Hi martens, thanks for the link. Interesting, as your links always are. There’s a lot here, way too much for a short comment, or even a long comment. So I will try to keep it short. First, I don’t pay much attention when people say “science can’t explain X”. We’ve only been doing science for about 500 years, more or less. In that time we’ve learned just so much. Even in just the last 100 years we’ve completely changed our understanding of space and time and the cosmos. Give us another 500 years and who knows what science will have taught us? Even now, some scientists are getting to some pretty fundamental questions — I’ve been reading Brian Greene lately — The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos — there’s a third one, but I haven’t read it yet. The physics gets very deep, even in popularization. It’s possible (though not certain) that the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” has a physical rather than a metaphysical answer. (But science is a lot more than this fundamental stuff — I have a friend who studies bees in South America, and he’s doing perfectly good science, even if he’s not grappling with the origin of the universe.)+So much for science, now on to religion. Whenever anyone starts talking about God (or god) I want to hear some kind of reasonable definition of the term. I don’t expect an exact definition at the beginning of the discussion, because obviously part of the point of such a discussion is to improve the definition, but some reasonable approximation. I rarely find that my interlocutor can supply me anything that makes sense or is internally consistent or relates to what people usually mean when they talk about God. And I think Ruse is no exception. Of course this is just a newspaper interview, and you can’t expect precision there, but still he doesn’t come close. So until I have some idea what claim he is really making, I don’t know how to evaluate what he’s saying.+But I have no interest in telling people who are religious that they shouldn’t be. I often find that I have a lot in common with certain religious people, even with some sorts of Christians, and I don’t see the point in starting arguments with them. If the topic comes up, I may (or may not) say what I think, but I don’t bring it up myself.
Hi martens, thanks for the link. Interesting, as your links always are. There’s a lot here, way too much for a short comment, or even a long comment. So I will try to keep it short. First, I don’t pay much attention when people say “science can’t explain X”. We’ve only been doing science for about 500 years, more or less. In that time we’ve learned just so much. Even in just the last 100 years we’ve completely changed our understanding of space and time and the cosmos. Give us another 500 years and who knows what science will have taught us? Even now, some scientists are getting to some pretty fundamental questions — I’ve been reading Brian Greene lately — The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos — there’s a third one, but I haven’t read it yet. The physics gets very deep, even in popularization. It’s possible (though not certain) that the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” has a physical rather than a metaphysical answer. (But science is a lot more than this fundamental stuff — I have a friend who studies bees in South America, and he’s doing perfectly good science, even if he’s not grappling with the origin of the universe.)+So much for science, now on to religion. Whenever anyone starts talking about God (or god) I want to hear some kind of reasonable definition of the term. I don’t expect an exact definition at the beginning of the discussion, because obviously part of the point of such a discussion is to improve the definition, but some reasonable approximation. I rarely find that my interlocutor can supply me anything that makes sense or is internally consistent or relates to what people usually mean when they talk about God. And I think Ruse is no exception. Of course this is just a newspaper interview, and you can’t expect precision there, but still he doesn’t come close. So until I have some idea what claim he is really making, I don’t know how to evaluate what he’s saying.+But I have no interest in telling people who are religious that they shouldn’t be. I often find that I have a lot in common with certain religious people, even with some sorts of Christians, and I don’t see the point in starting arguments with them. If the topic comes up, I may (or may not) say what I think, but I don’t bring it up myself.