and established facts. If the measurements start coming out differently, it will be jarring news indeed, but it will be a matter of having a new problem to solve, rather than a matter of "challenging our faith".(Years ago, I read a wonderful science fiction story, called "Brain Wave", written by Poul Anderson in 1954: the premise was that the solar system, in it's rotation around the Milky Way galaxy, suddenly brought the Earth into a section of space where certain "constants" of electro-chemical conductance were slightly but abruptly shifted. The result was that all biological neuronal systems on Earth suddenly became more efficient and powerful. People and animals were suddenly a lot smarter. It's a great read, if you can find it. I think of it now, because the author effectively used the story line and characters to clarify the distinction between "religious" vs. "scientific" responses to such a jarring event.)As for the last point in kb's item #2, I'll grant that we could readily find practitioners of scientific research whose thought processes fit that description, being "convinced" that a theory is true despite "loose ends" (beyond the normal sense of reasoning under uncertainty) -- perhaps I would be inclined to behave that way myself (or might give the appearance of doing so), and maybe the Darwin quotations chosen by kb are "proof" that Darwin himself was that way. As I see it, a scientist who accepts this sort of "certainty" is at risk of failing to be scientific.But here we must distinguish between the "performance" of an individual practitioner (who can make errors in judgment), and the "competence" of the scientific method, which will override and overcome the foibles of any one misguided individual, as other individuals take a neutral or adversarial approach to that person's work. The competence of science works because it does not abide faith, or any sort of unfounded trust in people or ideas. Nothing is sacred; this is the important thing, and the discriminating factor relative to religious faith.(I use the terms "performance" and "competence" on analogy from the field of linguistics: performance is what we observe in physical occurrences of language use, while competence represents the underlying system on which performance is based. Performance is susceptible to errors, imperfections, and unavoidable physical constraints that limit its fidelity, whereas competence is the extrapolation or abstraction -- we might call it an idealization -- that comes from aggregating and structuring all the evidence that performance provides. So it is with the practice of science: individual attempts have their limitations, but there is systematicity in the aggregate.)

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.

You like to liberally sprinkle your opinions with appeals to science words such as "empirical evidence" but you have yet to demonstrate what is empirical about your claims and evidence is a matter of interpretation.Seeing as you are much more an evangelist for evolution rather than a scientist, I am not surprised. What I want to know is why you get a pass on it here.To say it didn't happen on a certain date, that's easy just pick a date and go with it. You might even sidle up with Biblical scholars because its convenient for you, although you reject everything else they have to say as worthless.To say it didnt happen at all, that's a whole nuther matter, so you avoid that one like the plague.You are not doing science, you are simply a fellow using his credentials on a personal crusade against the Bible.

Well, once you have identified through logic and reason what the intended meaning of the author was, then the job of the biblical scholar is ''done''.And of course, the matter of if the biblical flood (your seemingly favorite biblical topic) is a possible reality in the light of the evidence, it's another subject which would of course also require logic and reason.

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Science is based on nature, as Christianity is based on the Bible.

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Are you kidding me?

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Of course not.

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Nature is real kbertsche.

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I happen to agree with you on this. But this is a metaphysical statement, not a scientific one. Reality is the province of metaphysics, not of science. The Bible and the spiritual world are equally as real as the natural world. (Note: this is another metaphysical statement.)

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No-one wrote, composed, edited or redacted nature.

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God did. (Another metaphysical/theological/philosophical claim.)

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Books can be made-up, imagined. They can be full of lies. They can be written in honest error. Nature cannot.

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Nature could be just as false, in principle. Last Thursdayism or Omphalism could be true, and we couldn't tell otherwise.

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Your retreat into solipsism does not solve this problem. Even in the internally consistent world of the matrix, your book could still be fiction. You must worry not only that reality is fictional, but that the book is fictional, even within that reality.

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In principle, yes (though I don't give much credence to solipsism).

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Science need worry about neither.

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Yes and no. In the teaching of science at the lower levels, or in the daily doing of science, there is generally no thought about whether or not one is studying reality. But good, thoughtful scientists DO think about metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of science.

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Religion does make claims about the natural world. About its history, its cosmology, its origins. I could go on.

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Certainly. Its focus is the spiritual world, but it does overlap with the natural world.

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Secondly, you posit the existence of a "spiritual world", but you do so with no reason. WI ask you what spiritual world? Where or what is it? How do we know it's not a figment of theist imaginations?

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ALL of this could be said about the "natural world." We've given no reasons to support its existence in this thread. It may equally be a figment of our imaginations.

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Science does not concern itself with studying what cannot be evidenced.

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Correction: Science does not concern itself with studying what cannot be scientifically evidenced in the natural world.

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Religion does and your "spiritual world" is a prime example. This is another huge difference between the two and it undermines your contentions of similarity.

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No--religion is also evidenced. But the evidence is of a different type than scientific evidence.

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You know perfectly well that religion does make claims about physical reality, you have simply chosen to ignore it. The claim that Christ rose bodily from the dead is a claim about physical reality.

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I do not ignore this, of course--it is central to the Christian faith. Christianity is a historical religion. Like all historical religions, it makes historical claims.

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By "truth-claims" I mean questions like "Does God REALLY exist?" and "Do quarks REALLY exist?" For both, we can provide evidence but not proof.

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Except that the evidence for quarks is experimental, repeatable, observable, falsifiable, etc.

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First, the reality of anything (including quarks) is a metaphysical concept. Science cannot answer whether or not quarks are "real."
Second, the evidence for quarks is quite indirect. All that we can test, observe, or falsify are the predictions of a model which has quarks as part of it. This is not a very good test of whether or not quarks exist.

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The evidence for God is non-existent.

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False. There are plenty of threads on EvC forum on this topic, if you are interested in it.

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No scientist need believe in quarks, not even those who study them. Christians must believe in God. There is a major difference which you seem to want to ignore.

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Far from ignoring it, I myself raised this as a difference in Message 256.

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You must assume a divine Bible, which assumes a divine. you must assume a God to find evidence of your god. You must assume that the Bible is accurate and appeal to its authority. Science need do no such thing. You have failed to show any similarity.

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False. Science must analogously assume that nature is accurate and must appeal to the authority of nature.

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Yes. The Christian faith, for example, is based on the claims of the Bible. Figuring out these claims requires reason. (How many times have I said this so far?)

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However, it doesn't appear that anyone is using reasons to conclude that these claims are true. Instead, these claims are believed to be true through blind faith.

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If you really want to investigate these more foundational questions (reasons to trust the biblical claims) I'm sure you can find plenty of threads here on EvC Forum.

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Science determines how reality is from reality itself. Religion is a dogmatic belief of how reality is without any reference to reality. That's the difference.

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No, you are making the same metaphysical error as GM. Reality is the province of metaphysics, not science. Nature is the province of science. Science seeks a scientific explanation of how nature works. Religion seeks a religious explanation of how the spiritual world works (and yes, it does make some crucial historical claims in the process).

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I realize that many here want to pull this thread into a "why should we believe the Bible" argument. I'm not really interested in yet another argument on this topic.

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Then why did you state that belief in the Bible as being true is based on logic and reason?

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I don't see where I quite said this in this thread. What I've said is that religious faith involves logic and reason.

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That is what we are discussing in this thread. This thread is not Theology, Evolution, and Faith. It is Creation, Evolution, and Faith. The act of Creation is about nature, not figuring out what the Bible says. Creation is about God being a real entity outside of the Bible.

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Actually, the main topic of the thread is whether or not "faith" is present in science, and how this is different than or similar to religious faith. The question of whether or not there is evidence or reason in religious faith was a secondary discussion, which threatens to derail the thread.

Sorry, scientists tend to use scientific terms.And by empirical we mean that it can be demonstrated and verified.And no, not all interpretations are equal. Some follow directly from the evidence, while others are a great stretch. I can present evidence. In the case of the global flood purported to have happened about 4,350 years ago, I can also present some evidence from my own archaeological research. Not so. It didn't happen at all.There is no evidence that the earth was entirely under water at any time in the past. Certainly not at any time in human history. If you look at my posts you will find that I contradict only those parts of the bible for which there is good empirical evidence that the bible is inaccurate. The global flood is one of the ones I deal with most because:1) the date is put during historic times, most often about 4,350 years ago;
2) this is a time period in which I have done dozens of archaeological excavations, as well as many more, both earlier and later;
3) thousands of archaeologists, geologists, and other -ologists have produced evidence pertaining to the existence of a global flood; and
4) the evidence is clear; there is simply no empirical evidence for a global flood.My conclusion, based on the work of many scientists as well as my own personal investigations is that the story of a global flood did not happen as written in the bible. It is a myth.Now, what would you have us do? Censor our findings for your convenience? Accept "divine" revelation as empirical evidence? Change how science works?You criticize science for contradicting your beliefs; perhaps you could examine your beliefs in light of the evidence science has produced.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

I have answered some of this in the previous post.And no, scientific evidence does not point to a global flood in historic times.The early creationist geologists gave up trying to find evidence of a global flood about 200 years ago.Since then the case for a global flood has been disproved time and time again by repeatable, empirical evidence. DNA is just the latest field that disproves the flood at about 4,350 years ago.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

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No--I have argued for reason and evidence in figuring out what the Bible says.

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But this has nothing -absolutely nothing - to do with the logical basis for religious ideas.

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Not so. Christianity claims to be based on the Bible. So its central ideas need to be logically derivable from the Bible. Of course, this does not guarantee that the claims are true. But this is not what I am claiming in this thread.

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Sure, you use reason to interpret the book. What we keep pointing out to you is that you are not using reason as the basis for the actual religious beliefs themselves. Interpreting a book is one thing. Deciding whether or not to believe what the book says is quite another.

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Of course.

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That is the distinction that undermines your comparison.

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No, now we are back to metaphysical questions of truth and reality.

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A false analogy. Compare and contrast;

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A scientist studies reality in order to find out what exists in reality.

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No, this is a very poor, sloppy description. A scientist studies nature in order to derive a scientific explanation of the natural world.

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A Christian studies the Bible, not merely in order to find out what the Bible says. He studies the Bible to find out about reality.

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Yes; a believer is not quite analogous to a scientist. And I've been careful not to claim that he is. The analogy is between biblical scholarship and science. A biblical scholar studies the Bible to find out what the Bible says. A Christian takes the metaphysical/theological/philosophical position that this is actually true.

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Example; the divinity of Jesus. You can study the Bible. You can see what it says about the divinity of Jesus. Let us suppose that we reach the conclusion that, yes, the Bible does say that Jesus is divine.

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Yes, so far we are doing biblical scholarship. This is a basis for religious faith, but it is not in itself the same as religious faith.

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This would be fine if Christians claimed only that "The Bible says that Christ is divine.". But that is not what Christians claim. They claim that Christ actually is divine. That he is absolutely real, that he really is divine, that this is all much more than some story in a book.
... No Christian I have ever met regards Christ as merely a character in a book. They regard him as real, not just historically real, but usually real and contemporary, a very real divine presence. That is clearly a claim about reality, not just a claim about what it says in a book.

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Yes, exactly. We have gone beyond biblical scholarship to metaphysical/theological truth-claims.

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Scientists on the other hand study reality directly. They make claims about reality (usually far more tentatively than theists do), but this is justified, since they are studying reality. Science has cut out the middleman.

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Correction: Scientists study only nature, using a specific methodology with a specific type of evidence. They make only scientific claims, and only about nature.

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In summary, science makes claims about reality based upon observation of reality.

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Correction: Science makes scientific claims about nature based upon scientific observation of nature.

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Religion makes claims about reality based upon observing what it says in a book.

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Sort-of, but not quite. Biblical scholarship makes claims about what the text says, based on observation and study of the text. Religion makes truth-claims about reality which are based on biblical scholarship. So religion is based on observations of the text. But this is not the whole story, of course; it does not address the question of why the text should be believed as true. This is a huge, multifaceted topic with many threads, websites, and books written on it. I do not intend to address it in this thread.