The following quote was called out in a deleted comment, but I think there is something to discuss here that would be missed if we didn’t come back to it even though that comment was ruled off-topic.
Thus, ultimate concern was displaced to science, a concern that its methods were simply not capable of handling. And science itself was always completely honest about its limitations: science cannot say whether God exists or does not exist; whether there is an Absolute or not; why we are here, what our ultimate nature is, and so on. Of course science can find no evidence for the Absolute; nor can it find evidence disproving an Absolute. When science is honest, it is thoroughly agnostic and thoroughly quiet on those ultimate questions.
The now deleted complaint was that this is saying something like science is in a non-overlapping magisterium from the question of whether or not God exists. I agree trying to claim separate magisterium is a problem and doesn’t work, so what do I see as the value of including this quote?
Mainly to highlight a point that I think is often poorly understood: that science, for all the good it does, intentionally cuts itself off from certain kinds of evidence in order to allow it to function. Maybe we can debate what is the “real” science, but I’m thinking here of the normal, run-of-the-mill thing you’d call “science” we find going on in universities around the world, and that form of science specifically ignores lines of evidence we might call anecdotal or phenomenological and, for our purposes, ignores questions of epistemology by settling for a kind of epistemological pragmatism that allows science to get on with the business of science without having to resolve philosophy problems every time you want to publish a paper on fruit flies.
This choice to pragmatically ignore deep epistemological questions is a good choice for science, of course, because it lets it get things done, but it also means we cannot take results like “science finds no evidence of supernatural beings or some ever-present unifying force we could reasonably label God” as stronger evidence than it is. Yes, this is pretty strong evidence that there is no God like the kind you find in a religious text that interacts with the world, but it’s also not much evidence of anything about a God that’s more like an invisible dragon living in a garage. The thing that lets you address those sorts of questions is a bit different from what is typically done under the banner of science.
This quote does go a bit too far when it says science should be “thoroughly quiet on those ultimate questions”, because it does have something to say, but I still thought it worth including because it highlights the common overreach of science into domains which it specifically rules itself our from participating in by setting up its methodological assumptions so that it can function.
(This last point put another way, think of how annoyed you’d be if every time you told your friend you felt sad and wanted a hug they said “I don’t know, I can’t really measure your sadness very well, and it’s just you reporting this sadness anyway, so I can’t tell if it’s worth it to give you the hug”.)
The following quote was called out in a deleted comment, but I think there is something to discuss here that would be missed if we didn’t come back to it even though that comment was ruled off-topic.
The now deleted complaint was that this is saying something like science is in a non-overlapping magisterium from the question of whether or not God exists. I agree trying to claim separate magisterium is a problem and doesn’t work, so what do I see as the value of including this quote?
Mainly to highlight a point that I think is often poorly understood: that science, for all the good it does, intentionally cuts itself off from certain kinds of evidence in order to allow it to function. Maybe we can debate what is the “real” science, but I’m thinking here of the normal, run-of-the-mill thing you’d call “science” we find going on in universities around the world, and that form of science specifically ignores lines of evidence we might call anecdotal or phenomenological and, for our purposes, ignores questions of epistemology by settling for a kind of epistemological pragmatism that allows science to get on with the business of science without having to resolve philosophy problems every time you want to publish a paper on fruit flies.
This choice to pragmatically ignore deep epistemological questions is a good choice for science, of course, because it lets it get things done, but it also means we cannot take results like “science finds no evidence of supernatural beings or some ever-present unifying force we could reasonably label God” as stronger evidence than it is. Yes, this is pretty strong evidence that there is no God like the kind you find in a religious text that interacts with the world, but it’s also not much evidence of anything about a God that’s more like an invisible dragon living in a garage. The thing that lets you address those sorts of questions is a bit different from what is typically done under the banner of science.
This quote does go a bit too far when it says science should be “thoroughly quiet on those ultimate questions”, because it does have something to say, but I still thought it worth including because it highlights the common overreach of science into domains which it specifically rules itself our from participating in by setting up its methodological assumptions so that it can function.
(This last point put another way, think of how annoyed you’d be if every time you told your friend you felt sad and wanted a hug they said “I don’t know, I can’t really measure your sadness very well, and it’s just you reporting this sadness anyway, so I can’t tell if it’s worth it to give you the hug”.)