Title: Re: paleonet Re: Ken's
comments
Peter,
I think your question about rationality
is a good one I will have to try and
find time to look into it. With regard to emotions and belief I
think
emotions need to be kept strictly under control but I am not sure that
we
can think at all without belief. To think it seems to me that we need
at
least some idea of the rules of logic and mathematics as has to be
built
into computers. How could we get that without believing? I think
that
believing in something that we are told or that we have observed is
how
thinking starts. Faith as I see it is something that grows out of
experience
with an object or an idea.
Faith is something arises due to a lack of experience with an
object or idea, or at least a failure to understand experience.
Faith is generally a substitute for a "real" explanation.
This is my understanding of the view of the scientific community.
Indeed, it is my understanding of the perspective of Modernism. (A
discussion of Post-modernism has no place on a paleontology
list.)
The Creationist camp often insists that evolutionists must have
"faith" in order to "believe in" natural selection
as the engine of evolution. In practice some scientists may
accidentally speak of or consider evolutionary theory as if it were
dogma, but in fact evolutionary theory is as dynamic as religious
dogma is static.
I think that believing grades into
faith and faith into knowing. Knowing is the end result of a
progression but I don't think we can ever eliminate an element of
each.
The history of the development of science out of faith through
the 16th to 19th centuries might look this way from the perspective of
the 21st century, but I don't think that's how it happened. I
have heard the phrase "coming to know God" as a way
of expressing an increase in depth of faith, but it has nothing to do
with an increase in knowledge of Nature.
A failure to eliminate faith from knowing is just that, a
failure.
I think that people who call themselves
believers are that in name only. I
think that small children are real
believers. I think they tend to accept
what they hear and see without objection and that makes learning
easy.
My experience with children is entirely different. Children
are the original skeptics; they ask a lot of questions and are really
good at spotting inconsistencies in a narrative.
They will only accept things "on faith" if they sense
that by doing so they will get the approval of an authority that they
respect. This is called indoctrination and doesn't have anything
to do with real learning. In fact, it gets in the way of real
learning.
The brouhahas in Dover, PA and Georgia are all about parents
freaking out because their own indoctrination of their children is
being contradicted by the schools' science curricula.
I think being skeptical makes learning
difficult and slower.
Being skeptical is the only thing that allows us to build real
knowledge, its structure, dynamics and content.
Small children don't worry too much
about testing their ideas.
This is all that children do. Or at least it used to
be when we let them go out and play.
It might be a small point but I didn't
mean to say that God created through
evolution but that evolution is the inevitable result of His
continuing
creation work. That He is continuing this work fits with the Lord
statement
that "The Farther worketh hitherto" John 5: 17.
If you don't accept that the Bible is the word of God (and I
don't), then this is simply circular logic. Whether God has any
hand in evolution is of no interest to evolutionary theorists since
the existence of God cannot be proven. Proving the existence of
God is of no interest since (1) if one turns out to exist and is
all-powerful, then that makes all further inquiry pretty pointless and
(2) if one turns out to exist and has to follow the rules of physics,
then all you've got is the 'god of the gaps'.
Sincerely,
Bill
--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
William P. Chaisson
Adjunct Assistant Professor
Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences
University of Rochester
Rochester, NY 14627
607-387-3892