Is science description or explanation? If you argue it's explanation, than what sort of explanation? Is explanation for natural science a description of causal relationships? What are the limits of this?

why do you think being dogmatically anti-religious is any more reasonable than being dogmatically religious?

I think claims like "modern science could only have arisen in a Christian society" are extremely offensive, indefensibly inaccurate and serve no purpose outside of the promotion of christianity. Those with positions of secular authority who abuse their position to promote this kind of crap get nowhere near my criteria for "impressive".

Now the Big bang hypothesis (and the empirical facts) says that reality was created 15 billion years ago (and these years are relative, and there is no time outside of space, nor center of reality).
Is this not a clear case of science trying to replace religion? If religion is not scientific, how can science replace it? And what question is answered by the Big Bang Hypothesis?

Science and religion - both are ad-hoc understandings of life.

How you could find this argument 'extremely offensive' if you are not anti-Christian?

Sorry Jack I can't let that one go by either. This is a meaningless generalization. You can say that one or another argument is an ad hoc argument but I think it is meaningless to say this about broad subject areas such as science and religion.

You seem to have a bit of your timeline mixed up...

Newtonian mechanics makes reality appear as if it needed winding up; something that Newton said was not true to reality.

What makes a hypothesis true? When do we cease doing work and start explaining away existence?

So what do you think of the article I linked?

Oh, come on. Observation of the redshift (ok, most, not all) came first. Incorporating it into general relativity second. No?

And your thoughts on M-theory, which proposes to explain where the big bang really came from?

You still haven't put forward an argument, only a prejudice.

I think claims like "modern science could only have arisen in a Christian society" are extremely offensive, indefensibly inaccurate and serve no purpose outside of the promotion of christianity.

In Christ and Science (p. 23), Jaki gives four reasons for modern science's unique birth in Christian Western Europe:

1. "Once more the Christian belief in the Creator allowed a breakthrough in thinking about nature. Only a truly transcendental Creator could be thought of as being powerful enough to create a nature with autonomous laws without his power over nature being thereby diminished. Once the basic among those laws were formulated science could develop on its own terms."
   
2. "The Christian idea of creation made still another crucially important contribution to the future of science. It consisted in putting all material beings on the same level as being mere creatures. Unlike in the pagan Greek cosmos, there could be no divine bodies in the Christian cosmos. All bodies, heavenly and terrestrial, were now on the same footing, on the same level. this made it eventually possible to assume that the motion of the moon and the fall of a body on earth could be governed by the same law of gravitation. The assumption would have been a sacrilege in the eyes of anyone in the Greek pantheistic tradition, or in any similar tradition in any of the ancient cultures."
   
3. "Finally, man figured in the Christian dogma of creation as a being specially created in the image of God. This image consisted both in man's rationality as somehow sharing in God's own rationality and in man's condition as an ethical being with eternal responsibility for his actions. Man's reflection on his own rationality had therefore to give him confidence that his created mind could fathom the rationality of the created realm."
   
4. "At the same time, the very createdness could caution man to guard against the ever-present temptation to dictate to nature what it ought to be. The eventual rise of the experimental method owes much to that Christian matrix."
   

Moreover, when we say they are 'broad' it is in a general sense of description. Which would mean, to follow, that there is nothing concrete or specific; which in turn means, it is subjective. The 'science part is a bit tricky, i admit, - in the sciences you have the theories, in the realm of speculations, and some like the uncertainty principle which has strong basis to it, or the atomic theory which has evidences to prove beyond doubt, but yet we have string theories, and quantum 'super position theories which cannot be proven conclusively. And then the laws of physics are also quite persuasive, yet the elliptical orbital movements defies our logic.

Now tell me ...... are not theories evolving?

I know the meaning but there is nothing that implies or supports first of all that there is a god and secondly that there is one that has that trait. If you take a christian biblical account. If god required six days to create everything, that is not very omnipotent if you ask me. Surely a omnipotent god would have been able to create everything in the first second. So why the six days if it is omnipotent?

If we are not talking about the biblical account of a god, then what would be your basis that there is a god and that it is omnipotent? That it can create anything from out of nothing? Which is absurd reasoning, because if a god can do that, why can't the universe?

Here is another thing. If a god were omnipotent could that god destroy itself?

Thought provoking posts Jeeprs, thanks.

"Stanley Jaki makes a strong case for the fact that Western science could only have grown out of Christian intellectual culture."

"It is an historical fact that modern science did arise in a Christian society and it is also an historical fact that many of the founders of Western science were Christians."

Would you be willing to broaden the statement to say that the societies of monotheism
(Not just Christianity) gave rise to Western science (or science in general)?

The Islamic cultures did have a big part in the development of science.

I think they evolve constantly, but I don't know if that is the same as saying they are simply 'ad hoc' expressions.

Surely science depends on the ability to discover laws which are predictive, in other words, which will produce results when they are applied, or predict results which can be observed.

There are many speculative elements in science, of course, about which nobody can say whether there will ever be proofs. But consider what science has achieved so far, and also that it is an immense body of very precise knowledge.

Religion also has experience at its core, although in this day and age it is easy to overlook that, as it has often been turned into dogma. But it has an experiential basis, although few are willing to consider it.

Is science description or explanation? If you argue it's explanation, than what sort of explanation? Is explanation for natural science a description of causal relationships? What are the limits of this?

In Christ and Science (p. 23), Jaki gives four reasons for modern science's unique birth in Christian Western Europe:

"Once more the Christian belief in the Creator allowed a breakthrough in thinking about nature. Only a truly transcendental Creator could be thought of as being powerful enough to create a nature with autonomous laws without his power over nature being thereby diminished. Once the basic among those laws were formulated science could develop on its own terms."

... nature is everywhere the cause of order.

"The Christian idea of creation made still another crucially important contribution to the future of science. It consisted in putting all material beings on the same level as being mere creatures. Unlike in the pagan Greek cosmos, there could be no divine bodies in the Christian cosmos. All bodies, heavenly and terrestrial, were now on the same footing, on the same level. this made it eventually possible to assume that the motion of the moon and the fall of a body on earth could be governed by the same law of gravitation. The assumption would have been a sacrilege in the eyes of anyone in the Greek pantheistic tradition, or in any similar tradition in any of the ancient cultures."

"Finally, man figured in the Christian dogma of creation as a being specially created in the image of God. This image consisted both in man's rationality as somehow sharing in God's own rationality and in man's condition as an ethical being with eternal responsibility for his actions. Man's reflection on his own rationality had therefore to give him confidence that his created mind could fathom the rationality of the created realm."

"At the same time, the very createdness could caution man to guard against the ever-present temptation to dictate to nature what it ought to be. The eventual rise of the experimental method owes much to that Christian matrix."

But who said it was supposed to make sense to you? You seem to be sure as to the meaning of omnipotent, but if you are what gives the idea that a human could possibly have the power as to make sense of the workings of an omnipotent being to the point that your insight is at the same level of the being as to which we speak of? if you indeed had the same level of understanding would you not be in posecion of the same level of power of that being's? But since you do not poses the same power, I don't understand how can you came to convince yourself that you could posibly comprehend his workings? I mean its like an ant trying to understand why he cannot flatten a tree the same way an elephant can, he does not poses near the same power. So what on Earth would make you think that you could come to comprehend that which makes sense to one who is omnipotent? I just don't understand.

Humans seem to be in the illusion that they have the power to come to an understanding of nearly everything with science and expect everything to be comprehensible to them, and if there is something they cannot make sense of its nonsense. If this God is indeed omnipotent, science cannot even explain for consciousness so how can we expect it to make sense of a being who created ALL that is including the the natural laws of which science is governed by?



This is a very blind approach, did he tell you that he was working to full capacity to complete it in a shortest time possible? It is said that Leonardo took around 7 years to complete mona lisa, I am more than sure that he could have completed it earlier but this would not justify my assumption as to why he didn't, as It is most certain that he had reasons.



I believe that we are all speaking of an omnipotent being when we refer to God no? But you are totally missing my point, which is why I asked of your understanding of omnipotent. You are taking a very blind approach, you seem to be confusing the limits of an omnipotent being with those of which limit our universe, the notion that something cannot be created out of nothing is one that applies to us and this universe but not to an all powerful being, when you try to understand the workings of an omnipotent being it fails utterly to use your own limitations as being the same of this being's, that is as I said earlier you cannot conceive or even come close to begin to comprehend the workings of an omnipotent being because YOU ARE NOT OMNIPOTENT , your reasoning is very short sighted, you claim that certain workings of an omnipotent being do not make any sense simply because you cannot make sense of them, this is like a child out ruling Einstein's mathematical equations as nonsense simply because they do not make sense to him. If this being is indeed omnipotent than what is possible for him you cannot even begin to imagine, no scientists or no genius will ever comprehend the limits of such a being. You need to do some contemplation on the meaning of omnipotent.

Why is this world so full of people who proselytise??? One's beliefs only tend oneself.

Thank you, and traipse magnificently, each and every one of you, always.

Mark...