Hawking is One of History's Most Brilliant Fools

by Joseph - written in response to Hawkings assertion that philosophy is dead


Hawking is one of history's most brilliant fools. If philosophy is dead, then this death occurred when philosophy was seduced by science and tried to become a social science.

Philosophy stumbles when it seeks to imitate the objectivity and neutrality of science. After all, real job of philosophy IS to judge - to judge right from wrong conduct, to judge the true and real from the false and illusory.

Science limits itself to understanding HOW it all came be, HOW things happen. Philosophy asks WHY things came to be, WHY things happen.

Nor can science declare that any phenomenon that it studies is beautiful. Science limits itself to what can be verified by all men through the senses, thus choosing to ignore unique, personal, internal experiences.

The more philosophy distinguishes itself from science, the better for both! That's not to say that I'm anti-science. I love studying mathematics and physics, especially quantum and astrophysics, as far as my limited education in these subjects and free time will allow. And these studies have impacted my perception of God, the universe, and my place within it. 

Philosophy should certainly be informed by science, but must never try to obey or become a science. Because science is, after all, a child of philosophy, and the parent should never seek to imitate the child. Science is born of the philosophical assumptions that the material universe is real, that man is real, that both are fundamentally good, and that phenomena arise due to cause and effect rather than fate. Without philosophers such as Pythagoras and Aristotle, science could never have been born.

We can even prove that philosophy is the superior endeavor. Imagine a world run by enlightened, wise philosophers who lack science. Now imagine a world run by brilliant scientists who lack ethics, a branch of philosophy. In which world would you rather live?

Science Proves God Does Not Exist

A nice look at 3 proofs that God does not exist!
1) The first, from the ever cogent Mike Flynn, writing in response to this:

A physicist named Victor Stenger seems willing to contribute to the mounting pile of evidence that those trained in the metrical properties of physical bodies can't do metaphysics for anything. We will try to accommodate him.

Yes, it's the auld God-does-not-exist-and-I-can-prove-it foolishness through *Science!*

Believe it or don't believe it, sez I; but don't believe you don't have to believe it.

Like many narrowly trained, he extends his own tool kit into domains of discourse for which it is not suited, much like a plumber who comes to counsel your teenager on his anxieties. In particular, terms are always to be understood in the casual ways in which he understands them. Dr. Stenger would not tolerate this sort of thing if the subject were physics. "Dark Matter? Well, dark means it's not lit up, so if we shine a light on it, we should see it." This would induce a similar eye-rolling to some of the usages in the essay.

But in any case, said essay provides a number of tasty tidbits for our intellectual noshing.

A. Absence.

Lets start with his title: Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence. Apparently, he believes that believers believe this as an explanation for "why there is no scientific evidence of God." (Hey. It couldn't possibly be because God is not a physical body and his existence is not a metrical property. Could it?)

Later, Flynn writes:

The notion that the God supposed by the Christians wrote his "plan" down as a set of instructions, rolled them up and stuck them inside the ur-block, that these instructions must be physical, and so that there is no "room" for "God's Plan" in the initial universe simply misses the point. The God of the Christians is not "in" the universe any more than Shakespeare is "in" Hamlet.

2) The second, from a new blog called BadCatholic:

The most laughable statement I've heard from atheists - and that includes their origin-of-the-universe theories - is that religion is an opiate, a crutch, a delusion created by a bunch of saps looking for something to hope for, a celestial pie-in-the-sky. To this idiocy I can only offer a short transcript that, for good reasons, was never found by anyone, ever.

Caveman 1: Bro, these mammoths are frightening, and I don't know why it rains.
Caveman 2: Yeah, sounds like we need some supernatural explanation for natural phenomena for which we are not yet advanced enough to understand.
Caveman 1: Right. So we'll need a god...
Caveman 2: Nice.
Caveman 1: And let's have no adultery with beautiful women...
Caveman 2: Uh-
Caveman 1: And in with the concept of eternal, unimaginable torment-
Caveman 2: Slow down-
Caveman 1: And moral obligations, and no more of this survival of the fittest. We'll not be able to lie, or steal, or cheat, or masturbate-
Caveman 2: Are you sure you-
Caveman 1: Or eat too much, or drink too much, or be lazy, or be prideful . . . .

3) And the third:

H/T and full sourcing: John Jansen @ Lunch Break
No copyright infringement intended. All posts are fully cited for source and author. I have provided links back to the original source whenever possible. This information is for my personal, Faith Formation, Confirmation class, OCIC and homeschool referencing.
I am so very grateful to the authors, website and blog owners for sharing this information, commentary, and knowledge.

Science Depends on Faith

Is it important for Catholics to study science? 

Given the frequent friction between science and the faith, many faithful believers are tempted to throw in the towel and leave science to the worldly. The temptation is reinforced by the strenuous arguments of secular atheists who paint a picture of superstitious faith resisting the noble advance of knowledge, led by science.

 

One Catholic thinker who is brave enough to stand against this false picture of history is the late Fr. Stanley Jaki (1924 -2009) who showed through numerous studies that modern science in fact has its birth not in the rejection of the Catholic view of the world, but precisely in the Catholic view of the world. Writing for Crisis magazine, Fr. Jaki stated,  

“Nothing irks the secular world so much as a hint, let alone a scholarly demonstration, that supernatural revelation, as registered in the Bible, is germane to science. Yet biblical revelation is not only germane to science -- it made the only viable birth of science possible.”

  Fr. Jaki and other Catholic thinkers have argued that not only does the view of faith not contradict science, but that science itself depends on faith, and the Catholic faith specifically. 

As Catholics, then, we have an obligation not only to be friendly to science, but to claim it as our own. In this newsletter’s quote, G. K. Chesterton claims that Catholic philosophy is 

“entirely the praise of God as the Creator of the World.” 

To abandon the legitimate call to science is, in a sense, to abandon a certain kind of praise God has called us to, that is, the praise of discovering and delighting in the world he has made for us. 

As Catholics our task is to take on science fearlessly, and find in it not suspicion but rather the praise of our God.

SOURCES:
Catholics Studying Science, by Michael Baruzzini
Crisis Magazine

No copyright infringement intended. All posts are fully cited for source and author. I have provided links back to the original source whenever possible. This information is for my personal, Faith Formation, Confirmation class, OCIC and homeschool referencing.
I am so very grateful to the authors, website and blog owners for sharing this information, commentary, and knowledge.

 

Faith in Science

by Mark Shea
Christianity in general, and the Catholic faith in particular has no problem with the Sciences. But many people without faith love to talk about "science vs. faith". They fancy the former is about what they “know” and the latter consists of bowing in blind obeisance to Authority. But, in fact, as a practical matter, what we are really talking about, for the vast majority of people, is not "knowledge" vs. faith, but two faith systems.

Take Global Warming. What interests me is that the ordinary people do not argue by having a data-filled discussion of glacier ice core samples nor by punching up the latest statistics on polar bear population density, nor by performing a statistical analysis of mid-Pacific temperature fluctuations over the past century, nor by doing a scientific evaluation of climate conditions in the past two centuries compared with global climate fluctuation estimates in carbon-dated fossil samples since the Pleistocene.

Why don’t ordinary people do that? Because we can’t. We don’t know how. We Ordinarys—you might even call us “we laity”—are wholly dependent on saying things like “The consensus among scientists is…” and then referring to our favorite rabbinic school in the scientific community to read the Holy Book of Nature, comment on it, and tell us what it means.

This holds true across the board for all the sciences when it comes to most of us. The vast majority of people who confidently hold forth on, say, the existence of gluons, or the expansion of the universe, or the various evidences for evolution, or the proposition that light is both a wave and a particle are entirely reciting hearsay they picked up from some Authority on the Discovery Channel or Popular Science.

In other words, they are behaving exactly like adherents of a religious system.


They have a certain group of people whose word they trust and they repeat what those trusted people in white lab coats tell them. They have never looked through a telescope or microscope and would not know what they were seeing if they did, nor how to interpret what they were seeing in order to derive meaning from it.
They couldn't actually describe the physics equations necessary to derive E=MC², nor, if you press them could they very clearly tell you what that formula means. If you ask them "How do you multiply Mass times the square of the speed of light?" the conversation quickly breaks down because they don't know. They don't know how sperm and egg combine, they've just seen some pictures and know that it happens--somehow. The last actual experiment they performed with their own two hands involved a bean seed and a Styrofoam cup in first grade. They don’t know what a “quark” actually is and have only the crudest mental picture of one, based on a show they once saw on the Discovery channel.

Now, I don't think it's a bad thing that believers in whatever Popular Science says this month are believing Popular Science. As a general rule, I think listening to what The Authorities say about their field of expertise is just the way human beings function: we trust each other and rely on group consensus and specialized experts to navigate a lot of our problems.

So when the physicist who knows the math tells me some weird thing like, “Special relativity guarantees that travel to Alpha Centauri and back at light speed would entail the passage of eight years for the interstellar pilot and several decades for the people he leaves behind on earth”, I believe him though I don’t really understand him.
He’s done the math and I haven’t. Even though I’ve never actually seen DNA, I still trust that a geneticist is not simply practicing high priestly mumbo jumbo when he discusses gene therapy.

In short, I think faith in Authorities Who Know What They are Talking About has worked pretty well over the millennia, with some hiccups. The main difference between me and the people who imagine they “trust Science, not Religion” is that I extend precisely the same courtesy to apostles who saw Christ rise from the dead and who paid for their proclamation of this truth with years of toil, suffering, persecution, and ultimately, martyrdom.

Moreover, I’ve found the Christ they proclaim to make claims every bit as testable as those of the Sciences. For he says, “My teaching is not mine, but his who sent me; if any man's will is to do his will, he shall know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own authority.” (John 7:17-18). That’s the science of the saints, who wear white garments instead of white lab coats, and whose lives are themselves the evidence that Jesus is the way, the Truth, and the Life.

SOURCE: http://www.mark-shea.com/fis.html

Science Works; Religion Doesn’t

A wonderful post by Mark Shea -- a definite "keeper" for my online notebook.

I like the TV show Bones. Dr. Temperance Brennan is a character I can relate to on many levels . . . but not in her opinions about God. Brennan once stated, "Science and religion are mutually exclusive."
I think the writers hit a big "fail" on that particular line.
On that note, I recently found an article by Mark Shea that dovetails beautifully with my own views. Here it is (source back link included).

Mark Shea writes -- A correspondent of mine, all agog for the New Atheism, spouted the hackneyed slogan “Science Works.  Religion Doesn’t” some time back, along with the claim that “all religions claim exclusive possession of the truth”.  My reply:

No small part of the problem with this sort of sloganeering is that there is a marked laziness on the part of critics of “religion”. They seem to have only the haziest notion of what they mean by the word. I’m afraid I find a similar haziness in your remarks. What do you mean by “religion”? If you mean “the worship of a deity or deities” where do you put Buddhism in that? Some people would class Confucianism as a religion. I would not, since I think it is basically an ethical code.

In the Catholic tradition, “religion” has a very precise meaning. Saying “religion doesn’t work” would, in light of that particular meaning (namely, the practical observance of one’s duties to God and neighbor) be a nonsense saying since “religio” is all *about* doing the works God requires such as clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, etc. Religion has, in that sense, worked extremely hard for centuries.

But by the same token, not all of Catholic faith consists of “religio”. The tradition is too big for that. In addition to work, there is contemplation. Indeed, some of the contemplation gave rise to the sciences because the West came to the settled conviction that the universe was knowable because both it and we were the creation of a God who made us intelligent and it intelligible. (Note before jerking knee: I am not speaking here of “Intelligent Design” but of the philosophic matrix from which the sciences arose.)

Of course, I doubt that by “religion” you mean Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy or liturgical duties to God. I suspect you mean something like “Religion doesn’t work at telling us anything about the physical universe”. But then (at least from a Catholic perspective), that’s sort of like saying Jesus would have been a bad bowler. So what?

The purpose of the revelation is not to give us scientific information any more than to give us bowling tips. It is to give us information we need in order to come to the knowledge of God.

It was the devout Catholic Galileo who reportedly said that the Scriptures tell us how to go to Heaven, not how the heavens go.  That’s not to say that science doesn’t matter to the Catholic faith.  The Catholic Faith says (in flat contradiction to some religious traditions) that the universe matters intensely since God took on a body of matter in this universe of time, space, matter and energy which he himself had made. Because of that, the West adopted the fundamental attitude that Science was a Good Thing because God spoke through creation.

If another religious tradition had been adopted, such as gnosticism, our culture would have never developed the sciences at all, because the whole scientific enterprise would have been regarded as a waste of time since (in the gnostic view) only the spiritual matters and the physical world is a snare, a work of an evil god or an illusion.

That’s why it’s such a waste of time making general statements about “religion” vs. science.
Which religion do you mean?

“Religion” in the sense of “belief system” teaches and says anything and everything. But then, so does “science” depending on when and where you encounter it.
“Science” has taught the four humors, steady state theory, geocentrism, the existence of ether, and the existence of Piltdown Man. Rejecting Science tout courte because of this is ignorant and ill-advised. All depends on specificity.

And it is at this point the laziness toward defining “religion” tends to kick in and there is much hand-waving as the critic says “All religions make exclusive truth claims and they all say they are the truth.”

Actually, even this is not true at all. An ancient pagan could have (and often did) subscribe to any number of cult-like observances and felt no obligation to give exclusive allegiance to any of them. Again, we are back to “what do you mean by religion?”

It would be an interesting problem, if people could approach it dispassionately. Unfortunately, so much of the conversation is conducted largely on the level of bumper stickers.

Two final points: it is typical (and telling) that most discussion of “religion” is primarily focused on the ethical. Most people have the notion that “religion” is primarily about the question “How shall we then live?”
That is certainly important, particularly since, as the past century of horrors (courtesy of a science unhinged from the revelation of Christ) has proven, our species is frequently incapable of even elementary morality.

But morality and ethics are ultimately a secondary consideration when it comes to Christian faith. The primary consideration (from a Catholic perspective) is “Who is God and what is our relationship with him?”  “How shall we then live?” seeks to address not the greatest commandment (Love God) but the second greatest (Love your neighbor as yourself).  To be sure, the two commandments are inextricably bound up together, but they are still distinguishable and they are still in their order for a reason.

This leads to my second point, which is that you seem to me to equivocate in your “Science works/Religion doesn’t” scenario. As you admit, science is no guide to morality. And as I freely admit, “religion” (including my own) is no guarantor of moral goodness. People retain free will.  But the fact is, of course, there is a choking cataract of testimony from people in various religious traditions that their religion “works” in the sense of answering the question “How shall we then live?”

Obviously, I believe, as a Catholic that my tradition “works” best in this regard, but that’s beside the point here.  For given the extremely hazy definition of the term “religion” that you seem to vaguely have in mind, it seems to me to be rubbish to say “Science works/religion doesn’t” when you acknowledge that Science (and particularly Science wedded to a shallow atheist materialist philosophy) can’t possibly hope to answer questions like “Who am I?  Where do I come from?  Where am I going?  How should I live?”
Indeed, atheistic materialist science often has “worked” only in the sense of saying “You are not a who at all. You are a what: a finely tuned bag of chemicals that comes from chaos, lives by pride and death, and is destined for oblivion.”  Such nihilist philosophy, wedded with technology has made it extremely easy to slaughter vast numbers of people at once and lay waste to large portions of the earth’s surface in a flash.  After achieving this task, all atheist materialist science can offer survivors is the chance to commit suicide in the despairing conviction that all their sufferings are pointless vibrations of raw nerves in a mindless void of time, space, matter and energy.  That may “work” in terms of achieving an end (just as the great scientific advance of Zyklon-B “worked”), but I think throwing over the hope of the Resurrection in favor of such gleaming efficiency is still wanting in logic.

That said, however, I will not go further since, as I say, slogans like “Science works/Religion doesn’t are a total waste of time until critics of religion get a clear and workable definition of what they mean.

Each and every word needs to be carefully defined.  But there is a direct inverse proportion problem at work that makes it sure such a project will never happen.  Namely, those who are most inclined to worship the intellect are least inclined to use it—and vice versa.  “Science works, religion doesn’t” is a bumper sticker that Intellect Worshipers slap on their cars.  It is not something that anybody who is actually serious about thinking would ever say.

 SOURCES:
National Catholic Register
Catholic and Enjoying It

The Accidental Creationist

I love listening to Engines of Our Ingenuity. When I was teaching at The Legionary School I would sit in my car to hear the whole thing and then RUSH in to make prayers. The timing was usually perfect! I was never the first to arrive in chapel when I listened to Engines, that's for sure! Here is a particularly interesting one. And I thought I'd share.
Having (finally) JUST watched the Star Trek movie (tu RedBox) I will quote Mr. Spock.
"Fascinating!" 
ps) I like listening and you can, too. Just click the audio link and make sure your speakers are on.
pps) John H. Lienhard and Engines hail from my Alma mater!

No. 1513:
THE ACCIDENTAL CREATIONIST

by John H. Lienhard

Click here for audio of Episode 1513.

Today, the problem of telling about science. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.

Robert Wright entitles his New Yorker article on Stephen Jay Gould The Accidental Creationist. Gould, of course, was the Harvard paleontologist who wrote so powerfully and engagingly on matters of Darwin, natural selection, and evolution. He was a strong critic of so-called creation science. And now Wright calls him an accidental creationist. What is going on here?

Wright feels that Gould represented the facts in a way that demanded creationist resistance. As he reviews Gould's treatment of evolution, he doesn't fault him on his facts. Rather, he criticizes Gould's emphasis. Gould pounded home the idea that we humans aren't special, that we have no reason to think we're evolution's pinnacle. I rather like the way that undercuts human hubris. But he goes on to treat evolution as a random-walk process, lurching here and there and going nowhere.

The subtext in Gould's writing, Wright says, is Gould's egalitarian combat against social Darwinism. Early Darwinians extended "survival of the fittest" beyond simple biological evolution to social evolution. It made a self-fulfilling doctrine of white-male supremacy, for example. Social Darwinism suggested that whoever was on top deserved to be there.
Gould constantly stressed the folly of that idea. Evolution has not bred any species that can claim supremacy, he says. Wright doesn't disagree, but he thinks social Darwinism died long ago. Gould kicked a dead horse. Well, maybe. But I'm not so sure that that horse is entirely dead. People are constantly trying to bring it back in new clothing.

Still, when Gould stressed the randomness of evolution, many people felt that he removed hope for finding God's design within it. Wright points out that evolution is a feedback process that certainly does lead to improvements. Deny that, and Darwinism is spiritually bankrupt. Most of us would require an alternative. That's how Wright thinks Gould unconsciously supports Creationism

Well, I'm not going to quit reading Gould. For that matter, Gould himself did not stay in one place. He continued to temper his positions over the years.
Meanwhile, evidence in favor of evolution is overwhelming. It goes on all around us. For example, the tuberculosis bacterium evolved by natural selection as we misused the first antibiotics. Evolution is why TB, which was almost extinct, may now re-emerge as the next great scourge of the human species.

The implicit message in all this is that science changes color as we tell of it. That problem certainly hangs over my head. So many meanings ride within the facts that science can never be completely objective. That comes home with appalling clarity when we find Gould and Wright forging such profound philosophical differences -- around a set of facts they both agree upon.

I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the way inventive minds work.



(Theme music)

---

Wright, R., The Accidental Creationist. The New Yorker, December 13, 1999, pp. 56-65.

I am grateful to geologist Art Pollett for suggesting the topic and providing the source.
Use the SEARCH function on the home page to find other episodes based on material by Stephen Jay Gould. 
Those who hear this broadcast in reruns after May 21, 2002, should be aware that Stephen Jay Gould lost his long bout with cancer on that date. I have updated the text above to reflect that fact. I for one wish that I could've traced the continuing evolution of his thinking for many more years, but it was not to be. I was priveleged to meet and talk with Gould the year before he died, and he was every bit as delightful in person as he was on the printed page. 

The Engines of Our Ingenuity is Copyright © 1988-2000 by John H. Lienhard.