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From: stevesu@azure.UUCP (Steve Summit)
Newsgroups: net.misc,net.religion,net.philosophy,net.physics
Subject: Re: Can Creationists Contribute to Science?
Message-ID: <2474@azure.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 10-Jan-84 02:32:07 EST
Article-I.D.: azure.2474
Posted: Tue Jan 10 02:32:07 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 6-Jan-84 04:27:51 EST
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Organization: Tektronix, Beaverton OR
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When I read the "Proposal to Eliminate the Deleterious Effects of
Religious Beliefs upon Science and Education," I somehow missed
the title and the word "Creationists" therein, and found the
article quite reasonable indeed.  (I didn't scrutinize it
terribly carefully, and the objections several people have raised
about the incompatibility of repeatability and divine
intervention are valid.)  However, some of the other suggestions
in the article are terribly important, and may be missed if you
assume a knee-jerk attitude against "those creationists."

Laura asks who except the creationists and the ecologists "finds
that the philosophy of science is not neutral enough for their
liking."  I do.  I don't have time right now to write a long
essay, and I'm not at all interested in getting in a flaming,
nit-picking discussion with the flaming nit-pickers out there.
I'll give this a try: bear in mind that it is fairly informal and
subjective.

Science is a religion.  It is considerably more detached and
rational than conventional religions, but blind faith in the
value of rationality is a religion, too.  Science demands faith
just as religion does.  You have to have faith in the veracity of
logic.  You have to have faith in the mechanism of cause and
effect.  You have to have faith that observed regularities will
repeat themselves.  You have to have faith in the existence of
the world around around you and your perceptions of it.

In fact, the aforementioned "Proposal" is considerably less
neutral and skeptical than it could be in that it assumes most of
these faiths.  I am uncomfortable with some of its "assumptions
basic to science" (section B.2) such as "The natural world is
lawful and reproducible" and "The laws of logic are valid."

Please do not immediately dismiss me as an addled philosopher. 
Of course, we take most of these things for granted today.  That
is, in fact, a cultural phenomenon.  In times past, the existence
of God was universally taken for granted.  Is there any
fundamental difference?  There are primitive tribes today which
are utterly incapable of dealing with "obvious" concepts such as
models and regularity.  They refuse to identify a picture of an
elephant as an elephant.  If you point out that it has rained
every day this week and that it is cloudy and windy today, they
will not even venture a guess as to whether it will rain today. 
They are not stupid, or wrong.  Their enculturated philosophy is
just different.

I am not saying that we should not take cause and effect for
granted, and I am not saying that we should take God for granted.
I am merely pointing out that it is just as impossible to prove
conclusively the existence of either of them.

You cannot prove anything without some fundamental postulates,
and they are always going to be subject to doubt.  You are going
to have to have implicit faith in your postulates, to believe in
them just as you might believe in God.  Even if your proof
contains no explicit postulates, it is implicitly bound by the
nature of its being a proof to require the implicit acceptance of
logic, and probably of cause and effect as well.

I am not arguing against science.  Science (and technology) have
rather unquestionably done us some good.  Blind faith in them,
however, is just as dangerous as blind faith in God.  There is no
question in my mind that the current "implicitly or explicitly
espoused definitions of science" have a major effect on our world
view.  Non-scientific societies may not believe as strongly in
rationality and the unemotional application of technology as we
do.  Without them, they probably cannot discover concepts such as
nuclear physics.  They also would not consider achieving a
desired result, like ending a war, with a simpleminded cause like
dropping a technological fruit, the atomic bomb, on a couple of
cities full of people, especially without exhausting every other
alternative.  (Yes, there have always been wars.  I think the
achievement of nuclear warfare is both quantitatively and
qualitatively different.  I think the current nuclear dilemma
confirms this.)

Science can never stand completely apart from society and its
inherent foibles and irrationalities. The  "Proposal" is in fact
deficient in this regard as well.  No matter how neutral, how
detached scientific investigation is, the very subjects it
chooses to investigate are influenced by, and have an impact
upon, the culture in which the investigation is carried out.  I
am personally offended that anyone could even conceive of the
concept of a computer achieving human-like intelligence, let
alone going out and trying to implement it.

Life cannot be reduced to an equation, to be manipulated with
cool, detached rationality.  The only thing you can truly do with
it is appreciate it, and any attempts to analyze or explain it
must always be taken with a grain of salt.  After all, you really
can't prove that God didn't create the heaven and the earth (he
could have faked the contradicting evidence) and you can't even
prove you're not dreaming.

What am I trying to get at here?  I should point out that I do
not wholly believe in either the conventional explanations of
creation or evolution.  The book of Genesis is a bit too
simpleminded and magical, but the Origin of the Species is too
detached and scientific to account for the beauty and splendor of
the world we live in.

I'm going to try to wind this down into some sort of conclusion. 
At the risk of sounding like the Californian I am, be mellow. 
Don't take anything too seriously.  Science and technology can
help you out, and so can religion.  There's some stuff in the
Bible about loving your fellow man that we could use more of
today.  Neither science nor religion will help you much if you're
marooned on a desert island in search of food, or marooned in a
sea of people in search of love.  You need some practical,
personal (intuitive, emotional) skills as well.

I'm sorry for the rambling style of this article.  I could (and
should) write an essay about each of these paragraphs, but this
is too long for net.misc already.  I've thrown in a lot of my
half-baked ideas without adequate explanation.  I'd be interested
in carrying on this discussion, particularly in a calm and
friendly manner.  (Unfortunately, I don't subscribe to
net.religion or net.philosophy because, last time I looked, they
were bogged down in nit-picking and definitions and looked
positively rabid.)  What happened to the net.origins that got
proposed in net.physics a while back?  It looked like it could be
interesting.

                              Good night,
                                         Steve Summit
                                         tektronix!tekmdp!stevesu