Re: Science Hates Religion

"On Thu, 31 Jul 2008 11:55:12 -0500, in article
<G6ednbHQw7rtcwzVnZ2dnUVZ_rzinZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxx>, Louann Miller stated..."

photekxl@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote in news:5128d932-19f5-4dbc-bcfe-d425cd12a6f4
@p25g2000hsf.googlegroups.com:

The point is that if you look at science, it does still have its far
off kooks trying to fly without
device, trying to create new elements without proper physical law,
etc. Pseudo-science
does exist in the extreme among atheists who feel in their own mind
they are scientific.

Let's establish a big difference between science and religion right
now: the 'extremists' that you talk about in science are not respected
in their fields if they introduce pseudo-science or stretch scientific
knowledge with no backup.

And another point: the kooks who try to fly without a device don't do it
more than once. Because there's really _clear_ testability about "Can I
fly with method X when I step out this third-floor window?" The guy with
the broken legs is the one whose hypothesis was unsound. (This is why
testability is important, and sometimes hilarious, in science.)

OTOH with the question "does explanation X rightly interpret this
Scripture?" or "Is God X realer than God Y?" you can go around and around
for centuries without coming to any testable conclusion. (To be fair, the
same can be said of "does thesis X rightly interpret this Shakespeare
play.")

But I believe that there are some people who try to be
objective about these things.

I think that the emergence of the "documentary hypothesis" is
an example of an attempt to understand the origins of the Bible.
There were some of the proponents of DH who tried to fit it into
some sort of ideology of how religion had to develop, but that
has been mostly discarded. More or less today there is a sort of
agreement on the DH which is independent of what particular
variety of faith one holds (if any).

Not quite the same thing as "testability", but there have
developed standards for evaluating hypotheses about Scripture.


--
---Tom S.
"As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand."
attributed to Josh Billings

.