Both of these are VFB, BTW. In the view from above, God is in the vector of every particle at every moment, so He can’t be escaped in cosmology.
That’s what militant atheists fail to grasp.
But He is not not in it, either. TOE is neutral about God because it can’t measure God. Those who claim that TOE excludes God are not making a scientific assertion.
This is where your error lies: just because X doesn’t see Y doesn’t mean that Y is not there. Make it a game of hide-and-seek: just because Jimmy can’t see Susie doesn’t mean that Susie does not exist. Or make it a matter of particle physics: just because CERN can’t see a neutrino doesn’t mean neutrinos don’t exist. Or perhaps more akin to the matter of God, just because biology can’t see the love of a mother for her child doesn’t mean love doesn’t exist.
The first statement is pure view from below. The second is a confusion of VFB and VFA as well as being nonsense from either one: in the view from below, Richard’s first statement here is absolutely correct, while in the view from above it is absolutely incorrect, and in the view from above or the view from below the second statement makes no sense at all because from the VFA perspective it proposes that there are realms in Creation where God cannot be found while from the VFB perspective it proposes that there are places where God is evident.
But the moment you include God you’re not doing science any longer – unless you have a divine-o-meter.
There are theological and spiritual realities to be found in scripture, Richard – it was those to which I was referring. But then, we understand you conflate scientific and physical realities with the spiritual and theological. Thanks for the additional substantiating example, not that we really needed any more.
I had to stop and think about this for a minute, using the view-from-above versus view-from-below distinction, and decided that however odd that final three-word assertion seems, it is correct because every discipline involved in interpretation is view-from-below, whether the study of the writing types or that of the writing materials or textual variants or grammar or literary type or the meanings of words themselves.
So where does view-from-above come in? It is exemplified by the Creed, in its first two words: “We believe”.
Where is God in scientific TOE then? Your double negative fails.
As soon as you try and insert God onto TOE the dynamics change. It only works without God. It is a theory that assumes God is not there so every mechanism is without God’s interference or influence. It must be. Science cannot include a God it cannot identify, quantify, or see. If you insert God you leac=ve science. You are not talking science you are not talking TOE. And the contra to that is{ if you are talking TOE you are ignoring the existence of God. If you proclaim TOE you are declaring God impotent at best and non-existent at worse.
“As soon as you try and insert God onto the evolution of the cosmos the dynamics change. It only works without God. It is a theory that assumes God is not there so every mechanism is without God’s interference or influence. It must be. Science cannot include a God it cannot identify, quantify, or see. If you insert God you leac=ve science. You are not talking science you are not talking the evolution of the cosmos. And the contra to that is{ if you are talking the evolution of the cosmos you are ignoring the existence of God. If you proclaim the evolution of the cosmos you are declaring God impotent at best and non-existent at worse.”
Yes, I have no idea nor have I ever understood why you cannot see that whenever you pluck biology out of the other sciences and say it is different because I said so, that you are conflating methodological science and theology.
Actually, yes – and that’s been the case several times, the one I’m most familiar with being the matter of flowering plants: when I first took university botany courses, flowering plants “just appeared”, and there were no sound explanation for the steps involved. The lack of intermediate steps was bad enough that our botany professor agreed that blaming it on aliens was as valid as any other proposal because there was no data to hang any proposal on – except for the fact that every botanist agreed that it had to have come about via known natural processes.
And since then that has been shown to be the case, so the idea that alien graduate students from Galactic U. started flowering plants was no longer just silly but not viable. Where there was “no evidence of evolutionary predecessors” there now is evidence – and it was found because scientists used the principle that it had to be natural processes to form hypotheses and guide research.
But that’s exactly what should be expected after an extinction event: surviving species will become the “founders” of their own “phyla and many classes” since numerous ecological niches will have been emptied and as surviving species spread to those the species will differentiate.
Patterson isn’t quite correct: those “stories” are conjecture, and conjecture leads to testable hypotheses. The bigger the gaps, the wilder the stories, but the wilder the stories, the more hypotheses. And as hypotheses are either knocked down or verified, the stories are in fact put to the test.
Which BTW is why the “alien grad students” story for the origin of flowering plants was silly: even if true, there was no reasonable way to test for it, the only hypothesis that could point to would be that there should be strings of DNA totally unlike anything else – and “totally unlike anything else” is too vague to be helpful.
That’s got to be the biggest bit of nonsense I’ve read in a month – it’s no different than asking if a newborn baby has to “take millions of years to evolve into a human being all over again”.
So why do you not argue against the godless science of cosmology with the same interminable vigor that you argue against the godless science of biology?
because the results do not compare. Cosmology is not self-determining it hasn’t even finished cataloging or identifying. And it will never get past the Big Bang which, as we all know was God’s shout.