|
I'm definitely out of my league here, but it seems like you're overcomplicating the question. I won't pretend to be qualified to say whether you are right or wrong, but I'd like to make a few points. I get the impression that you are trying to address whether science is as [in]consistent with itself as religion is [in]consistent with itself in their attempts to land upon some truth or as another commenter put it, "model of our world". But the question posed by the article is whether science is consistent with faith. For the author, it is. At least a few commenters are simply stating that the reasons given by the author for this consistency don't resonate with them. It's also worth noting that while you're using a "mathematical definition of consistency", the commenters you are refuting are probably just meaning that whatever conclusions one reaches via the scientific method are often in disagreement with those arrived at via faith. Now, I don't know what the Christian faith tells us about String Theory - heck, I don't even know enough about what science says about string theory to speak of it with any clarity. But I do know that with the help of science we can figure that the earth we live on is spheroid and revolves around the sun, and I know that the Bible hints slightly at a vastly different conclusion, or at least it was interpreted to do so at one time. On one side of the coin, we can look at evidence, or at the very least hold a theory as probable - and if it's falsified - well it's sad, but the theory changes to better suit the findings. On the other side of the coin, we must take somebody's unchanging word for it, and maybe revisit our interpretations of the same idea only if we're forced to - and otherwise, any objections must be false. I just don't see how anyone can say there's no difference there. |
My point is that for all the methods the parent poster pointed out, science does not actually fare better than (Christian) faith, barring a few exceptions.
He cherry-picks little pieces of specific theories that satisfy a high standard of truth, I merely point out that, first that does not mean science as a whole satisfies that standard, second you can do the same for the bible. And, when it comes to historical opinions that were held up using less-than-gentle means, science also has loads of black spots. E.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism, so again that is not a valid criticism of faith, or at least isn't black and white.
As an alternative I defend utilitarianism : scientific theories are not true or false, or better or worse than the bible, but they are more useful in some cases. Nobody will design a cell phone using the bible. Nobody should base their moral decisions on biology.
The big problem here seems to be that Christianity uses internally the same standards of truth to some extent, and so it can be attacked on those points. It's actually pretty consistent so I think the attacks against it are less than convincing, because there is no better alternative, there is just a completely unjustified faith in science that makes no sense whatsoever : logic, the branch that actually analyses whether science could be wrong and how and why trust in science should exist, has a simple conclusion since the 1950s or so : science fails it's own standards. Somehow this part is always missing from these arguments : there is nothing to back them.