A False View of Science

Gutsick Gibbon is reviewing the revised standards in Iowa's board of education.*

She's reviewing the one that's relevant for what they used to call Evolution.

She has without noticing shown a very real dedication for establishing in Iowa as in other states Science as a State religion. That's not the issue here.

She has also misunderstood what Creationists object to when speaking of Evolution as a modern fairy tale. They do not object to mutation, natural selection and other similar mechanisms, they say Evolution is a bad word for them, because it's also used to describe men and monkeys, mussels and microbes, mallows and mimosas all descending from Last Universal Common Ancestor. I know. Weird. That theory used to be called "Theory of Common Descent" and some weirdo seems to have repackaged that into "Theory of Evolution" while also calling the mechanisms I mentioned "Theory of Evolution." At least the Creationists claim so ... while Erica is so vocally proposing those mechanisms, never in a thousand years would she then switch over without notice to speak of the "Theory of Common Descent", would she?

Well, this is not my subject for this one.

It's the sentence in the image that she is NOT commenting on (at least up to 9 minutes 45 seconds). The one I've underlined in red.

Scientific knowledge assumes that natural laws operate today as they did in the past and they will continue to do so in the future

I have two quibbles with this sentence.

First, some would say all proper knowledge is "scientific knowledge" ... I disagree, philosophical knowledge is not scientific in this sense and neither is historic or interpersonal or personal.

Second, natural laws don't operate. They limit the operations of certain factors.

The three equations of Ohm's law limit the operations of electromagnetism as related to currents.

Ohm's law states that the electric current through a conductor between two points is directly proportional to the voltage across the two points. Introducing the constant of proportionality, the resistance,[1] one arrives at the three mathematical equations used to describe this relationship:

V = IR, I = V/R, R = V/I

where I is the current through the conductor, V is the voltage measured across the conductor and R is the resistance of the conductor. More specifically, Ohm's law states that the R in this relation is constant, independent of the current. If the resistance is not constant, the previous equation cannot be called Ohm's law, but it can still be used as a definition of static/DC resistance.

In other words, Ohm studied the realities of currents with a constant resistance of the conductor. The actual Ohm's law is interfered with whenever a conductor can chance resistance. Ohm's law is not operating, it's a partial only description of what is operating in reality, namely electricity, currents, conductors, and does not take into account how the equations get different results if the resistance changes.

Natural laws describe physical factors. They are not the physical factors and they neither say nor claim that physical factors are the only ones, they neither say nor claim that all apparently non-physical factors are ultimately physical (like grammar and thought supposedly being derived from the physics in human brains, as some would have it).

Not only does the 1947 book by C. S. Lewis contain a great proof of God, related to but much more step by step than Presuppositionalism, possibly the greatest, once you renounce the proof by Geocentrism (which by the way involves that some aspects of astronomy, and pretty big lines of it, have their correct explanation outside science as above defined). It also contains an excellent distinction of concepts between natural factors and natural laws. Whatever Anscombe technically disagreed on in the proof for God, she would certainly have agreed with what CSL said in that later chapter.

If we imagine, a) that natural laws have in and of themselves the power of causation, and b) that they are very regular, we could come to conclude, and a good deal of people in the last centuries in the West have concluded, that any irregularity, whether of events in human history or of explanations in astronomy would be some kind of breach in the natural laws. If God did that, God would on that view have dictated one law and then dispensed Himself from it.

If we realise that any natural law is a) just a description of how certain causes work, b) just describing one or some of several interlocking causes, which selection c) can be more or less relevant for the overall result depending on other factors, the whole sentence in Iowa's standards of Education falls apart. Obviously, if so, God is not breaking or dispensing Himself from any kind of law, He is just creatively interacting as Creator with factors He has Himself created and Himself not ever placed in the ultimate High Seat that certain science believers incorrectly place them in. Or in other words, "law" is a metaphor as applies to causalities, it only prescribes for a certain kind of description or calculation of them.**

If 1 Ampère * 1 Ohm equal 1 Volt, I cannot claim that 2 Ampère by 3 Ohm equal 7 Volt, it has to equal 6. If measured units insist on 2 Ampère, 3 Ohm, 7 Volt, I'm obliged to conclude that something other than normal electric current is taking place. I'm not obliged to conclude it didn't happen.

So, some people would like to pretend I'm a religious madman because I'm a Supranaturalist and refuse to share this false view of science? There is a name for people of that persuasion. Marxists. Unfortunately, like Evolution in the sense Theory of Common descent, it has another usage which is perfectly harmless, in this case Social Equity, Social Justice or Equity. That concept has been misused, and recently very heavily, in response to Marxist theories of who are the oppressors and the oppressed, but it has legitimate uses. A bit like denial of change over time has historically led to Old Earth Creationism with Racism as per Isaac La Peyrère, a Jew, converted to Catholicism, not very Orthodox, and often cited without acknowledgement by the Ku Klux Klan. Or, more benignly in the immediate theory, to the idea of a local or large regional Flood, a scenario which the Schooner Wyoming definitely disproved in the fairly shallow Nantucket Bay.***

Unfortunately, the Protestant mainstream back in 1924 (if not totally irreligious) was for total Species Fixism, was for a Local or Large Regional Flood, was for the Ark surviving for one year in that shallow water, so when Wyoming sank, 11th of March, many thought the Flood as such had been repudiated.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Blasius
3.II.2025

* Is Iowa Removing Evolution and Climate Change from their Education Standards?
Gutsick Gibbon | 2 Febr. 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so8_A4LD2tw

** The conventional symbol for current is I, which originates from the French phrase intensité du courant, (current intensity). Current intensity is often referred to simply as current.

*** See: Was the Ark Too Long for a Wooden Ship? Local Flood—Yes. Global Flood—No.