Category talk:Natural sciences

Re-synchronized

This page needs to be re-synchronized with Category:Science. -- Beland 23:21, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Why Relate Science to Divinity here?

The relation between science & divinity is a subject in philosophy (epistemology, ethics, metaphysics).

Natural sciences generally attempt to explain the workings of the world via natural processes rather than divine processes.

The natural sciences, I had thought, were defined by their subject of study (nature) and the method of study (scientific). The sentence above suggests a natural process was either scientific or divine, possibly not both.

The philosophy of science is little studied by most scientists. Scientists don't discuss methodology much, or their religions; but my feeling is that most scientists are still positivists. A question that cannot be tested with measurement or observation is not within the domain of science.

Many questions that cannot be thus tested are religious questions. This is a completely different field of study. Karl Jung once defined God's actions as unexpected events that strike across your life and change it. His was not at attempt to explain the workings of the World. Divinity's goals are not to explain natural processes; though 'natural processes' can be both scientific and religious. Was my hallucination a temporal-lobe seizure? This is a scientific question. Was this same hallucination a message from God? This is a religious question that may or may not be true; but it's certainly not a scientific question or a subject of inquiry by scientists.

So, the natural sciences do not attempt to explain the workings of the World through natural processes: the natural sciences study observable natural processes using scientific methods. Divinity's subject of study is not just the World (and to some, excludes the World); and its method of study uses many tools (those of Hinduism offering a good model), but none scientific. Personally, Iike to think God appears during wonderful, coincidental timings and in the beauty of nature; but others seek God elsewhere. No one, to my knowledge, seeks God in a test tube.

A 'divine process' can be a 'natural process': the two are not non-overlapping subsets of 'the working of the World'. Science is a game with rules; and its definition of 'truth' is strictly defined & limited: it is anything but absolute, philosophical truth. The practice of science is completely unrelated to the practice of religion: Divinity is a huge subject, and (IMO) one should not give the impression that it is related in any way to the practice of science.

Throughout history, many monks were composers (and, no doubt, used their spirituality as a tool for composing beautiful music). Many monks were great scientists (and, no doubt, used their spirituality as a tool for imagining beautiful scientific explanations). But these scientists tested as many unrelated predictions of these explanations as possible, by observation or measurement. The quality of music may be evaluated for its beauty, but one doesn't evaluate its spirituality. The quality of theories in the natural sciences may be evaluated for their beauty, but scientific communications are not evaluate for their spirituality.

Why not keep them separate, where they belong? Doing otherwise might give the illusion there can ever be a conflict between them. (There are some people with beliefs in the origin of the Earth that differs from those of the vast majority of scientists. These aren't published in peer-reviewed scientific journals because their reasoning is considered scientific but flawed. Others are not seen in scientific papers because their method hasn't the 'positivistic' content to be what scientists limit their methods to. It's not a scientific method and thus not natural science. The real subject being studied by most of these people, I believe, is likely not the workings of the natural World.) Geologist (talk) 08:55, 15 December 2007 (UTC)