Category Archives: Francis Collins

Language of God Excerpt #3

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While reading Language of God something important caught my eye and I wrote about it at the time.

This is cross posted here: https://randomraindrops.com/2023/10/21/naturalism-of-the-gaps/

Francis Collins writes,

Science is not the only way of knowing. The spiritual worldview finds another way of finding truth. scientists who deny this would be well advised to observe the limits of their own tools, as nicely represented in a parable old by astronomer Arthur Eddington.

He [Eddington] described a man who set about to study deep-sea life using a net that had a mesh size of three inches. After catching many wild and wonderful creatures from the depths, the man concluded there are no deep-sea fish that are smaller than three inches in length! If we are using the scientific net to catch our particular version of truth, we should not be surprised that it does not catch the evidence of spirit.

Reference: Language of God, p 229 https://www.amazon.com/Language-God-Scientist-Presents-Evidence/dp/1416542744

Collins is quoting this fellow:

Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington OM FRS[2] (28 December 1882 – 22 November 1944) was an English astronomer, physicist, and mathematician. He was also a philosopher of science and a populariser of science. The Eddington limit, the natural limit to the luminosity of stars, or the radiation generated by accretion onto a compact object, is named in his honour.


My remarks:

Eddington points out an epistemological mistake that is then used to draw an ontological conclusion that is not warranted. This is exactly what believers in philosophical naturalism (PN) commit when they tell us “science says there is no god.” PN believers are actually asserting that the natural world comprises all of reality and therefore theists must give up theism because the supernatural is impossible. This, BTW, is scientism.

I label this as Naturalism of the Gaps. I coined the phrase as a satire and later realized it is a serious position that invokes questions about human knowledge. I recently mentioned Naturalism of the Gaps to Jonathon Blocker. That afternoon I also read the remarks by Collins. It seems many physicists and philosophers have pondered these questions. I only noticed it because of the virulent and boisterous criticism of theists by science students who are looking for their daily student dose of confirmation bias.

Language of God Excerpt #2

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The poverty of an objectivistic account is made only too clear when we consider the mystery of music. From a scientific point of view it is nothing but vibrations in the air, impinging on the eardrums and stimulating neural currents in the brain.

How does it come about that this banal sequence of temporal activity has the power to speak to our hearts of an eternal beauty? The whole range of subjective experience, from perceiving a patch of pink, to being enthralled by the performance of a Mass in B Minor, and on to the mystic’s encounter with the ineffable reality of the One, all these truly human experiences are at the center of our encounter with reality, and they are not to be dismissed as epiphenomenal froth on the surface of a universe whose true nature is impersonal and lifeless.

REFERENCE:
J. Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an age of Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 18 – 19.

Science is not the only way of knowing. The spiritual world view provides another way of finding truth.

REFERENCE:
Francis Collins, Language of God, p. 229.

Naturalism of the Gaps

Posted on by

Francis Collins writes,

Science is not the only way of knowing. The spiritual worldview finds another way of finding truth. scientists who deny this would be well advised to observe the limits of their own tools, as nicely represented in a parable old by astronomer Arthur Eddington.

He [Eddington] described a man who set about to study deep-sea life using a net that had a mesh size of three inches. After catching many wild and wonderful creatures from the depths, the man concluded there are no deep-sea fish that are smaller than three inches in length! If we are using the scientific net to catch our particular version of truth, we should not be surprised that it does not catch the evidence of spirit.

Reference: Language of God, p 229 https://www.amazon.com/Language-God-Scientist-Presents-Evidence/dp/1416542744

Collins is quoting this fellow:

Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington OM FRS[2] (28 December 1882 – 22 November 1944) was an English astronomer, physicist, and mathematician. He was also a philosopher of science and a populariser of science. The Eddington limit, the natural limit to the luminosity of stars, or the radiation generated by accretion onto a compact object, is named in his honour.


My remarks:

Eddington points out an epistemological mistake that is then used to draw an ontological conclusion that is not warranted. This is exactly what believers in philosophical naturalism (PN) commit when they tell us “science says there is no god.” PN believers are actually asserting that the natural world comprises all of reality and therefore theists must give up theism because the supernatural is impossible. This, BTW, is scientism.

I label this as Naturalism of the Gaps. I coined the phrase as a satire and later realized it is a serious position that invokes questions about human knowledge. I recently mentioned Naturalism of the Gaps to Jonathon Blocker. That afternoon I also read the remarks by Collins. It seems many physicists and philosophers have pondered these questions. I only noticed it because of the virulent and boisterous criticism of theists by science students who are looking for their daily student dose of confirmation bias.