“It was my impression that science was attempting to make statements regarding reality. If science is merely about rules then you are correct, we have no argument.”
More precisely, science is an abstract. Like mathematics or even painting a picture, the purpose of an abstract is not to define, but to describe. A picture of a flower is not the flower itself, it is just one way of describing the flower.
The problem happens when someone looks at the painting and says, “That is a flower.” It is not a flower, it is a picture of a flower.
And believe me, this is such an important distinction that JHVH Himself remarked on it, in a way, to Moses. When Moses asked God his name, he replied with the statement “I AM THAT I AM”. And that is a profoundly philosophical statement.
The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber wrote a thin book entitled “I and Thou”, which was a remarkably easy read for the profoundly deep thought that went in to his analysis of personal pronouns. It can be read in a few minutes, but only understood after days of slow and deliberate consideration.
In any event, the statement “I AM THAT I AM” defines reality as a product of God. But it also puts man in a quandary, namely that while God defines reality, He leaves it up to us to describe reality, through the use of abstracts.
This was a philosophical dilemma that was only finally met by Rene Descartes, when he pronounced the very similar “I think, therefore I am.” In effect, this arrogant statement said that man, not God, defines, not just describes reality. This caused a revolution in philosophy, allowing philosophers to “write God out of the equation.”
Since that time, however, people have been so confident of their abstracts that they assume they actually create reality. But this has never really been the case, to those who understand what abstracts really are.
If you ask them, people also say that “the sun comes up in the morning”, even though must of them know better, that the Earth turns.
[Since that time, however, people have been so confident of their abstracts that they assume they actually create reality.]
To go ALong with this idea, people have tried to argue that morals evolved and are subjective, andit is up to hte individual to define the morals that one abides by. Dawkins tried doing this when he argued for a ‘selfish gene’ and tried to assert that God was nothjing more than a delusion of the poor unfortunate lesser evolved folks who can’t escape the chains of mass hysteria that drives poor sheeple to think there is a God.
The depths of Dawkins arrogance and delusional self superiority know no bounds, but unfortunately for him, He’ll discover too late that genes don’t dictate what the Great I Am is.
Dawkins understood that morals were not subjective, and that the argument for subjective morals had failed, so he, in his bias against Christians, devised an unprovable, untestable hypothesis that religion was a result of genes (Which he amusingly suggested could be passed along as though they were a contagion- like catchign the common cold from others. lol)
There really is nothign new under the sun- The arguments for subjective morality have failed, and the ‘selfish gene’ and the ‘God gene’ are nothign more than an attempt to revive the old argument that there is no God, and that we, being god-like, could determine our own fortunes by controlling something like a God-Gene and erradicating it from our lives so that we can supposedly become absolutely free. The problem is that poor Dawkins doesn’t realize that ‘freeing’ oneself from a good and loving God only leads to a bondage that can only lead to eternal death. Freedom from God is no freedom at all, yet people like Dawkins will argue until their dying breath that we are mini-gods and can define our own existences how we like without a need for the great I AM. Trying to define morality by arguing that an evolving gene is to ‘blame’ for universal moral codes is nothing new- it’s just the same old tired out excuses that are just said in a different way.
As I understand Descartes’ program of radical doubt he came to the end of it when he realized that he could not doubt his own existence. The trouble is that in using the words “Cogito ergo sum” he used WORDS. The language he used came from outside himself. That language could only be maintained by something that transcended his existence. The concept of a private language is absurd.
We face a similar problem. Man may manipulate the language of science, but what we are calling attention to is the fact that the language itself, the universe itself, transcends science.
This science as defined has a limited aim. That is fine. The trouble is when science so-defined arrogates to itself the right to define reality. And usurps the responsibility of parents to convey their understanding of reality to their children.