rluvsb

If worldviews shouldn't affect science, then explanations other than naturalistic ones should be considered and tested, not dismissed.

It is however very certain that science affects worldviews. What is the source of truth if there is no God? If man can make his own truth, then truth is interpretable and relative to any situation. If truth is relative then there is no rght or wrong.

How does a naturalistic scientist view the soul, or is it simply dismissed by naturalistic scientisits?

RBH

rluvsb wroteThey have been: see my post above. It was precisely as theistic scientists tested their supernatural explanations that they shifted to naturalistic explanations.

rluvsb wrote"Truth" is inaccessible to humans; what is accessible to science is a successively better approximation to a veridical picture of how the world works. For "T" Truth, science isn't the place to look. Science does not provide that every man to make his own truth -- it is a systematic way of providing for shared knowledge. Scientific knowledge is public knowledge, shared and tested by many, not private revelational knowledge accessible only to one person in himself.

Science surely affects "worldviews', but it is not a recipe for thorough-going relativism nor post-modernist intellectual nihilism. But it does not depend on an external fantasy figure for its explanations and warrant. It depends on the collective power of thousands of human minds studying phenomena.

rluvsb askedIt is neither viewed nor dismissed; it is ignored. There is no publicly testable evidence for "souls" and hence they are outside the purview of science.

RBH

Jack the Bodiless

The answer to this, ironically, involves evolution.

There is a "real world" out there. We'd better understand it, because if we don't, it could kill us. If an early hominid was being stalked by a tiger, he couldn't just make it go away by "choosing a different truth": he'd be naturally-selected out of existence.

Similarly with moral issues: if he chooses that robbing his neighbors is OK, he'd get cast out of the tribe (or worse).

rluvsb

That is because people compromised their views on religion and the authority of the Bible to fit the secular "truths". If you fit the world into the Bible, it doesn't work. It is impossible to arrive at truth without starting with truth. If you start with a Biblical perspective, or a naturalistic perspective, you still start with a bias.

Plognark

The problem is, non-naturalistic explanation are not generaly testable. In a naturalistic universe, things are consistent. The sum total of human experiences seems to bear this assumption out. There's really no other alternative.
If an explanation is supernatural, it can defy and break the laws and observations of reality and follow no known pattern. There's no possible way we can test or verify something like that.

Truth or truth? There's a difference, but this is gettig into messy philosophical issues; not my personal strong suite

Wellll....not exactly. This goes back to the whole peer review and concensus thing. No matter how much I disbelieve in that oncoming bus, it's still going to flatten me like a bug if I walk in front of it.

Objectively? No. Subjectively, yes. This is a whole separate thing from evolution though...belongs in another forum, so maybe you could start another topic there or a mod will split it off.

Well, if we ever find evidence of it, then it'll no longer be supernatural. So far, no evidence has been found for one, so science has little to sayo n the matter except "we haven't seen one yet."

However, the ideas that a seat of consciousness that resides separate and apart from the phsical brain is on pretty shakey ground. Injuries and chemical changes to the physical brain can have such radical and profound effects on personality, memory, etc...it would appear that all consciousness is rooted directly into our grey matter.

If the soul was a separate entity, we would (probably) expect to find that people's personalities and memories remained intact in spite of injury, chemical alteration, or other influences.

So for some specific definitions, science does debunk it a bit, but otherwise there's nothing there for science to test. :huh:

Richard Forrest

How can I test the assertion that an intelligent designer is responsible for creating living organisms from nothing using supernatural processes? More to the point, how can such an assertion be falsified?
Perhaps. But this is a comment on worldviews and how they may be formed, not science. This is a philosophical question which cannot be addressed by science. Ask a philosopher. Ask two - you'll probably get at least four answers from each. Perhaps. This is not an assetion which can be addressed by science.Scientists are people. They hold a wide range of views and beliefs. Some are deeply religious, some are atheists, some are agnostic. When they are working as scientists, they operate under the premise that the phenomena they study are the outcome of naturalistic processes. If they didn't, they wouldn't be working as scientists. This does not mean that a scientist may hold views on the soul, but as the soul is not something which can be investigated using scientific methods, it is not a subject for such investigation.

Richard Forrest

Jack the Bodiless

Precisely. Maybe you should give that some more thought?

The Bible doesn't fit the real world. It is fiction: fiction that frequently contradicts reality, as those who investigate reality eventually discovered.

Even if you begin with the notion that the Bible is true: investigation will eventually reveal that it is false. Reality doesn't shape itself to conform with what you'd prefer it to be.

Plognark

What does that tell you?

Truth™ or truth? We can get truth pretty easily. I'm pretty comfortable with the fact that we'll never be able to reach the philosophical holy grail of "Truth™".


Not really. The biblical perspective has to assume a few things: The bible is accurate, it is divinely inspired, God exists, Jesus really was the son of god, etc. (generally, I know some sects take different views on this stuff).

This is rather circular though. How does one know that these things are true? Becasue the bible says so. Amusingly, a person has to presuppose a form of methodological naturalism just to be able to interpret and trust the consistency of the bible.

All living creatures have been hard wired to work off of this type of naturalism, dealing with cause and effect and evidence. Some are better at it than others.

With methodological naturalism, the only thing we really have to presuppose is that reality is consistent and logical, (that observed laws don't change on a whim) and that our senses are generally consistent. Reality is nice enough to oblige, as all of our sum total human experiences seem to indicate this is so.

Anything else goes after that point.

rluvsb

The soul can only be manifest through the body, just as a television siganl can only be manifest through a set of electronic deveices. If you remove one part of the cathode that projects the electrons to the screen the TV doesn't work right either. That does not mean the signal is bad, it means the TV is bad.

Y.B

The television signal belongs to the natural, testable realm. The soul does not, or at least your analogy doesn't explain how it can be tested.