For those who do not believe in the Divine, transcedant, spiritual etc. whatever you wish to call it. They often cite lack of or absense of evidence as they see it for any reason to believe in such things. Now this is valid thinking, but it is also directed reasoning.
Because one of the main purposes in the development of natural philosophy (science) was the idea of trying to account for things specifically by trying to make sense of the world without the need for supernatural explanations.
So in a sense one could either claim that sciences criticism of supernatural explanations as an unscientific bias of the practice.
On the other hand one could claim that men of science’s ability to make sense of the world (if you’re of the mind that they have) without the need for supernatural explanation, has given us much more insight and allowed us to bypass a way of obsolete thinking.
The reason i’m pointing this out is that this key fact rarely seems to come up.
Hmm… perhaps i should have put this in science or philosophy instead.
In my own personal opinion this obsession with science has in effect neutered human thought, wherin Science is seen as the only legitmate or reasonable avenue in which to gain knowledge and to come closer to the truth of things.
Don’t misunderstand i’m not opposed to science, simply it’s claimed monopoly on reason.
As I see it, all science cannot be fully understood without understanding the origin of all that is scientific. Only the supernatural explanation works because all science has its foundation in the creation by a supernatural, divine person…God. Science opens up and becomes all the more fantastic when you see how wonderful everything is put together, or the way things work. Science is not a coincidence of happenings or evidences of chance. No, the nature of science is much more wonderful than that. Science and the Divine go hand in hand, I don’t see how you can separate the two.
Most of the guys making big claims about science aren’t actual scientists.
Looking for a natural explanation is not ‘Science’. It’s methodology.
Science is the art of experimentation, in its many facets.
Science believes in the supernatural just as much as the other religions. They just refuse to call it that.
From what I understand, that isn’t exactly their fault though.
The King was encouraged to disallow Science because it was creating a concern in the people relating to their religion. So the King declared that Science would be permitted to continue as long as they never spoke of anything “spiritual”.
Due to that command, they developed the ontology completely void of any religious references, yet pursued the same concern as the other religions. So generations later, they decide to declare, “see we understand and there is no God.” Well, of course, there is no “God” in THEIR ontology, because they merely reconstructed the same picture of reality without that image. If they had been forced to never speak of “particles”, they would now have a relatively complete ontology void of particles and be proclaiming that “particles don’t exist”.
It is just an issue of which epistemology and ontology you choose to use.
There is no actual conflict.
You just can’t mix and match just like you can’t mix the old English measuring system with the new metric system.
Choose one or the other. But don’t try to mix the terms and declare that the other is wrong.