Subject:
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Re: Ya wanna talk about legislating morality?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Fri, 6 May 2005 20:41:53 GMT
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Viewed:
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1083 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, John Neal wrote:
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I thought we all had agreed that Science had nothing to say about Creation.
But certainly you can’t deny that it occured. Creation is the elephant in
the room of Science.
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I don’t think that’s quite right.
On the one hand, let’s think about lightning for a second. We have a pretty good
idea how that gets generated nowadays. But for a long time science had nothing
to say on the matter. Not enough data. Hence, to definitively say “it comes from
Zeus” merely because science couldn’t yet formulate an opinion would’ve been
rather foolish.
But you’re right insofar as creation is a bit different. It’s historical. And
for all intents and purposes, science has nothing to say about *ANYTHING*
historical. Strictly speaking, I can’t prove I existed yesterday. I can show you
footsteps that match my shoe size, and phone records of people I called. I can
show you where my fingerprints show up, and carbon dating can suggest that they
were left yesterday. But can science prove that those fingerprints and phone
records didn’t suddenly just pop into existence via metaphysics? Nope. But
science would show that it was *likely* that I existed yesterday, thanks to
doing the same tests again today and on into the future, which would suggest
that I *did* exist at that time.
By the same token, science may at some point in the future understand the origin
of the universe ad infinitum. Probably not in our lifetimes, but it’s possible.
Suppose science showed that it was likely that the universe is cyclic? That the
exact same universe exists again and again? That there really is no “beginning”
or “end”, but that it’s on eternal repeat mode? What if we can construct a model
based on complex physics engines, that can extrapolate the history of the
universe successfully, and prove that they align themseleves perfectly with
other visible evidence?
You’re right, science has no *direct* evidence of ANY historical event. But
there are plenty of *indirect* sources which we may yet use to suggest
scientific origins of the universe.
DaveE
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Ya wanna talk about legislating morality?
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| (...) Everything that exists had to come from something. Whether you want to call Event 1 "God" or just "Some Random Occurance", neither fit into the model of Science. Even if you want to say that "the universe always was", that is still beyond (...) (19 years ago, 6-May-05, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, FTX)
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