Charles Darwin should be accepted as a colleague of scientists who disagree with him, and one who made significant contributions to the progress of science. Whatever disagreements there are with what he wrote should not blind people to what he was: a scientist among scientists. As Newton’s name was used by the so-called Enlightenment to […]
I think the following principle is true: For every divine revelation there is a detectable effect. Whether this effect is a miracle or not is a separate matter. How science or history explain the effect is also a separate matter. The point is that Christian apologetics can show the detectable effect and then point to
What is a real explanation? We are so used to dumbed-down “explanations” we hardly know what a real explanation is anymore. A real explanation describes all the causes of something. These were divided by Aristotle into four kinds of causes: the material, efficient, formal, and final causes. The early scientific movement of Galileo, Bacon, etc.
It’s rare to find an attempt to understand creationists. But here’s one, in an excerpt from “The Intellectual Civil War within Evangelicalism: An Interview with Molly Worthen” by Tiffany Stanley, December 3, 2013: I think it’s a mistake to understand creationists as “anti-science,” at least if we want to understand how they see themselves. The reality
I agree with those theological critics who say that the age of the earth or universe is not by itself a major issue for theology. It’s only when the age of the earth or universe are wedded to other ideas that major issues arise. Two minor issues can make a major issue. Before the rist
The dialectic of extremes and means is a method of reasoning whereby one begins with extremes and reasons to means or vice versa. If one begins with means, these are considered as unanalyzed entities, attributes, propositions, etc. The goal is to work out the implications of them as principles or to analyze them into their
A model is a realization of a mathematical formalism. So ordinary arithmetic is a model of ordinary algebra. That is, the algebra of the integers, the rational numbers, and the real numbers is realized by the arithmetic of the integers, the rational numbers, and the real numbers, respectively. Are there other models of ordinary algebra?
Evidence of Absence: Completeness of Evidential Datasets Elliott Sober presents a likelihood argument about the motto “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” (Sober 2009). He states the Law of Likelihood this way: The Law of Likelihood. Evidence E favors hypothesis H1 over hypothesis H2 precisely when Pr(E│H1) > Pr(E│H2). And the degree to
The Bible is diachronic but secular historical sciences are synchronic. Let me explain. The term “diachronic” arose in the study of the development of languages over a long time, which was the focus of linguistics in the 19th century. But to make linguistics more scientific in the 20th century this changed to study languages as systems during
There’s a common idea that science shows appearances are often wrong. It is said science shows that earth is not flat, the sun doesn’t go around the earth, and that life is not designed, all despite appearances to the contrary. I think this is a mistaken view of what science has done. Surveyors work with
