Is Science Omniscient?

Whatsisface said:
You can't go further than infer which falls short of these constants and laws actually demonstrating a designer. You are more or less assuming a designer.
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Inferences without empirical evidence can be quite assuring. For example, the ground is covered with nothing but grass when we go to sleep, and when we awake it is covered with snow. We witness no snow falling from the sky but correctly infer that snow fell overnight.
 
Caroljeen said:
Science can't determined designed-ness, nor measure supernatural because it only looks at the natural, materialist world. But with the use of scientific methods, we find things in the natural world that infer a designer such as constants and laws. The use of science helps us to understand the mechanism but not the designer of the mechanism.
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Inferring a designer from the existence of constants and laws is just an argument from ignorance or incredulity. God of the gaps type stuff.
 
stiggy wiggy said:
I ran across this quote from an atheist in another thread:

"Science doesn't even need to know whether there is a designer."

Why do atheists anthropomorphize science but no other branch of knowledge?
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For the same reason Christians anthropomorphize the bible:

Because arguing semantics with a troll is a waste of time.

ps. for the believers who deserve a better answer, there's a difference between a colloquialism and anthropomorphization. The OP intentionally mistakes the former for the latter; everyone occasionally utters a phrase like "the bible says <X>" or "physics says <Y>" or whatever. Doing so isn't anthropomorphization.
 
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Caroljeen said:
what is your explanation for them?
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I'm not speaking for @Tiburon, but yours is an interesting question, and I wanna take a stab at it.

First off, I don't claim to know why they exist.

I have a few ideas, though. The weak anthropic principle helps describe one of them, in that we wouldn't exist (in this form) to have this discussion if those constants were different.

Put in a different way, you wouldn't exist if your parents never met each other. You can place some deep fundamental meaning to their meeting and relationship, but the fact is that without them, you wouldn't be here place any kind of meaning upon that relationship.

As such, one of my explanations is that the constants exist simply because without them, we wouldn't exist to ask why they exist; they are a brute fact of existence.

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I haven't been following cosmology and particle physics like I used to. but as I understand it, there could be other universes with constants different from ours. Life would likely be completely different in those universes, such that we couldn't exist there. Physicists have been working with the idea that a stable universe can only exist in certain combinations of constants; there may well be more than one stable configuration. All we know is that our universe has this configuration; we shouldn't jump to conclusions by assuming that ours is the only universe in which life could exist.
 
Perhaps a more snarky version of my above explanation would go something like this:

How come your childhood bedroom had precisely zero cars crashing through the wall as you slept? The answer is pretty simple: if the number was greater than zero, you wouldn't be here today. That number isn't magical or significant; it's simply the value without which you could never ask the question.
 
mikeT said:
Perhaps a more snarky version of my above explanation would go something like this:

How come your childhood bedroom had precisely zero cars crashing through the wall as you slept? The answer is pretty simple: if the number was greater than zero, you wouldn't be here today. That number isn't magical or significant; it's simply the value without which you could never ask the question.
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If I recall correctly there is more than one constant, I think Dawkins said it was 12 and 4 laws of physics. Those numbers are not magical but certainly significant, at least to physicists. They indicate that the universe is fine-tuned and not structured randomly. Your one example doesn't cut it.
 
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Caroljeen said:
If I recall correctly there is more than one constant, I think Dawkins said it was 12 and 4 laws of physics. Those numbers are not magical but certainly significant, at least to physicists. They indicate that the universe is fine-tuned and not structured randomly. Your one example doesn't cut it.
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I used a single word inaccurately (or perhaps ambiguously) in a short essay of hundreds. Mea culpa.

By "significant", I simply meant it's not an indicator of something else. Just as there were 0 cars which crashed through your bedroom walls as you slept as a child, the speed of light in a vacuum is 300,000 meters per second.

Both numbers are obviously "significant", in that they exist, and their value is important for different reasons. However, there's no indication that those numbers represent "design".

I rather wish you'd responded to my longer post, previous to the one you commented on...
 
mikeT said:
For the same reason Christians anthropomorphize the bible:
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So you've heard people say, "The Bible knows?" I doubt it.

ps. for the believers who deserve a better answer, there's a difference between a colloquialism and anthropomorphization. The OP intentionally mistakes the former for the latter; everyone occasionally utters a phrase like "the bible says <X>" or "physics says <Y>" or whatever. Doing so isn't anthropomorphization.
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The verb was know, not says. You might want to pay better attention to what a post SAYS (not knows) before you barge in with a comment.
 
Tiburon said:
I don't have one. It may be that they cannot be other than they are. But I'm not just going to assume a designer in order to fill that gap.
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I have a difficulty with randomness (an unexplained rapid expansion of burning hot gases) developing order to the extent that we call them laws.
 
Caroljeen said:
I have a difficulty with randomness (an unexplained rapid expansion of burning hot gases) developing order to the extent that we call them laws.
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Was it randomness? I also have difficulty with randomness. The universe doesn't run on what we don't have difficulty with.
 
Caroljeen said:
I have a difficulty with randomness (an unexplained rapid expansion of burning hot gases) developing order to the extent that we call them laws.
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How do you know that the way things are now, are not the only way they can be? If that is the case, then a universe without God wouldn't be random.
 
Whatsisface said:
Wrong, it's a question. So again, how do you know that the way things are now, are not the only way they can be?
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Nobody "knows" much of anything in origins. Much of it is necessarily belief by faith.

What you need to do is start reflecting that in your thinking.
 
stiggy wiggy said:
I ran across this quote from an atheist in another thread:

"Science doesn't even need to know whether there is a designer."

Why do atheists anthropomorphize science but no other branch of knowledge? It seems to me that if the verb is "know," then science can be an object but not a subject. Science can no more know something that can math or geography or history. No one would say, "Geography knows that Florida is a peninsular" or that "Math knows that the square root of 2 is an irrational number."

I realize that on the surface this may seem like a petty distinction, but I think it telling. We can learn about the physical world from science but we cannot learn from science if the physical world exhausts all that we can know about reality. Falsely giving science the attribute of knowing, as opposed to being known, can give some people the idea that science has the potential to be omniscient.

Science may not need to know if there is a designer, but if we are equally apathetic, then we will drown in our shallowness.
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A mechanic doesn't need to know who made his tools in order to use them correctly.

Science is a mechanic.
 
Eightcrackers said:
A mechanic doesn't need to know who made his tools in order to use them correctly.

Science is a mechanic.
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Yes. But if a mechanic stranded on a desert island after a shipwreck were to discover a fishing pole, a packet of vegetable seeds and some garden tools, and yet made no effort to find out who provided them, thinking that the provisions were enough in themselves to get him off the island, assuming he even cared to get off, I would conclude that we were dealing with a very foolish mechanic/scientist, particularly if attached to the fishing pole there were a lengthy but cryptic note from its provider indicating that within the note there were clues about the identity of the provider and how to contact him.
 
stiggy wiggy said:
Yes. But if a mechanic stranded on a desert island after a shipwreck were to discover a fishing pole, a packet of vegetable seeds and some garden tools, and yet made no effort to find out who provided them, thinking that the provisions were enough in themselves to get him off the island, assuming he even cared to get off, I would conclude that we were dealing with a very foolish mechanic/scientist, particularly if attached to the fishing pole there were a lengthy but cryptic note from its provider indicating that within the note there were clues about the identity of the provider and how to contact him.
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A scenario which is at the same time, impossibly unlikely, and much more likely than Christianity.
 
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