Science is limited

[livingwordlabels]

Science, by definition, can only accept something which can be proven or tested in some way. It is therefore limited to making conclusions about physical things.
I'm not saying this limitation undermines science as a valid and extremely useful source of knowledge. However, what does undermine its reliability is when people use it to make assumptions and conclusions without acknowledging this limitation.

For example, when people try to use their scientific way of thinking to decide whether God exists or not. God is spiritual, not physical - a concept completely alien to science.

Also when people use only what they can observe to explain how mankind was created. This inevitably fails, as they have to limit life to something physical and we get the absurd idea of life evolving out of matter. The Bible offers us a more plausible explanation - that God created man from the dust of the ground and breathed into him the breath of life. If we believe the Bible, we can see that humans are spiritual as well as physical.

My conclusion? If you want to understand God, how we were made, our purpose for living, our relationship with God and even our future, then you need something more than science.

[FarWanderer]

[Replying to bluethread]

Funny you quote Sherlock Holmes. I happen to know a little about the classic detective genre of literature.

Sherlock Holmes only ever deals in solvable mysteries. In his universe things like ghosts, aliens, unknown drugs, secret evil twins etc. are, by narrative necessity, not allowed to exist.

In other words, ghosts and the like are not even something Sherlock considers "improbable"; to him they're "impossible" as a matter of course. One can only have an attitude like Sherlock's after they've dismissed the unverifiable, such as ghosts, cloaked aliens, and flying spaghetti monsters.

[olavisjo]

.

Sherlock Holmes only ever deals in solvable mysteries. In his universe things like ghosts, aliens, unknown drugs, secret evil twins etc. are, by narrative necessity, not allowed to exist.

The elements that make for a good 'true story' are the very elements that make fiction sound hackneyed and corny, thus not allowed.
Take fiction like 'Catch Me If You Can' or 'Lee Daniels' The Butler', would they have worked without 'based on a true story'?
In fact, I think that any story with the disclaimer 'based on a true story' will be, by narrative necessity, bad fiction.

[FarWanderer]

[Replying to olavisjo]

Are you making an argument against something I said, or are you just commenting on it? Because I don't really disagree with what you're saying.

I mean, I never made any claim that Sherlock Holmes was based on a true story or anything. It's totally fiction. Not realistic at all.

Only things known to be possible by the reader can ever be allowed in Holmes's stories. This doesn't only include supernatural things, but also unknown drugs or devices. Even things like secret passages or disguises, while obviously "possible", aren't allowed to be relevant to the mystery (unless there are clues for them).

It's all extremely contrived. The reason for all this is so that the reader can actually solve the puzzle. Without these restrictions giving the reader a fair shot at figuring the answer out before Holmes reveals it himself, it wouldn't even be detective genre. That's what I meant by "narrative necessity".

[olavisjo]

.

Are you making an argument against something I said, or are you just commenting on it?

Just commenting. Good fiction is limited to only things known to be possible, real life has no such limitations.

[Cathar1950]

Go out and talk to any devout Christian, I guarantee you that they are not believing just because they want to avoid going to hell.

Of course they won't be because they believe they are saved and going to Heaven. If you believe you are going to Heaven why would you fear Hell? That doesn't mean that it wasn't the fear of Hell that led them to becoming Christians in the first place.

I bet you that if they start to lose their faith then the fear of Hell will become a big factor.

it seem less confusing to have a number of irons in the fire than one iron in many fires...
How would one really understand the limits of science or even claim its limited unless you know everything? And then it seems to be our limits not the limits of science.
Science is knowledge and understanding and not to be understood by a limited understanding of the tools and methods created to gain knowledge and understanding.
As I was reading through the threads and topics trying to catch op I recall, with humor, someone claiming that it is beyond the scope of science about the origins of the universe as if their limited understandings and possible understandings of the Divine provided them with better answers when in fact the provided more questions then answers and replaced arguments with bare assertions.
We can eliminate the assertions that are nonsense and science and reason have pretty good tool for looking at the rest.

What you are referring to is deductive reasoning. That is not limited to science and science does not always employ deductive reasoning. Based on deductive reasoning, when one can not identify the proximate cause of the unpredictable movement of items in an empty house, one could conclude that the house was haunted. Science and reason are not interchangeable. Science serves as an empirical check on reason and reason adds continuity to scientific observation and experimentation. Though the two are closely related they are not inextricably linked.

I was not referring to deductive or top-down reasoning, this is clearly a red herring on your part as you introduce a rather sophist approach to science and there was no such confusion about or between science and reason, unless you behind the times it looks as if you are confusing knowledge, understanding, reason, methodologies and even ontology.
We have not yet reached a point where we can say science will always have the limits we have today. The impossible is already eliminated as it is unknown, we only know the actual and it is from this we can induce or deduce. I am more of a bottom up as we have events, experience and memory which are all creative as I see it. You can not think of nothing as nothing is not capable of being thought and is not thought. To think nothing is not to think at all.

[Cathar1950]

Based on deductive reasoning, when one can not identify the proximate cause of the unpredictable movement of items in an empty house, one could conclude that the house was haunted.

No, you have this backwards. This is inductive reasoning. An item moving in an empty house isn't reason to deduce it's haunted. Objects can move due to a wide variety of non-ghostly causes. You induced a haunting through the lens of your pre-suppositional faith-biased worldview.

I said one could conclude, not one must conclude. I also made no statement regarding what I would conclude. My point was that science and reason are not equivalent. Often science accepts the best guess, when there is insufficient empirical evidence. This is because we must make decisions often without sufficient empirical evidence.

As an evidence-based thinker, I would approach this problem much differently. If I didn't know how an item in my house moved, I would just say, "I don't know." I could be lazy, and try to act smart in the absence of intelligence, and pretend I logically deduced that aliens, ghosts, or elves did it, but that wouldn't make sense. Pretending to be logical doesn't logical make.

Then you disagree with Sherlock Holmes? "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth".

Reason and logic as well as math and a number of other ideas such as chance, evolution, the idea of randomness, relativity, forces of nature and other such things have become very much a part of science. It is just the fact of our limited nature that makes science important to our cultures and it is unlimited in scope. We no more know its limits anymore than we know what is impossible, we only have the actual, events, experiences and memory, as well as our tools, to figure out everything else.

[Tired of the Nonsense]

[Replying to post 1 by livingwordlabels]

Science, by definition, can only accept something which can be proven or tested in some way. It is therefore limited to making conclusions about physical things.
I'm not saying this limitation undermines science as a valid and extremely useful source of knowledge. However, what does undermine its reliability is when people use it to make assumptions and conclusions without acknowledging this limitation.

For example, when people try to use their scientific way of thinking to decide whether God exists or not. God is spiritual, not physical - a concept completely alien to science.

Also when people use only what they can observe to explain how mankind was created. This inevitably fails, as they have to limit life to something physical and we get the absurd idea of life evolving out of matter. The Bible offers us a more plausible explanation - that God created man from the dust of the ground and breathed into him the breath of life. If we believe the Bible, we can see that humans are spiritual as well as physical.

My conclusion? If you want to understand God, how we were made, our purpose for living, our relationship with God and even our future, then you need something more than science.

And that something would be the human imagination, which is in fact the ONLY way of accessing God, Since the human imagination is in fact the only place that God can currently be shown undeniably to exist.

[Cathar1950]

[Replying to post 1 by livingwordlabels]

Science, by definition, can only accept something which can be proven or tested in some way. It is therefore limited to making conclusions about physical things.
I'm not saying this limitation undermines science as a valid and extremely useful source of knowledge. However, what does undermine its reliability is when people use it to make assumptions and conclusions without acknowledging this limitation.

For example, when people try to use their scientific way of thinking to decide whether God exists or not. God is spiritual, not physical - a concept completely alien to science.

Also when people use only what they can observe to explain how mankind was created. This inevitably fails, as they have to limit life to something physical and we get the absurd idea of life evolving out of matter. The Bible offers us a more plausible explanation - that God created man from the dust of the ground and breathed into him the breath of life. If we believe the Bible, we can see that humans are spiritual as well as physical.

My conclusion? If you want to understand God, how we were made, our purpose for living, our relationship with God and even our future, then you need something more than science.

And that something would be the human imagination, which is in fact the ONLY way of accessing God, Since the human imagination is in fact the only place that God can currently be shown undeniably to exist.

I sometime get the impression that "science" is often confused with methods.
Claiming philosophy can live with out science but science can't live with out theology is nonsense as history can attest showing us just how far and long philosophy can mislead us without thinking like an ancient Greek thinker we have managed to feed ourselves with the science of knowledge we had long before they discovered ideas and the problems they found thinking about them and mistaken them for ideals.

[Ooberman]

Science, by definition, can only accept something which can be proven or tested in some way. It is therefore limited to making conclusions about physical things.
I'm not saying this limitation undermines science as a valid and extremely useful source of knowledge. However, what does undermine its reliability is when people use it to make assumptions and conclusions without acknowledging this limitation.

For example, when people try to use their scientific way of thinking to decide whether God exists or not. God is spiritual, not physical - a concept completely alien to science.

Also when people use only what they can observe to explain how mankind was created. This inevitably fails, as they have to limit life to something physical and we get the absurd idea of life evolving out of matter. The Bible offers us a more plausible explanation - that God created man from the dust of the ground and breathed into him the breath of life. If we believe the Bible, we can see that humans are spiritual as well as physical.

My conclusion? If you want to understand God, how we were made, our purpose for living, our relationship with God and even our future, then you need something more than science.

The theist position is untenable as you define it.

First, you claim that science can't detect something in the universe. Please demonstrate this is true.

It is possible that science can detect or comment on everything, we just don't know yet.

Second, If one can't detect it, how do you know it exists in the first place?

How can you claim something undetectable exists? If there is an invisible, undetectable coconut tree in your bedroom, how would you know?



Please explain how you know the spiritual exists if you can't detect it.

[orthodox skeptic]

[Replying to post 1 by livingwordlabels]

I think that you just said we should scrap our scientific explorations and rely on the ouija board.