I still don't know why the author brought religion/faith/god into the discussion; he seems like a religionist trying to come to grips with the dominance of our world by science and the scientific epistemology.

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mysterymath 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Beeeecause this was a lecture delivered at a Catholic philosophy/theology conference?

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pdonis 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> he seems like a religionist trying to come to grips with the dominance of our world by science and the scientific epistemology.

That's because he is. Take a look at the articles listed on his website.

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verisimi 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think the reason is because he was trying illustrate that you can say an awful lot (in analogical language) about things that are not empirically observable.

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dist-epoch 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> scientific epistemology

Science can't tell us so far what really exists. It can only predict experiments. To put it in more common terms, "is the wave function real or not?", or "do quantum fields really exist, or are just elegant mathematical abstractions for explaining experiments?"

Or as others say "shut up and calculate".

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pdonis 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> It can only predict experiments.

Your "only" here makes it seem like predicting experiments is a narrow thing. It's not. All of the modern technologies we have--including the computers we're all using to post here--are based on science "predicting experiments"--but the "experiments" are things like building computers, or the Internet, or the GPS system. The fact that all those things work exactly as our science predicts makes it very hard to view that science as "only predicting experiments". It's telling us how to use real things to build real technologies that have real impacts on people's lives.

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bheadmaster 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not only that - one could argue that all observed phenomena are experiments, and the way we behave in the world is based on predicting them.

A religious person - if not honest enough to simply say "existence of God is an axiom and cannot be derived from reason alone" - uses the very predictions of experiments to reason God into existence: everything that exists has a cause; universe exists; therefore universe has a cause.

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lo_zamoyski an hour ago | parent [-]

Epistemically speaking, the existence of God is not axiomatic. Your second claims is more accurate, though not entirely. Knowledge of God's existence is derived from observed features of reality. However, these features are very general and not scientific per se; rather, they are presupposed by empirical science. Examples include the reality of change, causality (especially per se vs. what science is generally concerned with, per accidens), or the existence of things. The denial of these general features would undermine not just the possibility of science, but the very intelligibility of the world. You would hang yourself by your own skepticism.

These are also not axiomatically accepted features either (except perhaps in the sense that they are in relation to the empirical sciences, as science presupposes their existence).

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bheadmaster an hour ago | parent [-]

> Knowledge of God's existence is derived from observed features of reality.

If it were so, God's existence would be just another scientific fact.

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lo_zamoyski an hour ago | parent [-]

Did you read my entire post? I already explained to you why this isn't the case. We known that, for example, change is real through general observation, but it is not something belonging to any empirical science per se. Rather, it is presupposed by each of those sciences.

Of course, the classical definition of "science" is more expansive, including what would be the most general science - metaphysics - so in that sense, yes, you can say the existence of God is a "scientific fact". (God here is self-subsisting being, not some ridiculous "sky fairy" straw man of New Atheist imagination.)

	▲	bheadmaster 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yes I did, but the rest of the comment hangs on the initial claim I replied to. If you redefine God to mean "fundamental assumptions of the universe", its existence becomes tautological. But that is not what most people mean (including the author of the article we're commenting on) when they say "God".

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dist-epoch an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> It's telling us how to use real things to build real technologies that have real impacts on people's lives.

That's the popular definition of the word "real".

But this article is about the philosophical meaning of the word "real". And from that viewpoint science hasn't delivered yet, science doesn't know yet what "really exists out there", it can only predict how that thing behaves in experiments.

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mejari 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>Science can't tell us so far what really exists.

Only inasmuch as nothing can tell us what "really" exists. By any practical definitions of any of the words in that sentence science is the best way of determining what exists.

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IAmBroom an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

... which is still far more than religion can provably do.