Hiding in the snow
Hiding in the snow
Of course. Like you, they won't admit to supernatural requirements for their claims. That's because denying those requirements comes with little cost, while admitting to the reality of a supernatural requirement includes a high price.
Again you take liberties, this time of pretending you know why I don’t include the supernatural as an explanatory mechanism. So again I will recommend that you try to understand and deal with what my real motivations are, rather than relying on tactics like insinuating that I am unwilling to pay the “high price” of Christian belief. In fact I was deep into Christianity, and my parting from it exacted a very high price – in the severing of the vast majority of my friendships, social network, even much of my family distancing themselves from me.
I shouldn’t need to say this to you, who has a long history of arguing matters in science, but science is predicated on seeing what we can learn about the natural world. To have any hope of consistency in that, we limit ourselves to trying to find natural laws and principles. That does not mean the supernatural does not exist, but the supernatural is, by definition, not a natural law or principle. Simple example, when friends come over for salmon and salad, I know pretty well how much food to buy ahead of time. But if I were to invite them over for what may turn out to be a “miracle of the fish and loaves” meal, then perhaps I should bring in a few dozen 50 gallon drums to hold the leftovers, even though I only bring an initial slice of bread and a single anchovy to the party. Plus, with hundreds of religions, most of which likewise lay claim to supernatural intervention, should science open its doors to the claims from the whole bevy of them?
If I were you I wouldn't be so keen about the support consensus gives you since science (if we define it as the pursuit of truth) will win in the end.
That is fine with me. I am not even going to claim that relying on consensus (as I have defined it – the collective belief of a large group of experts who have extensively researched an idea and reached a common understanding) may not sometimes lead me astray. As was recently mentioned, just over a century ago, the consensus was that Newton’s Laws were essentially unquestioned as being correct. Einstein’s gift of deep analytical thought showed the consensus had been wrong.
But the point remains, in scientific fields where I necessarily have to rely on others, what is the best course of action? Do I side with some malcontent outside of the consensus group, or should I perhaps give preference to claims from minority religious groups (like yours) that make no bones about wanting science to validate their unique tribal creation tale?
As an example, I don't know if you are reading the conversation with gcthomas and tyrathca I'm having about Shannon information. But somehow they think information comes from noise - it's a miracle!
My immediate reaction is again to go with consensus. I am confident there are a lot of very competent scientists who are intimately familiar with message transmission as it applies in biology, yet fully support common descent. After more than a decade of debating Shannon here, it seems these debates in a Christian debate forum are the epitome of your success in getting your Shannon arguments accepted in the science community. Why am I not very excited?
Let me, purely as an amateur in the peanut gallery, ask a question. A DNA mistake in replication (would that be counted as “noise”?) turns what normally would be a brown baby rabbit into one with white fur. Grows up to have lots of white-furred kids, who can live in the snow where brown rabbits could not hide before. I wouldn’t call that a miracle, but would that constitute “new information” in the rabbit genome?
The magnetic field of the earth as an example. According to materialists there's a dynamo that science says isn't there. Your appeal to miracle is noted even if you don't like to admit it.
Reference to where science says the dynamo isn’t there?
