In the phylogeny of human activities, beside the one in which enquiry is limited to material causes, would there be room for one in which enquiry was limited to verifiable causes, but verifiable not to material?
It was like that science used to function. It cannot be shown it was less fertile in technological applications then - goggles were invented by pretty certainly Catholic optic students and electric battery was invented by Volta, who was a Catholic. Pascal was a Jansenist and as such got freewill wrong, but he got creation right. And he gave us the wheelbarrow.
Mendel - whose discoveries were deliberately ignored by Evolutionists for some 50 years - and who gave us laws of heredity quite certainly thought of them only as secondary causes, and of God as the first cause of heredity. He was a monk cultivating and crossbreeding pea varieties for the monastic kitchen, as well as for studies on tied and non tied variables.
Well, seems AronRa still has some kind of issue with non-material causes and their supposed lack of verifiability.
When explaining the scientific method, he even says, at least on one video against the "Texas Board of Indoctrination" that enquiry has been limited to "verifiable, natural, material causes" as if those were synonyms.
Now, funny thing is, neither are all material causes verifiable, nor are all verifiable causes material.
Photons and electrons may be verifiable in the end, but they are not verifiable as a piece of blunt lead is verifiable when fitting with the dent in the head of the corpse. Or as a pistol is verifiable when shooting bullets of same size and scratch pattern as those found in the wall behind the corpse shot to death.
Now, how would you verify something immaterial, such as God?
- - Enumerating all possibilities and eliminating all material and non-divine ones.
- - Enumerating necessary characteristics of a certain cause for a certain effect, and seeing the characteristics lead to non-material conclusions.
- - God choses to make himself material and so be verified materially, we Christians claim that happened 2000 years ago.
- - God repeats his works of upholding and creating the universe in miniature to comply with the repeatability criterium of scientific method.
Enumerating all possibilities and eliminating all material and non-divine ones. - Anything that seems to be (seems to be substance in Aristotle's sense), either it is an illusion, or it really subsists. Anything that exists, either it exists from eternity or it came to existance. Anything that came to existance, it either was created by some intelligent designer, or came to being and that either by change from within, according to possibilities unfolding or by chance from without. So if illusion and eternity and pure chance and evolution can all be ruled out for say life or human intelligence, we have proven an inteklligent creator.
Enumerating necessary characteristics of a certain cause for a certain effect, and seeing the characteristics lead to non-material conclusions. - Acts of mind and of will reveal on introspection immaterial characteristics, which means that mind itself, giving rise to them, is immaterial.
God choses to make himself material and so be verified materially, we Christians claim that happened 2000 years ago. - Only problem: did Jesus exist and did he show himself to be God. We say yes, to both. But that is what I am arguing about on quite another blog, dedicated to vindicating Gospels rather than Genesis, so I had better link there. In the main, the showing himself to be God part coincides with the next part: God repeats his works of upholding and creating the universe in miniature to comply with the repeatability criterium of scientific method.
- Checklist:
- God created man? Then he could once again create someone without parents or without one of the parents. Virgin Birth.
- God created life and health? Then he can restore it to the dead and to the sick. Raisings of dead (Jairus' daughter, the widow's son and Lazarus) and healing of innumerous blind, deaf-and-dumb, lepers, bent people, etc.
- God has defeated demons? Then they exist, can tamper with our lives and Christ could easily defeat them again, by exorcism. Check the possessed man at Gadara and quite a few others. Including the one which provoked the extremely dishonest incredulity of Pharisees in Matthew Ch. 12.
- God has created the vine and fermentation? He made water into wine over shorter time than usual in Cana.
- God has created other plants and also animals? He multiplied loaves and fishes, twice.
- God has created physical nature? He stilled the storm. The sun went dark when he died.
- God has created gravity? He walked on water and rose to the clowds before the eyes of his disciples.
But, as said, that is a matter for another blog, about veracity and historic verifiability of the Gospels.
It is called "somewhere else" since an atheist not buying the Jesus mythers asked me to "preach to atheists somewhere else" than under comments on that post.
Here is the url:
"somewhere else"
http://notontimsblogroundhere.blogspot.com
A little challenge for you, AronRa: millions and billions of years of time are part of the causes evolutionism accepts. And it is as material as a dimension in which matter exists and material states take place can be material. But is that length of time verifiable?
Why so shy about creationist pov on C14?
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2011/07/why-so-shy-about-creationist-pov-on-c14.html
Hans-Georg Lundahl
Georges Pompidou Library of Paris
Sts Perpetua and Felicitas, 7-III-2012
