epistemology, science, kinds of knowledge, methodology
Although intelligent design proponents avoid talking about the designer, the critics of intelligent design “know” that they are trying to sneak God into science. After all, who else could the designer be? The critics of creationism reject bringing God into science because God is a wild card that could make any hypothesis true. We seem …
Louis Agassiz wrote: …if species do not exist at all, as the supporters of the transmutation theory maintain, how can they vary? And if individuals alone exist, how can differences which may be observed among them prove the variability of species? Darwin responded to Asa Gray: I am surprised that Agassiz did not succeed in …
Science and history should be complementary disciplines. Science should not dominate history but they should work together. Science focuses on what does not change – what is conserved, what repeats, what is invariant. History focuses on what does change – the small details that turn out to make a big difference, the unique people and …
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? …
