No, it’s more like a disease.
1 Like
Satan had to get permission from God to do anything at all.
2 Likes
That’s indeed a biblical metaphor and it works when we are talking about spiritual corruption of humanity. But it doesn’t work if we are talking about corrupting the physical world, which is what YECs teach. They imagine a Disney movie scene where Adam and Eve eat the fruit and then the world slowly desaturates as “sin” magically corrupts the natural world, creating thorns and viruses, and fire ants ex nihlo, changing DNA to insert deletions and mutations that cause disease, transforming the gentle vegetarian T-rexes into ferocious predators. It’s a fairy story.
4 Likes
I recently watched the original Sorcerer’s Apprentice animated feature and your description here had me picturing sin as the unstoppable flood . . . .
2 Likes
It is neither, It has no substance or presence. it cannot be transmitted nor inherited. It is a value. A description of an act.
Richard
Newton had much to his credit, but even he admitted to having stood on the shoulders of giants. Francis Bacon laid down much of the foundation for the scientific method in the prior century, and Galileo’s experiments demonstrating that gravitational acceleration was independent of weight, and his telescope observations supporting Copernicus, prepared the way for Newton.
I expect you know all this, and the point was just that science does not go back to medieval or ancient times.
2 Likes
There is no concept of natural vs. supernatural causes in science. Science studies patterns in physical phenomena and attempts to explain them in terms of other patterns. That’s pretty much all it does. If God is part of that system of patterns, then science can study him as a cause of phenomena. But if you’re treating God as one cause among many for physical phenomena, you’ve left traditional Christian theism. God is supposed to be the author of the whole thing: the phenomena, the patterns, and the scientists looking at the patterns.
If phenomena sometimes simply fail to follow the usual patterns (what might be called a miracle), then science lacks the tools to analyze them. All we can say in that case is that we have no scientific explanation.
9 Likes
What then is methodological naturalism, other than methodological antisupernaturalism?
“Sin” is not used to describe a singular concept in the Bible and multiple metaphors are used to help people understand what it is like. It can refer to specific acts of disobedience, but also propensity to rebel, corporate attitudes/actions, and selfish/prideful nature, among other things. Disease or sickness is one metaphor for sin in the Bible. Also, impurity, filth, crime, being on the wrong path, debt, failure, slavery, an enemy and some others. Sin, like the atonement that deals with it, is not something you can nail down with some kind of mechanistic definition, at least you can’t without sacrificing some of facets that are described in the Bible.
2 Likes
It’s an agreed upon procedure for a specific task, it’s not a philosophical commitment that applies to your entire worldview.
5 Likes
That’s a good point but it is surprising how strong a hold material determinism has in philosophy too. Of course it isn’t quite part of standard procedure the way methodological naturalism is in science. But the notion that to understand something you must analyze it into its constituent parts is pretty much the way analytic philosophy which is the dominant approach works.
1 Like
“anti” implies against. I would say that methdological naturalism is simply a-supernaturalism not anti-supernaturalism because science simply can’t measure and study a supernatural causes by definition. It is like trying to look for stone artifacts with a metal-detector. Wrong toolkit!
5 Likes
I don’t see much difference between being a-theist and anti-theist. For those who are neither a-theist nor anti-theist there is a category, agnostic. So why not methodological agnosticism?
Science cannot measure and study natural causes either. There is nothing in the scientific toolkit that allows the scientist to distinguish natural causes from supernatural causes. I honestly don’t understand why this is so difficult for people to grasp.
So if someone claims to be only able to study natural causes, that’s pure hogwash and question-begging.
Scientists speak in figurative, unscientific ways. We all do. I’m not sure we’d able to communicate without doing so. I don’t even know what it means to “speak in a scientific way.” Do scientists have their own specialized linguists?
Sure, we all speak in figurative ways. And yes, scientific discourse has it’s own conventions and vocabulary and domains and you can certainly speak in a scientific way, which is what I was doing. But stick to the point. I said “sin is not a force” and you argued I was wrong. “Force” is a scientific term and force can be represented in physics equations to explain causes and effects on the natural word. (i.e. gravitational, electrical, frictional, magnetic, etc.) Sin is not something you can put into a physics equation and explain, for example, how DNA mutates or why tectonic plates shift over fault lines. You can not use physics to explain how sin “corrupts the natural world.” It’s an imagination exercise not based on observable, scientifically describable reality.
4 Likes
You are mixing philosophy (philosophical naturalism) with a method of studying the natural world. Science is, by definition, a study of the natural world (i.e. by natural causes-and-effects). Let me know when you invent a divine-o-meter…and we’ll be having another conversation.
1 Like
It is what I wrote about in the rest of my post: it’s a process of explaining regularities in natural phenomena in terms of other regularities. What do you mean by natural and supernatural?
2 Likes
It’s an admission that we can only study what we can detect and measure.
3 Likes
The patent has already been granted (different trade name though ; - ), but it’s still under development and not on the market yet. 
(How it works is still a highly guarded secret – not even its inventor knows how it is supposed to work.)
IMO, all atheists do not believe in any god; all anti-theists don’t want you and me to believe in any god.
4 Likes