Saying that hypotheses are religiously regulated as to the nature of their postulates does deny that hypotheses are “objective” - if that means “neutral.” But how you get from that to the accusation that this position requires the denial of justice, love, unselfishness and other moral virtues is (wildly!) beyond me. It does no such thing.
It does mean that justice may be seen differently owing to different divinity beliefs - and there are differing theories of justice. Ditto for love and unselfishness. But that doesn’t deny either that differing theories can have significant overlap or that there are real moral values in the world.
My aim in pointing out such religious control is to urge Christians to explore the distinctive view their Divinity belief has for such theory differences, and construct theories that presuppose the God revealed ion Jesus Christ. If that seems “blockheaded” then I accept being a blockhead.
Granted my experience is very limited, but this is what I gathered from an online dialogue with a physicist:
heymike3: How does M-theory explain the occurrence of EM noise as happening without a cause?
Without describing any causal relationships. Obviously.
heymike3: Right… so how does M-theory explain the occurrence?
M-Theory makes more specific novel testable predictions than “I don’t know why.”
heymike3: Yep… and any event considered to be without cause is necessarily unexplainable.
The form of O’s Razor I don’t object to says that if two theory’s are equal in explanatory power, but one makes fewer hypotheses than the other, the one with fewer hypotheses is to be preferred. In short, why postulate 5 entities when postulating 3 will explain just as well?
But in practice those who like the 5 hypothesis theory will always say it explains better. And many theorists jump too soon to appeal to O’s Razor. They point out that their preferred theory makes fewer hypotheses long before they even attempt to show it explanatory power is equal to the theory they want to reject.
If you believe - as I do - that scripture tells us that knowing God through Christ effects the whole of life, then it should effect our theories too. And if there’s a distinct perspective for Christian theorizing, then we have an obligation to present that to other Christians and help them develop that perspective in their fields of work.
Another way to put that is to say that when it comes to theoretical work, part of our love obligation is to develop that Xn view and share it with others - Xn and nonXn alike.
The position I argue for has to do with sorting out hypotheses, and in no way denies moral values such as justice, love, and unselfishness. But people have made theories about all of them and every other moral value. And I’m advocating a distinctively Christian point of view for theorizing about them or anything else. If that’s being a blockhead then I’m a blockhead. But I don’t see why contrasting the Christian from all other views of them is evil.
I don’t need scripture to tell me that knowing God through Christ effects the whole of life. Knowing God through Christ through scripture effects the whole of life. The problem is that there is no instance of the fingerpost in scripture for God. For Christ in God. There is no anachronism of divine intelligence. Be that as it may, I am more than capable for myself of theorizing Christianly. But not overlapping with you in your idiosyncratic myth. We cannot communicate therefore.
I can work with the act of Excession of God in Christ. The ultimate Outside Context Problem. I want it to be so. And it certainly affects theorizing. But not about nature in any way except as its ground and its transcendence. Nature makes God absurd, meaningless. And God does not explain nature one scintilla. Having got to truly good, competent God, even though I lost my grip on Him, His grip on me persists in wanting to live according to love. God enduring nature in solidarity with us is a wonderful idea,
No theory of science above grounding can be affected one scintilla God or no God.
You start by saying that you don’t need scripture to tell you that the whole of life is effected by knowing God, but you end by saying that God’s very existence makes no difference to any theory in science.
Those cannot both be true since one contradicts the other.
I think it can be clearly shown that theory-making is not done independently of the assumptions of the theorist, and that some divinity belief or other is among those assumptions.
Roy
Professor emeritus at the college of New Jersey in philosophy, religion, and logic since 1968 certainly doesn’t sound like an extremist to me.
The point was that despite my objection to idea that religious neutrality is impossible, this certainly doesn’t mean I think the book is without merit.
The objectivity of science has nothing to do with any objective quality of hypotheses. The objectivity of science comes from the provision of written procedures which anyone can follow to get the same result no matter what they want or believe. This is a sound basis for a reasonable expectation that others should agree with these results.
I certainly said nothing of the sort. The point was that these are also ideals we strive for and claiming that they are impossible serves no useful purpose. (I have most often heard this used for the case of unselfishness.) Religious neutrality in the public schools of a religiously diverse society is likewise a worthwhile ideal to strive for. If a teacher uses “religious neutrality is impossible” rhetoric to justify forcing their religion on my children in classes they teach in a public school then I will fight to get them fired.
I think it is highly unlikely you do anything of the sort. The College of New Jersey is a public university, after all. But maybe you can see the point I was making, even if it wasn’t in any way applicable to you personally.
And when has such a thing actually been used in science to choose one theory or hypothesis over another?
Now it is true that science has a tendency to explain more diverse things with a lesser number of entities as time goes on. It is one of the reasons why string theory is so appealing, because it hopes to explain a zoo of particles as the different vibrational modes of a single entity. But I personally don’t think parsimony or Occam’s Razor has anything to do with. Rather it is because the explanation with fewer entities actually explains more – not only explaining the different phenomenon but also why they are different.
I am only likely to think these pejoratives apply if you are saying that people in other religions are incapable of moral values such as justice, love, and unselfishness.
I would only consider it dubious you can speak for all Christians regarding such moral values or dictate how they must think about them.
And I was wrong. I should have said affects. But there is no contradiction whatsoever. The affect is meaning. God gives meaning. That doesn’t change QM, general or special relativity, abiogenesis or the emergence of consciousness, the fallacy of fine tuning or your entirely natural idiosyncrasy.
Do you also object to Matthew 12:30?
No. I only object to your assumption of authority to dictate the meaning of scripture to the world. Matthew 12:30 does not say religious neutrality is impossible, or that religious neutrality is not a worthwhile ideal in a religiously diverse society.
The fact that Jesus was God does not equal God giving the right to speak for Him over to some guy claiming to be Christian. Nor does it give Christianity ownership or monopoly over God.
Religious neutrality can be our agreement to disagree about those things which we disagree about. To what extent this is possible is an open question. But I’d like to be optimistic that we can accomplish this, as much as it is possible for people to have the freedom to answer these questions without legal coercion.
Religious neutrality is not an individual’s ability to be religiously neutral.
I mean the distinction we made above between scientific theories and interpretations which are metaphysical (or in your terminology, religious) ideas about what those theories mean.
Yes, I understand what you’re saying. But what I can’t get clear is whether you think these general differences change the way they do science. Would Heisenberg and Einstein do different experiments or not? You’ve said both yes and no – those are very different positions.
First, what you’re calling “interpretation of theories” is actually part of every theory. Without it you wouldn’t know what the theory is about. So it matters whether a subatomic particle is “purely physical,” “purely mathematical,” or a complete fiction we invent - as Mach held. So, for example, E=mc2 is worthlessness we know what the symbols stand for.
The answer to the question about experiments & calculations is: sometimes differences in the meaning of a theory’s terms do create differences in calculations and/or experiments. That’s because theory differences in math do. Theorists who are Intuitionists in math will not accept any proof that uses Cantor’s theory of transfinite numbers, for example, because they take it to be “meaningless.” When the astro-physicist Ramsey saw the experiment that was supposed to confirm the existence of a subatomic particle, his response to seeing the predicted light-streak in the gas was: “All I saw was a light streak.” That was because, following Mach, he held to the theory of reality (Logical Positivism) that says all we can know are our own perceptions. He said in another place: I read about the vast distances of interstellar space and the vast size of galaxies, but I don’t believe it. They are dots of light in my visual field. (I didn’t put quotes around that because I’m recalling it off the top of my head. But that’s the gist of his remark.)
So why would someone like that want to do experiments t find new particles?
Sorry, but I don’t understand the last sentence.
I figured you ignored my last comment to you, but maybe it was unintentional.
You may still respond to it:
I’m saying an individual cannot be religiously neutral. I might have crossed a term with your use of it, so that sentence should be not be taken in reference to your book.
I am not assuming any special authority for myself on this point, and I don’t get your reference to Matt 12:30. I never cited that in support of this position, and I don’t know of anyone else who did either.
There is a long tradition of Calvinist thinking that has emphasized this position. That tradition has seen a connection between such biblical statements as when Paul says that all things are made new by knowing Christ and we are to bring every thought into captivity to Christ. Paul even contrasts doing that with being drawn into affirming Greek philosophies about the cosmos depending on “the elements” (Gal. 1:4-5)
There is much more to the scriptural basis for this point that I can’t type here - there have been entire books devoted to it.
Sorry if I gave any impression of having invented this position. That wasn’t my intention.
Roy
Then we agree about that.
Either knowing God in Christ changes everything or it doesn’t. You can’t believe it both changes everything and that it doesn’t impact theories.That is a contradiction - if I’m understanding you correctly.
But perhaps you have another way of thinking of the impact?
I strongly disagree with this, and I’d like to see some evidence that any significant fraction of physicists agree with you here. In my experience, physicists do experiments, measure things, and make up theories to model those measurements. What those “things” really does not matter for the practice of physics, and it’s that practice we learn as the craft of doing science. Thoughts about what the relationship is between observation and Reality are speculations to engage in when you’re not doing something useful.
As long as those symbols have well-defined relationships to measurable quantities, no, it really doesn’t matter what they stand for in an ultimate sense. This is why you really cannot distinguish the worldview of scientists based on the science they do.
Such physicists may exist but among the hundreds I’ve worked with personally, I’ve encountered exactly zero instances.
ETA: I’m also unclear as to what such scientists would actually do. If they don’t think there’s value in investigating hypothesized entities, what are they spending their time as scientists doing?