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From: mcgeer@ucbvax.ARPA (Rick McGeer)
Newsgroups: net.politics,net.religion
Subject: Re: "Secular Humanism" banned in the US Schools.
Message-ID: <10706@ucbvax.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 18-Oct-85 14:26:02 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.10706
Posted: Fri Oct 18 14:26:02 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 20-Oct-85 04:39:11 EDT
References: <10673@ucbvax.ARPA> <1744@akgua.UUCP>
Reply-To: mcgeer@ucbvax.UUCP (Rick McGeer)
Organization: University of California at Berkeley
Lines: 39
Xref: watmath net.politics:11571 net.religion:8011

In article <1744@akgua.UUCP> rjb@akgua.UUCP (R.J. Brown [Bob]) writes:
>
>Rick,
>
>Sounds good that everything is explicable by the great god
>Science until you run into somebody like Goedel (who if
>we are allowed to extrapolate his ideas) predicting that
>we will NOT be able to explain it all without reference
>outside the System.
>
>Maybe God is the Outside-the-System reference...maybe not ?
>
>
>Bob Brown {...ihnp4!akgua!rjb}

You're taking a few liberties with Goedel.  His statement  concerned the
completeness and correctness of axiomatic systems,  and I would not call
any of the sciences axiomatic systems.  Heisenberg is a better citation
for you...

Anyway, these speculations are interesting but fundamentally unanswerable.
Hence they pall after a time.  My point is that many things are knowable.
All that they require is that we trust our senses and our observations more
than we trust revealed word.  Our observations tell us that evolution is a
fact.  Revealed word tells us that the world was created in 4004 BC, or
whatever.  ``Creation Science'' mostly consists of asserting that our
observations could be flawed, because all observations may be flawed: there
is no statement of observations which conflict with those commonly reported.
The case is that since observations may be flawed, and since the observed
phenomena conflict with revealed word, the revealed word should be taught as
an alternate theory.

Needless to say, I find that argument rather unconvincing.  A better argument
for teh religionists is to make their peace with science, as Catholic
theologians have long since done.  The Catholics now argue that Genesis is a
metaphor, God's way of explaining complex truths to ignorant children.  If
I were a theologian, I should find this argument quite appealing.

						Rick.