> > Science DOES get things wrong; it simply has mechanisms in place for correcting itself. Constantly updating your viewpoint to acknowledge new information does not make you right; it just means that you acknowledge your mistakes.
> >
>
> I don't think that's what Wes meant. Scientists do get things wrong, either from carelessness, wishful thinking, or any number of other fallacies.
>
> The methodology of science, on the other hand, will never be "wrong". It's the only way to learn about the universe. We make observations, form hypotheses, and test them over and over again to form a working model of the way things work. There's no other way to do it. Science will not "evolve" into or be displaced by something else. And to me, personally, it's the *only* valid way of establishing truth. I don't think faith should have any place beyond the fundamental necessity of having faith in the grounding of the scientific method, logic, etc..

Point taken. The scientific method in and of itself apparently cannot be wrong--I hadn't looked at it that way.

> And what about those questions which science can not settle? I use cold hard reason to weigh the alternatives and choose the simplest explanation of things. After all, if we'll never know exactly why something is a certain way, why not at least simplify our thinking?

That's a good method. However, one common problem there is that people often choose the simplest method after discarding the supernatural as a possibility. To quote William Craig (as quoted in The Case For Faith):

"Logicians have a term: 'inference to the best explanation.' This means you have a body of data to be explained, and then you have a pool of live options or various explanations for that data. You need to choose which explanation from that pool would, if true, best explain the observed data. Some skeptics, however, will not allow supernatural explanations even to be in the pool of live options. Consequently, if there is no natural explanation for an event, they're simply left with ignorance. That's prejudice. Apart from some proof of atheism, there's no warrant for excluding supernatural explanations from being a member of the pool of live options. If you do put them in that pool, then you've got to be an open, honest investigator to see which is the best explanation of any given event."

The point here is that for a lot of scientific problems, scientists run out of reasonable explantions, but do not take the supernatural alternative. Objection #3 in the same book shows fairly clearly how the theory of evolution is sound, but a purely natural theory of evolution continues to fail to show how life came about in the first place. All modern naturalist explanations for the origins of life (at least all the ones I have ever heard of) have been shown to be incapable of fully explaining how life could come about at random under any circumstance. In such a case, the simplest explanation then has to be supernatural--in fact, with all other explanations being shown to be nonsensical, the existence of a divine being who can do anything becomes pretty much the only available solution. The common counter-argument to this is to say "Wait and we'll find something better in the future." However, this denies one of the basic tenets of science--that we should come up with an explantion based on our current data. Waiting around for more data does not seem to me to be a reasonable solution when we already have a plausible explanation sitting right in front of us.

All this is not to say that I believe this is a closed case. In a lot of cases, my scientific justification for my faith in God is based simply on the lack of a better scientific explanation, and I admit that such arguments are flimsy; as such, I would be quite interested in listening to alternative explanations (for any phenomenon, not just the origins of life) so long as those explanations are clearly reasoned and researched. I would also welcome any recommendations anyone might have on books to sate my thirst for knowledge--in particular, I would like to delve deeper into the issue of the origin of life, and if anyone has read a compelling explanation for how it could have happened naturally, I would be interested to read it myself.

In the meantime, I would strongly suggest that those who are interested in scientific reasons for God's existence pick up The Case For Faith and read it, particularly Objection #2 and Objection #3, which deal the most heavily in science and its interactions with faith. It has certainly helped me to come to terms with the conflicts which seem inherent in the two subjects.

> --gremlinn

Don Monkey