Atheists, what is your take on this statement by a Christian apologist on the nature of science?

Question

Disclaimer: I'm honestly not attempting to troll. I just wanted your response would be to this. This is a statement on Quora by a Christian apologist who was responding to an atheist. I am nonreligious myself. Your thoughts please? Sorry for the length. Thanks in advance.

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[ "Lawrence. This sounds very like, “keep faith in your god separate from mine because mine is right and yours is nonsense.” Perhaps that is not your intent. The idea that God and science must stay separated is a conflict over worldview though and not really a sensible one.

There are a couple of points.

I have already addressed the idea of “no scientifically valid proof of God’s existence.” That really depends upon what you mean by “scientifically valid” and by what you mean by “proof.”

In science, not all science is done in a lab with a microscope and the five steps of the scientific method. When science studies the origins of the universe, it can’t put the universe in the lab. When the origins of life are studied it isn’t possible to go back in time and take a sample. Gravity can’t be put in a test tube and brought into the lab; the best that can be done is to study the effects of gravity and make inferences. That is all science. And the methods used to infer in these areas of science can also be used to make valid inferences about God. ...(cont. in additional details)

Answer 1

"In the soft sciences like psychology and anthropology, self-reporting is a valid means of information gathering."

Yes, but even in those fields, that sort of evidence is not considered credible where it goes against the laws of physics.



Science does not require faith in anything like the way that religions do. We observe that there is consistent behaviour in the universe. Science is just the means of analysing that behaviour.



"There are so many—so very many—aspects of science that are unexplainable without God."

Are there, though? There are things that have not yet been explained by science, but just look at how much has been explained since science really got started a few hundred years ago. God is not a useful explanation for anything when the answer to "How did X happen?", is just, "God did it".



"And so many types of evidential support for the existence of a higher intelligence, and historical support that he reached out to us in Jesus."

Such as?

Answer 2

The scientist I quote here is not an atheist but faces up to how Christian claims cannot be proven scientifically: "Science is on a journey, seeking the best way of explaining and representing reality. Science is primarily about a method and secondarily about the outcomes of the application of the method. What one generation regards as secure and reliable may be abandoned by the next. Scientific theories are provisional. That does not mean that they are arbitrary. It just means that they are not - and never can be - the last word on anything. Richard Dawkins rightly points out that Darwinism is just as provisional as any other scientific theory. 'We must acknowledge the possibility that new facts may come to light which will force our successors of the twenty-first century to abandon Darwinism or modify it beyond recognition.'





"...Now, some people believe that science is about what can be proved. Yet, to say it again, it is just not that simple. Science often proposes the existence of invisible (and often undetectable) things - such as 'dark matter' - to explain what can be seen... The reason why the Higgs boson is taken so seriously by particle physicists is that it makes so much sense of scientific observations that its existence seems assured. In other words, its power to explain is seen as an indicator of its truth.There is an obvious and important parallel with the way religious believers think about God."





If the Higgs boson is a reasonable hypothesis, then so is the hypothesis of God. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. To examine the hypothesis of God, read the 2nd book reference, written by another scientist who is also a Christian. The 3rd book is also written by a Scientist who is a Christian, laying to rest the false presentation of this supposed ‘war’. What you quote is just a scratch on the surface of the debate that needs to be faced up to because science and theology are not at war: one deals with the material, the other with the immaterial.       

Answer 3

Blah! Blah! Blah! No one is going to read the long great wall of text.

Answer 4

My thought is that the last paragraph ( first tex written) is realist! → '' In science, not all science is done in a lab with a microscope and the five steps of the scientific method... '' Etc ...

Answer 5

If you talk about God with a relation to what we experience around around us, that's one thing, however, If you talk about God with a relation to what humans do, well that's absurd.

Answer 6

I say your buddy is asking about the ultimate origins of life and the universe because he's grasping for gaps he can fill with his god.  Either prayer works, or the Christian god doesn't exist.  Prove prayer works. 

Answer 7

This is the kind of thing that makes a ton of different points that I want to comment on, but it'd end up being longer than your quote. But the bulk of it is... he's kind of ignoring that different kinds of evidence are weighed differently. Psychology doesn't use self reporting because it's strong evidence. Just that it's usually the only kind of evidence the field can produce. And that's recognized as super problematic. That's the reason it's so inexact. The reason it's a soft science. That isn't to say that it's invalid. But the conclusions it draws are only going to be as strong as how well they're replicated.



I'm not clear if he means faith as just belief or something else, but whatever evidences he believes are reinforcing it, are they even up to the standard of self reporting? Are any conclusions people want to come up with through them easy to reproduce consistently in randomly drawn populations? And do they directly suggest anything about any gods?

Answer 8

What do I think? Not very much. Said a whole bunch of stuff without really saying anything. What is proof and what is scientifically  valid only requires this much talk when youre trying to link god and science. Until someone comes up with a method to examine ANYTHING supernatural its all smoke and mirrors on the part of the christian apologist. He didnt offer any actual evidence of any kind. 

Answer 9

To be perfectly honest, I am not the slightest bit impressed. All that person is saying is that studying science is studying God, and they offer not a shred of evidence for that assertion.