Scientist should never give up searching, otherwise they will never find an answer. And God should not be a placeholder for scientific ignorance. Besides, I believe that God is more interested in interacting with his people than in tweaking DNA.
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You’re assuming that there is a naturalistic explanation. But that is not a given—in fact it’s a main point of contention. An ongoing failure to find a naturalistic explanation may not be “scientific ignorance” at all, but the opposite: scientific evidence pointing to supernatural action.
It’s incumbent on ID to be beware the god-of-the-gaps; similarly, EC to beware assuming a priori uninterrupted naturalism. Neither position gets carte blanche. Isn’t to believe otherwise the end of discussion?
To the question posed at the end of the post linked: yes or no?
Can science provide evidence for supernatural agency? - #19 by MarkE .
Agree that saving faith does not and should not depend on signs and wonders.
However, perhaps for another topic is how EC meshes with Romans 1:20:
“For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”
It may, but the instances to which I refer (including documented ones in my own not-quite-yet lifetime of threescore and ten and then some ; - ) do not include any supernatural ones where natural laws were broken. There are just a slew with preternatural timing and placing, many in sets of disjunct events tied together only by the objective meaning induced amongst them, and not just one-off coincidences. But then, when Jesus calmed the Sea of Galilee no natural laws were broken either – a man in a boat said something during a storm.
No. God can never be a scientific hypothesis… NOT anything I would ever call God anyway. Definitely contrary to the reasons I believe in any of this God and spiritual stuff.
Suggest to whom? To me? No. Besides, there has been enormous progress in explaining the origin of life naturalistically. All the evidence points to a naturalistic origin and nothing points to a supernatural origin. The best you can do is point to the singularity of the beginning of the universe and the origin of all the laws of nature and say that many explanations fit those circumstances equally well in that we have no objective evidence to uphold any of them.
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Praise God!
39 And he awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.
40 He said to them, “Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?”
41 And they were filled with great fear and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”
Mark 4:39-41
The sudden—unnatural—ceasing of the wind was precisely a display of divine intervention. That’s why they were filled with fear.
The disciples exclamation could be paraphrased as, “Who then is this, that can even override the laws the nature with a command?”
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“There is active scientific research about the origin of life (a field of study called abiogenesis), and currently no consensus exists among experts on a plausible scientific explanation for the origin of life. Perhaps it was one of those miraculous events for which there can be no scientific explanation, or perhaps scientists will eventually develop a plausible explanation.”
You seem anxious to stop scientific investigation.
One of my favorite verses, and I think a good example also of accomadation, of God meeting us where we are.
Or that even with an infinite number of universes with different values for physical constants, you still have a probability of near-zero of getting the values we have.
I didn’t at all mean to imply it wasn’t or to detract from it and the sovereignty of the Person involved, but just to point out that no natural laws were broken. And that is still God’s frequent M.O. in his providential interventions in the lives of his children today. How he does it is a wonderful mystery!
We know from the principle of mediocrity that there are infinite universes from eternity. Furthermore it’s not chance that six measured constants have the value that they do, it’s necessity; nature self tunes.
This a little out of date, though it is certainly an area of very active research. There has been considerable progress recently in putting together the ways the chemical processes of life could have come about. Other things to look up in order to find this research is “metabolism first theories” and “pre-biotic evolution.” Of course the chemical processes of life are many and very complicated so this is a long and difficult project. Nevertheless I wouldn’t be surprised to see a robust theory for how all this happened to be put together in my own life time. Most importantly, I think we have the basic theoretical framework and we are just piecing together all the chemical details. Once they have that, they will probably be able to run computer simulations and even calculate some of the probabilities.
For sure, no sense of you detracting here.
But wouldn’t you agree that Jesus’ miracles, by definition, involved breaking natural laws:
Storm calmed: laws of physics
Water into wine: laws of chemistry
Walk on water: law of gravity
Lazarus raised: law of entropy
Again, abiogenesis is being most ably progressed in research like Nick Lane’s in The Vital Question.
Naturalism, physicalism, materialism is the given as there is no (rational) warrant whatsoever for supernaturalism until we get to the intentionality - or not - of the (eternal, infinite) ground of being.
I think there is some confusion here. Philosophical naturalism is the belief that the natural world is all there is. Methodological naturalism, however, allows for the supernatural, but excludes it in scientific investigations. And that makes it very powerful for science because we can investigate the natural world and conduct controlled experiments. It was a great blessing when we started to unlock the workings of the brain–patients who experienced seizures could be diagnosed with epilepsy and given medication, instead of subjecting them to exorcisms. And in our daily lives, we actually operate by methodological naturalism quite a bit. If a dead body is discovered, we don’t assume that an act of God was the cause of death.
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And if our toilet is clogged, we do not assume it was demons. Most of the time.
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"We know from the principle of mediocrity that there are infinite universes from eternity. "
But we have no reason to know that the principle of mediocrity is valid under any circumstance, and particularly with regard to these questions.
If we draw from a distribution that has some reasonable level of resemblance to a normal distribution, then our chances of getting something close to the average are pretty good. But if we look closely at any one example of something in the real world (above the molecular level), it’s likely that we can find something unusual about it, because the number of possible features to look at is huge. Claiming that something must follow the principle of mediocrity, without evidence, is closer to the gambler’s fallacy than the principle of mediocrity.
We have examined one universe. Even that was not randomly selected. So we have no scientific basis whatsoever for assuming that our universe is either ordinary or unusual - there’s no valid statistics when the sample size is 1. If multiple universes exist that different significantly in properties, then it is quite likely that our universe is unusual in some way.
Can science provide evidence of the supernatural? As already noted, part of the challenge is defining exactly what are the limits of science. Personally, I would tend to say that an ID-type conclusion of design would be based on the failure of science to find an explanation rather than based on science.
Could that happen? In principle, yes. If we agree that actual scientific data on birthdates and experiences shows that horoscopes are no better or worse advice for anyone, regardless of birthday, then it seems that actually finding a correlation between horoscope applicability and birthday would constitute scientific support for the supernatural in some sense. We could imagine having a time machine and taking a portable GC/mass spec to first-century Cana, generating quantitative data on an abrupt transition from water to wine. But the evidence of the Bible, other historical sources, and personal experience indicate that events which clearly do not conform to known natural laws are quite rare. So it’s reasonable to start by trying natural-law explanations. The usual error of ID-type claims is extremely premature claims to have ruled out natural law explanations.
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The latter three, yes. But the storm stopping suddenly could be said to be miraculous timing, not a necessarily a violation of physics. It still demonstrates God’s sovereignty over the material world, and my refrain, …over timing and placing.