What is science (or how do you define it?)

Faith & Science Conversation
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I agree, and I think this is one of the benefits of Christianity to other forms of theism. Not only did God tell us how we “should” behave, but he gave us an example in the form of a man who (if you are a Christian) exemplifies what it means to live this out, in a way we as humans can relate to.

On one hand, I agree that saying “because God says so” is not a satisfying answer. On the other hand, if God created all this stuff and also provided a set of guidelines of how he would like us to treat other people (with tangible benefits to ourselves and others when we do so), then it makes sense why we should care about what God declares is moral. We are free to choose not to follow these directives of course. If the commands of God follows our moral intuition and gives us a basis for justifying it, then I think we have good reason to invoke God in morality.

Ayer and the other positivists claim that non-falsifiable propositions are meaningless/not grounded in reality. Whether moral claims are factual (I.e. there really is an obligation or teleology for humans) is very important. I am not denying that harm, fairness, human wants and needs are grounded in reality. What is difficult to justify is the content of a claim that we have an “obligation” to change our own behavior/wants/needs.

An obligation or duty is a different kind of thing. It involves something intended to change our behavior from how it “is” to how it “should” be. For instance, when I see an animal eating another animal, I understand that there is animal suffering going on. At the same time, I may not feel an obligation to step in and “save” the animal suffering. If I see a human hurting another human, I may feel an obligation to step in and help. Is there a “right” response, in that I should/should not feel such an obligation, or actually intervene?

When someone says “people should step in and help others,” they often want this to be taken as a proposition or a statement that expresses truth. Now this “should” is ether relative or objective. It is relative, the content of someone’s statement is really “I would prefer it if people step in and help others.” After all, the other person is free to have their own relative “should.” Under relativity, these both seem (to me) to be equally epistemically valuable, despite me “liking” one more than the other.

Alternatively, if such a “should” is not relative and is instead ontologically grounded, then such a statement can be objective and even a true proposition. A universal obligation makes a lot of sense with the existence of God. God’s character forms the ontological status for commands which are an expression of divine will. Since God created everything, he has a “right” to say how we “ought” to behave or what good functioning people behave like. When we make moral claims about the “rightness” or “wrongness” of things, we can make these claims with reference to principles that exist outside of human thought. If God exists and cares about how we treat each other, then the idea of a duty or obligation makes a lot of sense: it comes from an agent with a will and desires. This avoids the issue of obligations being relative to each culture and thus “cancelling out.”

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If there is nothing that could potentially disprove a claim then you can’t have evidence for that claim. What you would have is an axiom, or perhaps a dogma.

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There are other religions who also claim to have objective moral systems, and they disagree with Christianity, and they disagree with one another.

I don’t see how creating something makes you moral. God could also create the universe and us and command us to do immoral things. If we are judging God’s commands on whether they are moral, then we are using our own sense of morality which makes it subjective.

This all gets back to Euthyphro’s Dilemma described by Plato. Does God command it because it is moral, or is it moral because God commands it. If something is simply moral because God commands it then morality is based on God’s opinion which makes it subjective. If God commands it because it is moral then morality would have to exist outside of God. Therefore, we wouldn’t need God to find morality.

Then ignore the positivists. Problem solved.

Is there some physical law that says you have to follow what someone claims is moral? No. You can choose to be moral or immoral. Yes, there can be consequences for your actions in the culture and society you live in, but there’s no physical law that requires it. Does that mean morality is not important? Absolutely not.

Is love some sort of objective fact of the universe like atomic spin or charge? No, it is a subjective human emotion. Does that mean my love for my mother is not important to me? Absolutely not!!! Some of the most important things in our lives are subjective, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Is morality doing something because it is your duty, or is morality doing something because it is the right thing to do? You seem to confuse obedience and morality.

Or its subjective.

I see it differently. They are really saying, “Don’t you think someone should step in and help others?” They are appealing to other peoples’ sense of morality, a subjective morality that the vast majority of us share. Human morality emerges from human culture, society, and community. It isn’t an individualistic thing. If there were only one human we wouldn’t need morality.

God’s opinion of what is moral could be just as subjective as our own opinions.

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We have a document supported by external evidence (lots of it eg written, historical artifacts etc) that is absolutely proven to be more than 2000 years old and yet you continue to make this blind claim?

The reason why an historical document supported in said manner is important in this discussion is because if you are going to deny cultural history, why on earth do these questions and discussions even matter to you? Why are you even here? You/We are here partially because you can read…which should be unsurprising but apparently not!

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Myself (and most other Christians) think it is a false dilemma and follow Aquinas and Augustine (3rd, 4th century) in saying God commands things according to his good nature, which itself is the standard for good. Thus God only commands good things according to his nature (which is not independent of him).

Creating something doesn’t make you moral in itself but it does give you authority to say what it is created “for” and thus allows you (and others) to say whether it is functioning properly or not. If I make a knife, and the purpose of the knife is to cut, I can communicate what my purpose for making the knife is (and thus others can comment on whether it “cuts well” and is thus a good/bad knife). If you are interested in exploring this argument further and its implications for morality check out Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, excellent book one of my agnostic friends bought me and we have been reading together.

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If that document did not exist, what evidence outside of that document would lead people to believe that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old?

If the physical evidence really did support a young Earth then we should be able to conclude that the Earth is young without the document. Shouldn’t we?

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That only begs the question of what makes God’s nature good, and how could we determine that?

Really? My parents created me, but if they commanded me to randomly start shooting people I would still be acting immorally if I followed their commands.

A knife is not a moral agent.

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This is odd. Given that the earth is billions of years old, of course there is no problem with documents being two thousand years old.

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I have not read all of this discussion…however in reading the O.P my first reaction is this:

If i were to say I was born on 1st July 1960, how would you prove my claim?

I would argue that surely at least a couple of methods could be used…

  1. A radiometric dating method
  2. searching through historical evidence

Now here’s the dilemma, obviously in my case, a few years of error in radiometric dating when we talk thousands of years might not seem important, however, given that the written documented evidence can point to not only a year, or month, it can specifically name a date and in more modern times the very hour and minute i was born.

So, when a Darwinian twit comes to me and makes the claim science is the authoritative method of dating over and above that of 2000 year old written evidence that points to a different timeline, then I’m sorry but i will never accept the scientific twit over the written document!

The point above is not that the science itself is the twit, its that the interpretation makes stupid claims such as “let the text explain itself” when in the next breath are the beginnings of statements that are completely at odds with the fundamental writing style, intentions, and even the credibility of the writers of said document!

The reason why the bible must be the first source of authority on this is not only the above but also because it remains consistent across its pages over a period of thousands of years of compilation and storage (e.g dead sea scrolls and codex sinaiticus). Anyone can prove beyond any doubt that during the storage period of the dead sea scrolls and of codex sinaiticus that there has been no theological corruption of the written text. So when i hear modern followers of Darwinian theory make claims to the contrary or make claims that the “inspired word of God” is not inspired because writers had no idea that they were being fed tripe (eg the Apostle Paul making references to creation), then I’m sorry but I reject any claim of that kind of nature.

I also see in another forum post even more interesting comments on this topic, a surprising reference in support of the evolutionary timeline, that “Pope Francis wrote…”

I am really surprised at this because almost all Evangelical churches believe that the Catholic church is a corruption of the Gospel. Some denominations even believe that the Catholic Church is not only responsible for the murderous deaths of 10’s of millions of innocent Christians, but that it is indeed the beast in Revelation 13…evidence for the partial fulfillment of the prophecy in Revelation 13 being the rise of Catholicism out of the empire of Rome, changing of the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday (which the church itself has published as being true), and the murder of 10’s of millions of Christians during the dark ages! As an Evangelical, i would never cite the Catholic church in support of an interpretation of what is very obviously a corruption of the theology of the bible, any more than i would trust a common thief to bank my weekly wages!

In terms of the O.P more specifically, I am interested in why it is that the question focuses on demarcation in Science? Demarcation is not science…so why the exclusion of the other aspects of demarcation…mathematics, logic and religion?

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So what? Radiometric dating addresses ages far older than 2000 years. If the evidence of radiometric dating distresses you with cognitive dissonance, that will not be negated with schoolyard taunts.

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Obviously, you can’t use radiometric dating, as no known method is capable of that specificity, or that young a sample, plus the carbon in your body is constantly recycled and would represent the age of the carrot you ate last week more than your age even if it were that precise. So we need to work on your understanding of radiometric dating.
We can’t drill a core and count the rings like we do with trees, or with ice layers or lake varves, That would only get us to a year or so, anyway.
So, historical data it is. But, how to verify that? You might be a Russian sleeper spy with false documentation. You may have stolen someone’s identity, and those documents may actually be saying something else other than telling your age, even if completely original and authentic (Ahem), You may have been born 5 months after your parents married, were home birthed, and were told you were born 9 months after the wedding (I know of cases in my own family of similar circumstances, so it happens). Point being, to get a birth date, you have to look for verification outside of what is written in the family bible, as ink and pens are held in human hands. Verification might come through census data, tax records, analysis of the paper and ink looking for counterfeit documents, interviewing others who may be direct witnesses, DNA analysis to see if you are who say you are by comparing it with other relatives. (Science can be pesky) And, if all that works out, you are off to Langley for your new job.
Point being, as you state,the Bible does indeed have good documentation of textual stability (with variations) over the past 2000 years, and even longer if we look at the Septuagint, and perhaps longer still though little survives intact, and by faith we accept it as authoritative in what God is trying to communicate to us through it. We must disagree, however, that the message he seeks to have us learn through his word is the age of rocks. For that, he gave us science.

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One way I know it is a false dilemma, is the way in which God loves himself… this is another gift from John Piper’s book Desiring God.

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Hmm… this is going to run sideways, but I had an awakening where I experienced the conviction of the Holy Spirit for my sinfulness. That wouldn’t count as an axiom or dogma. It is subjective, and yet it is self-evident to me.

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God’s self-interest is such that he commands we worship him and he has made us to experience joy in doing that… I do however see our interest for joy or happiness to be as a kind of natural law… the problem is we are often confused by the joys of this world… something which I think James Smith nailed.

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Mainly because this intends to be (in my view) a science/Christianity forum, and I was focusing on demarcation in science. Demarcation of religion is a very interesting field too.

Based on the responses there doesn’t seem to be a single agreed-upon answer/definition. This makes it difficult to distinguish between science and pseudoscience.

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Plantinga said this much about that:

“It would be very much worth knowing (if possible) which things he did do directly; to know this would be an important part of a serious and profound knowledge of the universe. The fact that such claims are science stoppers means that as a general rule they won’t be helpful; it doesn’t mean that they are never true, and it doesn’t mean that they can never be part of a proper scientific theory… It is a giant and unwarranted step from the recognition that claims of direct divine activity are science stoppers to the insistence that science must pretend that the created universe is just there, refusing to recognize that it is indeed created.”

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I personally don’t understand the personification of science in that quote. Scientists are the ones that pretend things and refuse to recognize things. And I flat out disagree that claims about what God did or didn’t do can be part of a proper scientific theory.

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is there a question somewhere here or are we simply interested in promoting hypotheticals in order to obtain some kind of credible reference in support of something that simply isn’t a reality?

Oh but there is physical evidence…lots of it (Behee, Myer, Wise, Hackett, Jeanson, Chadwick and more)

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Assuming you mean they are not the ones that pretend things.

And what, are philosophers more guilty of that, or is it the apologists?

No, scientists allow their metaphysical presumptions to bleed over. There are inescapable intuitions rational creatures cannot ever truly be free from, that is without suffering the label of being an irrationalist.

That bit about the infinite divisibility of space is important. Did that prove to you my understanding of non-Duhemian science?

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I don’t know about all of them, but I don’t think Myers’s advocates a young earth. He does not accept evolution, but is fine with an old earth I understand. And Behe accepts both an old earth, and common descent, but holds that divine intervention was needed to produce it. Don’t know about the rest, although those that are employees of ICR and AIG I can assume are YEC.