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From: shiue@h-sc1.UUCP (steve shiue)
Newsgroups: net.origins
Subject: Re: Re: Philosophy of science and Creationism
Message-ID: <634@h-sc1.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 25-Oct-85 00:13:55 EST
Article-I.D.: h-sc1.634
Posted: Fri Oct 25 00:13:55 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 31-Oct-85 05:27:25 EST
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Organization: Harvard Univ. Science Center
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> 
> Well, (by one definition) God is supposed to maximally benevolent and 
> omnipotent, which seems to have observational consequences that could be
> falsified ....
> 
	This is not necessarily true.  People like Alexander
Pope (see the Essay on Man) have been saying for hundreds of
years that because God is OMNISCIENT as well as omnipotent,
and therefore is not subject to questioning.  For instance,
suppose that a scientist told a creationist that observation
indicates that if there is a benevolent, omniscient, and
omnipotent God, then he must be out to lunch.  The
creationist, by the very definition of God that endows him
with the above properties, could refute this by saying that
God understands the broader picture that the scientist is
incapable of seeing or understanding even if he could see
it.  The creationist argument is rather facile, and
completely lacking in rigor.  It amounts to ducking out of
the intellectual fray before it even begins - the
creationists ask to have it both ways, but I think it is a
bit much to ask science to respect your theory when the
nature of the theory places it above and outside of
science.

> >I agree that from the point of view of science, these assertions have
> >been falsified.  But I don't think that the issue.  To me the issue is
> >whether Creationists sidestep such falsifications when they arise by 
> >resorting to the unfalsifiable hypothesis of an omnipotent God. 
> 
	^Of course they sidestep such falsifications, for
the reasons mentioned above.  The essential point is this:
the introduction of an all-powerful, all-knowing entity
(regardless of its politics and whether you choose to call
it God or Kate Bush) is, by intuition and logic, anathema to
scientific inquiry.  It allows any theory to survive poverty
of evidence and outright contradiction, and by doing so,
provides the ultimate "fudge factor" to justify any theory,
even one as poorly supported as creationism.
	Certainly I cannot prove that the universe wasn't
created a millisecond ago, exactly as it is (or ten or
forty thousand years ago, for that matter).  I can't even
prove that anything exists outside of my own mind (see
Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding), or that
my senses don't deceive me (as a matter of fact, I've
recently come to suspect that people like Ken Arndt are
merely perverse phantoms of my own imagination).  But the 
advance of evolutionary
theory and its study has proved enormously useful in the
study of biological and anthropological phenomena, while the
assertion of creationist theories has had if anything a
negative influence on science and education. 
			-Steve Shiue

"I wish I could give Brother Bill his great thrill,
I'd set him in chains at the top of the hill,
And send for some pillars and Cecil B. DeMille
So he could die happily ever after."
	-Bob Dylan, "Tombstone Blues"