[ExI] Science or Scientism?

[John Clark]

On Tue, Nov 6, 2018 at 3:33 PM William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
wrote:

>>If God existed, that is to say a intelligence who created and operates
>> the world, then Teleology, the idea everything has a purpose or goal,
>> should be one of the fundamental aspects of physics; a world with Teleology
>> should exhibit different phenomenon than a world without it and so should
>> be accessible to the scientific method.   john clark
>
> > *I don't see how that follows, though certainly it could. *
>

If we assume God is intelligent and His overall plan is not self
contradictory then when physicists observe a new phenomena they could form
theories about what its purpose is and how some yet unobserved phenomena
might be needed to fit into it to make the overall plan work, and then they
could test to see if that new unobserved phenomena actually exists. But
Physicists at CERN don't do science that way even though that sort of
strategy works very well for predicting people's actions; if I see you do
something surprising I can form a theory about why you did it and use that
theory to predict something you will do in the future, and quite often I
will be right. But it works only because you are a intelligent being, for
thousands of years people tried to use it to predict things in the natural
world, but it didn't work worth a damn.


> *> The idea that god has a purpose doesn't mean that we have one.*
>

We don't need a purpose because we're the ones that are in the purpose
conferring business.  An amorphous blob can't give you a purpose, but you
may be able to find a use for it and give it a purpose.

John K Clark
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