Snippet wrote,
“Materialists,” “scientists,” etc… (at least the ones worth listening to) are NOT saying, “Nothing exists if we haven’t YET found it.
That isn’t what I’m getting at. All scientists aren’t Materialists and it isn’t that they are saying nothing exists until we find it, what I wrote is just another way of saying lack of scientific evidence isn’t evidence of lack. To state with authority that a materially transcendent god cannot exist because science cannot measure it (as many arguments I’ve encountered have claimed) is no different than stating the opposite because the Bible says so.
Snippet further:
What they are saying is, in effect, if X cannot be measured – even theoretically
Serious question: how does one measure something theoretically? Is that what you’re saying, or am I reading this wrong?
More snippet:
The “faith” at the root of the scientific worldview is fundamentally different from the faith that props up religion.
Call it soft faith – the faith that amply confirmed observations are reliable things upon which to base one’s belief system, for the time being.
If this is faith, then the word faith is really too blunt an instrument to be of any service to any discussion. It is reduced simply to anything that is believed without 100 percent certainty – i.e., everything anyone believes, has believed, or ever will believe.
Herein lies an epistemological problem. There can be no such thing as a ‘scientific worldview’. I believe science supports my worldview. Does that make it a scientific one?
Are ‘amply confirmed observations’ such as the kind used in legal testimony from multiple witnesses also reliable things to base a belief on some event?
Regardless your answers to these few questions, the soft faith you speak of is not what I was referring. We have not observed ample transitional forms in the fossil record, for instance. (or evolution among high level taxonomies) We have not observed multiverses.
When we take the many pieces of what we have amply observed and quantified to the larger picture of reality, we fill in the gaps in our physical knowledge with metaphysics, no matter who we are or what we ultimately believe about the true nature of reality. Materialists are no better than Theists on this score, though they certainly act like it, that is my point.
