You're welcome. ;-)
Did you also like the metaphor of the tool box (post #19) -- which gains no value, and makes us idiots, if we put it up on some alter, and bow down to worship it?
Alamo-Girl: "Problems arise when people "do" theology or philosophy under the color of science..."
In posting and discussing these matters on Free Republic, it does seem to me that much, if not most, of the confusion arises from people's mis-understandings of distinctions between science on the one hand and philosophy, theology, religion and even politics on the other.
Science itself should have little or nothing to say about those subjects...
Alamo-Girl: " '...it is unknowable by the scientific method'... "
Bingo! We have a winner. :-)
Alamo-Girl: "I would also put "randomness did it" in the same faith statement bucket since we cannot say something is random in the system when we don't know what the system "is." "
Thank you. It's one of my favorite subjects, because it answers the famous question raised by Albert Einstein when he was puzzling over (iirc) issues of quantum mechanics, and remarked: "G*d does not play dice with the Universe".
No! Albert-baby, buddy, you got it all wrong!
The physical Universe is one giant casino, with "slot machines" everywhere you turn, and every single one of them is rigged, just like Vegas, to produce a profit for "the House", and who, in the Universe is "the House", if not it's Creator, G*d?
In the long run, G*d's purposes will not be denied, yes "machines" "randomly" produce winners and losers, but G*d's Will will be done.
And in the shorter runs?
Wouldn't you suppose that those who understand the "games" stand a better chance of coming out ahead?
;-)
The word "science" itself is simply the Latin word for knowledge: scientia. Until the 1840's what we now call science was "natural philosophy," so that even Isaac Newton's great book on motion and gravity, published in 1687, was The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis). Newton was, to himself and his contemporaries, a "philosopher." In a letter to the English chemist Joseph Priestley written in 1800, Thomas Jefferson lists the "sciences" that interest him as, "botany, chemistry, zoology, anatomy, surgery, medicine, natural philosophy [this probably means physics], agriculture, mathematics, astronomy, geography, politics, commerce, history, ethics, law, arts, fine arts." The list begins on familiar enough terms, but we hardly think of history, ethics, or the fine arts as "sciences" any more. Jefferson simply uses to the term to mean "disciplines of knowledge."
Quantum mechanics relies on statistics and it works, but that does not mean ipso facto that the physical universe is random at the root since we do not know, indeed cannot know, the full number and types of dimensions.
Jeepers, we cannot deny the existence of particles or fields which do not have a direct or indirect measurable effect.
"Information" is yet another term misappropriated by the Sciences from the discipline of Mathematics. Information Theory is a branch of Mathematics originating from Claude Shannon's Mathematical Theory of Communications.
In Shannon's theory information is the reduction of uncertainty in the receiver (or molecular machine as applied to biology) in moving from a before state to an after state. The math is so much like thermodynamics, it is called "Shannon entropy."
In common parlance, the term which refers to the action is falsely used to describe the content of the message being sent or received. For instance, the letter in your mailbox is not information, information happens when the letter is read.
Worse, in science the term has been misappropriated to mean determinism, i.e. physical cause/effect.
In my view, mathematics is a more elegant and certain discipline for knowing than any of the science disciplines. And misappropriating its terms results in a false sense of elegance and certainty in the sciences.
Indeed, I very strongly agree with Wigner (the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences) and go further to observe theologically that mathematics is God's copyright notice on the cosmos.