Not a God of the Gaps, But Man in the Valley of the Knowable

Quantum Physicist Wins $1.4M Templeton Prize For Work on “Veiled Reality”

This was my comment on that Blog:

I think if you think about it for a moment, there’s some value in his approach, because it puts the emphasis on the limitations of the human mind and human methods, which is really what science is all about dealing with.

If we were perfect at dealing cognitively with the environment, we would not need scientific methods to to clear away potential explanations. We’d just get it right the first time.

Intelligent Design advocates take an approach that tries to push God into the framework by saying we can puzzle out what was just randomly allowed to happen, and what is so improbable that it requires God’s hand. But their primary error is that it’s difficult to establish what is likely or unlikely if you do not know all things. Worse, they insist upon the notion that God’s design itself, created by a being able to perfectly understand all the complexities individuals struggle to understand just parts of imperfectly, is distinguishable from nature to folks like us.

If you believe in a Christian-Style God who created everything, you run into what can only be termed a figure-ground problem: how do you tell one creation from another. Furthermore, if we’re dealing with a perfect God, why the need for the do-over? A perfect God, we can reason, would be capable of engineering the world so that these things would come about spontaneously from the complex processes of nature itself.

To get around such questions, ID advocates take the position that the scientific doctrine of natural materialism, that is trying to explain nature without positing supernatural explanations, is somehow wrong, and needs to be superceded by ID theory’s supernatural framework.

But why do we stick with natural materialism in the first place?

There’s one simple reason: it’s what we’re competent to deal with. I can philosophize about God’s role in the universe, but I’m not capable of creating an experiment that can distinguish the right or wrong of my position in any fashion beyond that of oh-so fallible rhetoric. Real scientists, dealing with what they deal with can design observations and experiments to look for the signs of whether one theory approximates reality or diverges from it. They can say “this means that A must be true, rather than B.”, and others can cross check this position.

We deal with the world we can deal with, and leave the rest to priests and philosophers.

Essentially, I believe in God, and that he is responsible for the design of the world. However, I don't believe looking at the world in terms of human notions of design is appropriate, and I don't think we're competent to analyze design that takes place on levels that far beyond ours. So, at the end of the day, we should use scientific methods out of humility for our own limited understanding of the world.