sciences in general, what they are and their methods
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
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
It’s easy to forget that “nature” means the essence or form of something. Over the centuries this morphed into nature as a “natural world” as if only some things have a nature, which is mistaken. Every thing or being has a nature, including God. A natural science is the study of things/beings with a common nature
The discipline of history investigates what actually happened in the past as far as that is known from records or other evidence. Scientific history is what could have happened in the past without being inconsistent with the data or laws of science. Note the difference: scientific history is about possibilities; real history is about actualities. Scientific history
Scientific methodology makes extreme simplicity (or parsimony) a key quality of a hypothesis or theory. One flaw in this is that there are multiple kinds of simplicity. The cultural milieu then becomes the arbitrator of which kind of simplicity is preferred. Historically, one version of simplicity becomes dominant until another version overthrows it. Then it
Aristotle laid much of the foundation for modern science but failed to take the final steps. He articulated the logic, the four causes, sensory realism, and the importance of observation. But he didn’t have the Bible when he tried to start with final causes and used philosophical speculation instead. Bacon and the early modern scientists
While the early scientists expected God’s creation to be orderly and show God’s lawfulness, that is certainly not the case with conventional science today. While we can say that’s because of the Enlightenment, there’s more to it than that. There’s something called the ontological inversion. Basically, at first science is very empirical: what is real
