For those following my series over at Wheat and Tares, don’t miss out on my latest post: Positivism vs. Scientific Realism: An Example. Here is a teaser:
However, Deutsch is right about one thing. Positivism ultimately fails to grasp the value of believing your explanations. It is only through believing your explanations that you can comprehend them. And only by comprehending them can you refine them into something even more useful.
Check out the next post in my “Reason as a Guide to Reality” series over at Wheat and Tares. Here is a preview:
To prove his point of view, Deutsch suggests a thought experiment. Pretend that aliens give us poor humans a magic box, an ‘oracle’ so to speak, that can “predict the outcome of any possible experiment, but provides no explanations.” (The Fabric of Reality, p. 4) In theory this should be a Positivist’s dream. Since we only care about the predictive power of science, we now no longer need science because we can literally predict anything.
by Bruce Nielson
Andrew Ainsworth was recently nominated for a Niblet award for his excellent post which posed the question “Do we let the Church get in the way of the Gospel?”
The analogy is that of an orange:
Any church is like an orange: it has sweet, juicy, nourishing fruit (i.e., truths that help people live better lives); and it has a tough, bitter peel that protects the fruit and holds it together (i.e. an organizational structure, prescribed forms of worship, and claims to divine authority). Were it not for its protective institutional peel, a church’s nourishing spiritual teachings would become damaged and lost; were it not for its fruitful truths, a church’s institutional peel would be hollow and purposeless. Continue reading
[Cross posted from Sixteen Small Stones]
Today marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of “The Origin of the Species” by Charles Darwin. If you’ve followed my blog for a significant time you know that I have doubts about the compatibility of Darwinism and the belief in God as the Creator.
I remember as a high-school biology student, in addition to various other evolutionary facts, our teacher showed us the famous Heackel drawings of the developmental stages of embryos. He made us all memorize the phrase “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” And he insisted that it was a scientific “fact” that proved that Darwin’s theory was undeniably true. It was all very convincing and I believed him. As a faithful member of the LDS church I reasoned that “evolution” was simply the device which God employed to bring to pass the creation. This was in 1989 and little did I know that the “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” hypothesis had, even then, been long discredited.