From: lydick@SOL1.GPS.CALTECH.EDU (Speaker-to-Minerals)
Newsgroups: alt.callahans
Subject: Re: Science and god:  Are they incompatible?  If so, why?
Date: 18 Nov 1992 03:52:12 GMT
Organization: HST Wide Field/Planetary Camera
Distribution: world
Reply-To: lydick@SOL1.GPS.CALTECH.EDU
NNTP-Posting-Host: sol1.gps.caltech.edu

In article <1992Nov17.235531.11416@midway.uchicago.edu>, mss2@kimbark.uchicago.edu (Michael S. Schiffer) writes:
=	"What if he chooses to use that power _once_?  Or
=three times over the course of fifteen billion years?  Now he's not
=limited inherently by rules (at least not rules knowable by the
=inhabitants) but he's still not interfering most of the time.  And in
=that case, he's operationally omnipotent (there's nothing by which one
=can infer with certainty that he can't/won't intervene tomorrow) but,
=I think, still not generally in conflict with science on a day-to-day
=basis.  Any scientific prediction has implicit caveats: X will
=happen-- assuming our data are accurate and our theories are
=sufficiently close to the truth to cover this case.  An
=interventionist god or gods would add the caveat "and assuming no
=miracle occurs".

True.  As I said in my original post in this thread, I didn't give a
comprehensive list of possible types of deities.  Your example falls somewhere
in between the god of the Deists and those of the Pentecostal religions. 
Exactly where one draws the line between a god that allows the possibility of
science and one that doesn't, I don't know.  I suspect that there is no
clearly definable line separating the two, but instead a vast grey area about
which it's possible only to say "I don't know."

=	"If the universe has a supernatural creator deity or deities,
=then natural law is as much a divine creation as its suspension would
=be--

True.

=but 'miraculous' happenings are by definition an unusual alteration of
=business as usual.

But, as with so many other aspects of religion, the definition is rather fuzzy. 
Please consider the following example:
	A person who's on a religious retreat who drops his glasses.  He looks
	for them without success.  He calls to his friends who look for them
	without success.  They all pray that they'll find his glasses.  After 
	doing so, they expand the radius of their search and, lo and behold,
	they find his glasses.
Now is that a miracle?  I don't think so.  But I've heard this situation
described by a fundamentalist who was adamant that it WAS a miracle.  I finally
gave in and agreed with him:  If the rest of the party was similar to him, it
was indeed a miracle that one of them had enough intelligence to widen the
search.

=If interventions were arbitrary and
=frequent, then it would not be possible to have lawful behavior-- but
=this universe has nonlawful behavior in parts of it.  Perhaps God
=personally determines the exact position and momentum of each and
=every particle, and runs things within the event horizons of black
=holes and in the vicinity of naked singularities according to whim.

You're confusing lawful with deterministic or known.  Certainly the position
and momentum of a particle can't both be known with arbitrary precision. 
However, we CAN repeat an experiment and the distribution of the outcomes is
well-defined and reproducible.  Similarly, the fact that information about what
happens in the vicinity of singularities can't reach us doesn't mean that
behavior there isn't lawful.  It means that if current physical theories are
correct, we can never know whether or not it's lawful and if it is, what those
laws might be.  On the other hand, such regions are not, for most practicle
purposes, part of this universe, since no information from inside them can
reach the rest of the universe (please note:  wormholes, if they exist, are a
special case, and I don't know enough about them to say anything about them). 

=However, such things are unknowable and as such (as far as I can tell)
=irrelevant to people.

Uh, yeah.  Wish I'd read that before taking the time to compose my previous
paragraph :-)
=
While one can imagine purposes (both good and
=bad) for a deity to suspend laws occasionally, to do so often would be
=the equivalent of having no laws at all-- and as such, wouldn't be
=detectable as the suspension of laws.

True.  But as I said in my original article in this thread, without laws, there
can't be science.

=Since the universe is
=observably lawful in large parts, it must be presumed that if there is
=an omnipotent (or sufficiently powerful) creator, said creator must
=have willed it to be lawful.

Yup.

=That being the case, it does seem
=logically necessary that suspensions be rare or very small-scale-- but
=it does not seem necessary that _everything_ within the universe must
=be lawful absolutely all the time, which would seem to be the Deist
=position."

I'm not familiar enough with Deism to comment on so specific a point.  However,
if I recall correctly, there is a Deist in this group.  Perhaps if he's reading
this thread, he could comment?
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