The God Truthiness: Never underestimate the power of...

science / a good metaphor.

From dr clam:

The classic statement of the incommensurability of the two things is the book metaphor which Rilstone discusses at some length. What do you think of his arguments there, eh? Basically, even if science gives a full explanation for all the events *inside* the book, it is incapable of answering the question: 'Why isn't this book writen in Japanese?'. Dawkins would say that this was a meaningless non-question, but surely that is a cop out.

Yes, Dawkins would say its meaningless. No, that's not a cop out. Not as far as Dawkins is concerned. YMMV.

Over the last week or so writing these posts I've seen a clash of ways to view the world. I'm sure there's a nice word which encapsulates someone's frame of reference for the world, but I'm not erudite enough to know it. Dawkins prefers to explain the world through science, for others a good metaphor will suffice. Dawkins is a stickler for the scientific method, which “is a body of techniques for investigating phenomena and acquiring new knowledge, as well as for correcting and integrating previous knowledge. It is based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning, the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses.” Others quite happily see a lack of evidence as an invitation for faith.

So when I look at this definition I've got to do an about face and agree with marco that “God can neither be disproven nor proven.” Science is concerned with the observable natural world, not the supernatural. Dawkins can at best claim (and he does) that God is “though not technically disprovable, [He] is very very improbable indeed” (136).

I'd have to say I come down more on the science side. I'm not that knowledgeable about science, but I do require more proof than the warm fuzzy of a good metaphor before I'd devote my life to the not sky fairy. Again YMMV and I hope it does.

I'll leave these posts for now with this quote from Dawkins that I think answers dr clam:

My own feeling... would have been an automatic, deep suspicion of any line of reasoning that reached such a significant conclusion without feeding in a single piece of data from the real world (106-107).

I'm going on holidays so there'll be no posts for a little while. Enjoy whatever you're doing and thanks for the all comments. I've greatly enjoyed having the visitors.