Science is utterly incapable of establishing or falsifying metaphysical facts other than specific facts about one's sensory perceptions, and it is also always open to potential revision, while logic remains unchanged due to its inherent nature. It follows from either one of these that basing one's metaphysics on anything unearthed by the scientific method is intellectual suicide. Can anyone prove any of the specific scientific points the design argument for God hinges upon, for example? Of course not! Even if the main scientific points of the design argument were provable, it does not follow that God is responsible for them.
As if the non sequiturs of the design argument were not inept enough on their own, scientific arguments for God also set up their adherents for existential crises. The person who pledges themselves to theism on the basis of science could always have their foundation ripped out from under their ideological legs with announcement of a single new scientific model or discovery. After all, the first sign of new scientific data automatically brings with it the possibility of an alternate explanation for various empirical observations, and thus God's existence is never guaranteed to be relevant at any given point. Only logic is immutable and permanent, and thus only logic can ground a sound worldview.
In light of this, it is asinine to believe in God because of unverifiable scientific concepts. Logic alone can prove the existence of an uncaused cause [1] (as logic alone can grant absolute certainty about anything to begin with), and if human epistemological limitations meant that one could not prove the existence of God, then agnosticism would be the only legitimate stance on the issue of God's existence. Either way, science is both epistemologically and metaphysically irrelevant to the matter, just as it is irrelevant to everything other than immediate practicality and better understanding one's perceptions of phenomena in the external world.
Theistic or Christian apologists who rely on science to ground their theism shoot themselves in the foot, crippling their own efficiency and accuracy even as they claim to represent sound demonstrations of God's existence. A stable theist recognizes that science, considering the malleable nature of its theories, simply cannot justify any beliefs other than those about perceived connections between events in the external world. Science is of great value for engineering solutions to practical problems and developing descriptions of how matter behaves, but it has no authority in the realm of metaphysics.
[1]. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-uncaused-cause.html
Complex question coming your way! I've heard skeptics ask this (or at least of the sort) and it's also something I've wondered many times throughout my life and feel like I've never really had a good answer for: If evidences points in favor of the uncaused cause being Yahweh, can we hear his voice?
ReplyDeleteAfter all, the Bible records multiple instances of Yahweh carrying seemingly audible conversations with humans, as early as Adam and Eve! The question asked is why doesn't God seem to talk with that type of clarity with people beyond biblical times, like us 21st century folk?
The most common answer I've heard to this is "God speaks to us through circumstances" but I don't know if I've ever found this answer satisfying? Couldn't circumstances just be circumstances, and what if one completely misinterprets/makes up a "message" from them? Just wanted to see if there was maybe other possible answers
I've heard some very incomplete or unsound answers to that question as well. One of the first things that needs to be examined is the actual scope and frequency of God's verbal (and non-verbal) interactions with people in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament. Entire lifetimes go by in some Biblical books without any obvious divine activity. The Old Testament is often described as if it is brimming over with miraculous events, but many of the times when God audibly spoke to someone or intervened by means of a miracle were very particular.
DeleteGod does not personally speak to everyone in the Old Testament even when they desperately ask him to, meaning that divine "speech" was not necessarily all that common, as it seems to have mostly occured in very specific situations. There is never any indication that Yahweh literally spoke to humanity on a universal, ongoing basis, with the exception of the Edenic world before Adam and Eve sinned. This is especially significant if the universe is billions of years old, as scientific data suggests. This would mean that there is no evidence that God actively and audibly spoke to humanity as a whole even at the height of the Old Testament miracles, even if humanity has existed for far longer than several thousand years.
You are definitely right to find the claim that "God speaks to us through circumstances" questionable. Even if this was true (though I don't even think some people who say this actually know what they mean by it), it would be impossible to distinguish between circumstances God is "speaking" through and those that are just circumstances. This would force people to either remain agnostic about whether God is somehow "speaking" in a given scenario or invent completely subjective interpretations of life occurrences. Thus, believing that God is directly communicating with oneself through some set of otherwise ordinary events is just a kind of irrational mysticism.
That makes sense! I think I may have overlooked how rare the extraordinary events and miracles in the Bible are.
Delete(You may have addressed this somewhere before, I don't remember) A question that kinda builds from that is, how do we accept what biblical figures say in the Bible about what God has commanded for everyone/a very specific task they themselves need to accomplish, when we would be skeptical if some rando came up to us today and claimed that God spoke to them or that they're the second coming of Christ? What's the thing that makes these people's experiences reliable?
I've always thought these were good questions and thought it wise to have a possible answer ready to relay if anybody is ever asks me this same question!
That's a great question! If someone told me that God spoke to them and they did not mean it in a non-literal sense, I would admit that they hypothetically could be correct, but I would tell them that I have no basis for believing that they are even probably right without much stronger evidence than a personal anecdote. The key difference between the claims of a random moderner and, for instance, an Old Testament prophet is the fact that the Bible is a book that can be evidentially supported--and it even has parts that can be completely proven. Whereas a stranger's claim to have heard from God inevitably reduces down to a fallacious appeal to their subjective, private experiences unless he or she can predict pr perform some sort of miracle, many Biblical accounts can be historically investigated and philosophically supported.
DeleteNot every Biblical story can be supported by direct historical evidence, but the truth of historical documents isn't a matter of absolute certainly to begin with. It is still far easier to defend the seeming veracity of a book with historical elements than it is to prove that a random spiritual experience has any actual connection to God. Since you mentioned that someone might claim to be the returning Jesus, it's also worth mentioning that one could at least see if the details the Bible provides about the return of Christ apply in the case of someone who identifies as Jesus and claims their appearance marks the Second Coming. One could also point out if they say something that completely contradicts what Jesus says in the gospels, they could not be the Jesus described in the Bible. There are some variables that make it easier to falsify claims of the Second Coming than it is to actually falsify other claims about divine activity, even if they are erroneous.