[Phys-L] Re: god friendly science

[John Mallinckrodt <ajm@CSUPOMONA.EDU>]

Referring to a previous message of mine, Justin Parke wrote

> It seems you are saying that
> a) good scientific theories can be true
> b)scientific theories with little experimental support may be true
> c)non scientific theories may be true

No question about it.  Does anybody really think that this is controversial?

> Would you go so far as to say that truth may be discovered by non scientific
> means?

I don't know if I'd say that; I do recoil a bit from the idea of
"discovering truth."  I suppose one can "discover the truth" of
trivial isolated facts like whether or not there is an oak tree in my
back yard.  (That is to say that I do believe in objective reality.)
But I don't think that one can "discover" grand or overarching
"truths"--e.g., the truth of general relativity theory, Freudian
analysis, or Taoism for instance--primarily because I don't think
there is any way even to determine what IS "true" at the grand,
overarching level.  People are entitled to their own beliefs and they
are entitled to think that their beliefs are "true."  But I can't
attach any precise meaning to such squishy, nonobjective notions.

Accordingly, in a previous message I wrote.

> Science does not deal in "truth."  Pretending that it does is
> responsible for a lot of very dangerous mischief by its enemies.

Justin went on to respond to my question:

> [A]re you saying that [a] scientist who DOES believe that
> supernatural events occur would, nevertheless, NOT offer
> supernatural explanations for observations in the lab? Why on Earth
> not? Doesn't that seem more than a little odd?

saying:

> That does not seem odd to me. A Christian who is a scientist may
> believe that science is a way of discovering truth (a very good and
> interesting way) but not the only way. He or she may also believe
> that while supernatural events do occur, they are not at all common
> events. Thus this scientist would hesitate greatly to confer the
> status of supernatural to any event observed in the lab (though they
> would likely not rule it out altogether.) Even if such a scientist
> believed he had observed a supernatural event there is no way to
> examine the event scientifically since there is no way to perform
> repeated measurements (supernatural events are rare and even more
> rarely repeated!) The event may have occured and be true yet not
> scientifically verifiable.

First, I reiterate that I would find fault with this person for
believing "that science is a way of discovering truth."  More
importantly, however, I just don't see how one can really do science
if one is always open to the possibility that any given observation
may have been influenced by a supernatural power.  This doesn't seem
very different to me from the significant handicap that some students
labor under as a result of believing that data can--and usually
does--just turn out to be bad because that's the way it is and there
really isn't anything they can do about it.

John Mallinckrodt
Cal Poly Pomona
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