I tried expounding on this issue in my last couple responses but I didn’t get much of a response from you. I am going to try to present this issue more clearly.
Consider this case:
Hippocrates is considered the father of modern medicine. He lived from approximately 460 to 370 B.C. This was a time when people didn’t have a great knowledge of medicine but Hippocrates made it into an observational and systematic system of investigation. You could say that he was the one who started using the scientific method.
On epilepsy he writes:
"Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it.”
Hippocrates accepted that there had to be a natural, rational explanation for this mysterious medical condition and he rejected any superstitious and divine causes. Today, we understand epilepsy as being caused by the abnormal neuronal activity in the brain. We no longer think that epilepsy is the result of demonic possession. Please agree with me on this one. If you believe that epilepsy is caused by demons, then we have some problems.
In the bible, it talks about Jesus curing epilepsy by casting out demons. This seems bit odd, don’t you think? Jesus is the son of an all-knowing, all-powerful God and this is his response. He tries to cast out demons. Really? Hippocrates had the right approach and this was several hundred years before Jesus was even born.
We don’t understand something, therefore God (or the supernatural, and in this case, demons) must be the cause. This is what we mean when we talk about the God of the gaps. I gave you a couple examples earlier. One was about the bats which have echolocation that wasn’t understood by science until recently. The other example was the sunflower--dealing with how it moves by following the sun in its course across the sky. Imagine now, trying to explain these away by appeal to the supernatural. Likewise, the fact that our cosmology is not 100% understood no more implies a case for the supernatural any more then these cases did in the past.
Here is a quote by Einstein:
“To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with the natural events could never be refuted...for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot.”
It seems to me that the scientist, if he is to remain consistent, must chuck all the religious stuff. If he then wants to remain religious, he sticks God in for whatever science does not yet have a good answer. The problem here is that science eventually does advance, and when it does, the religious must retreat once again.
And now for some responses:
“Science was just as much on the "Flat Earth" bandwagon as the Church was, the only difference now is you're still basically attacking believers for believing in a 'flat earth'."
Well first of all, I have said nothing of the flat-eathers. Please be fair.
Second, there is a fundamental difference between science and religion. Science is a dynamic process of inquiry. Religion is not. Scientific theories progress over time. This is just how science works. Over time, a theory builds up with anomalies and unsolved problems. Alternative theories then arise which solve these problems. And eventually, scientists will adopt the new theory over the old one. So to say that science was once wrong is not at all detrimental to my case. You still have to explain how it is that religion is able to change and adapt to new scientific advances. I understand religion to be eternal and non-changing.
“Didn't you awhile ago argue with me when I said Antony Flew said that this very conversation we are having belongs in the area of metaphysics??”
No. What I said before was that religion often times steps over into the realm of science. It is then usually either in contradiction with the science or has set up camp in an area that science has yet to understand. Questions that are beyond science are metaphysical. I’m actually a little confused as to what you are objecting to here.
“haha, sucker, I win! I told you God was real!”
This is the argument_from ignorance. It is a logical fallacy-- argumentum ad ignorantium. You cannot argue that something is true just because it hasn’t been proven false. The God of the gaps that I discuss is also a variety of this fallacy.
“Somebody is using the faith language and his name is Mikey!!”
No. We just don’t know everything. We should realize what we don’t know. Let’s not replace what we don’t know with God. This does not answer anything. This is the God of the gaps as I have been trying to explain.
“Any theory that PROVES/ DISPROVES God I will be very skeptical of.”
I never said anything about being able to prove or disprove the existence of God. Again, be fair to my case. I was merely trying to illustrate the amount of progress that science has made in understanding how the world works and point out how recent a lot of these advancements are.
“I will argue and already have argued that the evidence for God's existence is all around us.”
We have the world around us, this is true. But how is this evidence of a designer? Please explain.
You still haven’t answered my question about how you are to respect the authority of the bible if you reject select verses, i.e. like the creation story in Genesis, etc.?
