Re: The similarity of scienctific method and faith
I have never given this any thought. What I have understood is that randomness never really exists. Through the process of randomness taken to excessive levels people have seen an order … They call it the ‘Order out of Chaos’.
In fact the premise of the Chaos theory is that it is used as a model for simulating randomness whilst using deterministic principles. Such that the infinitive end result is known but the variations on the journey towards that point is subject to what we observe as randomness, then in time this behaviour becomes statistically predictable.
It joins back to what you say that ‘randomness has its own purpose’ such that the concept of randomness could disprove the existence of a Wise God who does nothing for the sake of it. Rather what we observe in our attempts to produce random events we must resort ultimately to use patterns and order to just model randomness. We can assume that true randomness exists, but we have never found that to be so. The greek symbol PI which represents the harmony between circumference and diameter of the same circle demonstrates a numerical figure which extends to a random array of digits to infinitum. However, we know that it represents something real. The diameter is given purpose by its circumference and the circumference by its diameter.
PI is a true discovery of the Law of Nature. That it can not be modelled exactly because it represents transcendental harmonies which we can fathom and realise, but when we try to explain without sophistication we fall short of what is actually happening. The simplicity of nature but the impossibility of defining it shows that something Wise has brought it into being.
This flows into what you state next …
I couldn’t have said it better …
Before I go on from here I’ll explain myself a bit. Entropy is about disorder and disorder is about randomness. Mechanically high entropy applies to a system that has decreasing useful energy to produce work. It is evidence that useful energy at least on the thermodynamic scale is born from low entropy systems which means the starting point to everything must be something extremely ordered.
Later I was defining what ‘purpose’ should mean to us. It is not enough to say that something contains a purpose for its own function, but rather a function can only be acquired from it if something else is already in place and vice-versa. Such that two completely independent things work so harmoniously together that it seems they were designed to be symbiotic, and that this particular function would otherwise be non-existent if these two things didn’t come together, this is evidence of ‘purpose’ and evidence against the precepts to the theory of evolution. But it is clear scientifically that things have purpose.
So we have concluded that everything has purpose … and now you want to formulate a new hypothesis which is to answer the question ‘what is our purpose?’
This is irrespective, because we know that some domains of science give (hypothesise) us a purpose, and yet so does faith.
Our purpose according to science is “to survive”
Our purpose according to faith is “to know God through worship”
Both give us a purpose and as previously explained we need not go any further because ‘purpose’ can only be borne out of something very Wise. Wisdom infers Life, and religion readily claims that God Attributes to Himself Life. To have purpose should mean that we have a God; it does not matter whether that purpose is to simply ‘survive’ or to ‘know God through worship’.
To prove that our purpose is to survive and not to know God will not negate that we have a Wise God. One will simply be the theory of ‘intelligent design’ and the other will be ‘traditional religion’.
That is why atheistic evolutionists dislike the theistic evolutionists it is because they argue that we all have a design purpose and it is something that atheists cannot possibly accept. Rather they use sophistic reasoning fallaciously to conclude that “we don’t have purpose but we give purpose to ourselves”
Because atheistic science is now out of the equation and theistic evolutionism and religion now begin to depart from one another we need to analyse the two hypotheses independently and see what happens as well as explore the possible hybrids of these approaches.
Rather ‘theistic evolutionism’ from the onset covers those orders which profess no duty bound obligation of the existent to the Pre-Existent, whereas religion obviously does require this duty. Religion is often criticised for negating the gradual and stage-by-stage development of the Universe and life in general. And the ‘theistic evolutionists’ will even argue that the ‘neo-Darwinian’ theories are in fact true, because they say this is what is proven or demonstrated. They make little effort to distinguish between the concept of ‘Creation’ and ‘Evolution’ and often reduce God to a ‘force’. There are some religious people who believe that the world was made in a 24 hour period, who are also usually the same as those who believe that Adam and Eve were created and did not appear through evolution. On the other hand many people who believe in the gradual development of the universe also apply their gradualism on mankind and life in general. Some theistic evolutionists even believe in alien intervention in the development of humanity. There are those people who endow their beliefs purely on scripture, but there are also those who primarily base their beliefs on scripture but view them from the prism of science and vice-versa. Some people are religious apologetics and try to make their scriptures conform to common understandings; others do not let any common understandings permeate their beliefs.
In our analysing we need to decide which are right, which are acceptable, which are conditionally acceptable and which are wrong.