The Gaia hypothesis is a naturalistic view of nature,which portrays nature as self-sufficient,and developing life from its own forces. It overlooks the fact that nature as a whole is not alive and that life in nature is itselfsupernatural,not a natural force or energy.
Sorry to be so long away, but better late than never.
Why not depict nature as self-sufficient? Why would God make nature not self-sufficient? Or as one scientist has termed it "fully gifted" to do whatever God has purposed it to do? Why label nature as a whole as "not alive"? Before the Enlightenment-based mechanistic view of the universe took hold, people did think of nature as in some sense alive. Properties of life were attributed to mountains, rivers and many other things that we in our modern hubris call "superstitious".
Scientifically, there is no hard and fast dividing line between living and non-living matter. Is there a theological basis for this division? Not that I know of.
In any case, I would think a more organic view of the universe (which was universally held by Christians for the first 1 1/2 millennia of Christian history) was more friendly to theism, not less friendly.
If we take scientific models as our point of departure for interpreting God's relationship with nature,we are left with a remote,detached God who made nature self-sufficient,able to sustain its order and create life - just like the pagan deity Gaia,a personification of the earth.
And that is exactly why we should not base theological interpretations directly on scientific models. Science is not equipped to teach theology. The model of the universe as machine was temporarily helpful for exploring the nature of the universe, but giving it theological status led to Deism--God as the absentee clockmaker who finished his work and walked away from it. Much of the controversy over evolution stems from the fact that even believers accepted Deism as the only non-atheist alternative theology consistent with science. That set a theology of science back a century and only now are scientists and theologians working out the basis of truly Christian understanding of evolution. (I don't mean by this some different theory of evolution, but a way of understanding evolution within the framework of the Christian teaching of God as creator.)
The word process is not specific,and so scientists reduce natural processes to specific causes and effects that they call mechanisms.
I don't think "mechanism" is any more specific than "process". But since even from a scientific view the universe is looking less and less like a dead machine (though it contains some marvellous "machinery" some of it very much alive) it is probably time to break old habits and build a new vocabulary to describe more up-to-date views of nature.
The writers of the Bible took it as a given that God is the giver of life. They did not believe that nature produced life by its own power.
And there is nothing in science that disagrees with that. The power in nature that engenders life is God-given, like the power by which God inspired the writers of scripture. It is filled through and through with the life-giving breath of God.
The point is that science is limited to describing the physical process which can be empirically tested and cannot provide evidence for the theological view I just stated.
I know that science has nothing to say about the soul - it excludes the supernatural from consideration.
You seem to think that science chooses to exclude supernatural explanations as a point of belief in their non-existence. But show how science
could include a supernatural explanation and still be science. As lucaspa says, you are mistaking a limitation for a commitment. Science is limited by its own tools and methods of testing to exploring the natural. It is not committed to the view that the natural is a sufficient explanation of its own existence.
For a Christian who believes God created all the natural world and works in it by both natural and supernatural means, science is the appropriate tool for learning to understand what God is doing when working in the world by natural means. That does not imply any rejection whatsoever of supernatural reality, events or modes of action. It just means we need something other than science to tell us about these.
But for that reason,it falsely views life as only a natural phenomenon produced by natural processes. And so nature is attributed with power it does not have. When natural phenomena are misinterpreted,so are natural causes.
No. Science is a body of knowledge and a method of ascertaining that knowledge. It is not a person to have a view (true or false) of anything. Do some scientists hold that false view of life? Sure. Do all scientists hold that false view of life? Clearly not.
This view is not scientific. It is an opinion about the nature of life. It is not integral to science and this is the error many anti-evolutionists make: attributing to science (especially evolution) the worldviews of some scientists. Not that scientists don't bear their own share of blame for confounding scientific observations with philosophical views themselves.
But this is where the Christian student of science has to be alert to where the biases of some scientists get mixed in with their actual scientific work and offer a better theological view of the results of scientific investigation.
Christians, too, bear some blame. First, for not really learning science before rejecting some conclusions. But more so for accepting a change in the meaning of "natural" from its original sense. We have come to view the term "natural" as antithetical to God, as excluding God. Nothing could be further from the original intent of that meaning. Even into the 19th century, nature was seen to be the province of divine activity. "natural" mean what was uncontaminated by
human activity, not what excluded God's activity. The opposite of "natural" was "artificial" i.e. what was made with human skill and technology.
That is a meaning we ought to revive. Instead of viewing natural explanations as a fence around God, we should view them, as our ancestors did, as descriptions of how God acts in this world on a day-to-day basis. And in terms of natural events, we don't need to draw a distinction between life and not life. That would be limiting God to acting only with what is living and excluding God from the rest of the material world. As God is Spirit, God exists in and through all physical being, however we classify it. God is as active in an molecule of salt floating in the ocean as in one circulating in my bloodstream. And it is by the power of God that the molecule of salt interacts with other molecules. Nothing natural needs to be understood as "naturalistic", as excluding God.
Belief and science are not mutually exclusive. Science has its own beliefs,beginning with the assumption that natural causes are adequate to explain all phenomena. People who have a materialist view do not even believe in the soul.
That is not an assumption of science. That is a "naturalistic assumption", an assumption of people who have a materialist view. And, I grant, such people will try to tell you that this view is "scientific"; but it is not. That is the atheist lie which, as Christians, we must reject. As long as we accept that this is an assumption of science itself, we put ourselves in the needless and tragic position of rejecting science instead of rejecting a false view of science.
The distinction between philosophical and methodological naturalism is a moot point,because they both have the same view of the natural world as being all there is.
On the contrary, it is very important, and the difference is precisely that while philosophical naturalism holds to the view that the natural world is all that exists, methodological naturalism holds to no such view.
Methodological naturalism is a recognition of the limitation of science in dealing with reality; a recognition that whatever the extent of existence, scientific tools and methods are only effective in investigating what has material substance and can be tested on the basis of observing and manipulating what is perceptible to our senses.
To mistake that limitation for the whole is the error of philosophical naturalism. It is not an error of science.
The opinion that only nature exists is not a philosophy,although it is foundational for a naturalistic philosophy.
Well, it may not be a philosophy, but it is a philosophical (and not a scientific) opinion. As you say, it is a foundational axiom for any sort of philosophy that holds the natural material world to constitute the whole of real existence.
As I said some time ago, there are two distinct ideas that confusingly get referred to by the same or similar words such as "nature" "natural" "naturalistic" etc.
1. the fact that science (all science, not just evolution) is committed to understanding and describing natural causes and only natural causes
2. the philosophical position that all causes are natural.
Science has a policy of explaining all phenomena as if only nature exists,and that is a false view to begin with.
No, science has a policy of explaining as many phenomena as it can (which may or may not be all phenomena) within the limitations of its methodology. That methodology limits science to empirically-testable explanations.
Now, the idea that empirically-testable explanations are ipso facto exclusive of divine action is a philosophical view to which materialists are committed. It is not integral or necessary to science.
It is not part of scientific policy to say: because we can describe how the molecular structure of water leads to the formation of snowflakes in a hexagonal pattern, it means God has nothing to do with making snowflakes. That is what a materialist would say, but we don't need to accept that materialistic view as part of science or as a policy of science.
(Historically, consider Newton. His discovery of how a prism breaks light into separate colours and of the power of gravity gave us natural explanations of rainbows and planetary orbits. But he did not interpret this as a reason to become an atheist or adopt a materialistic view of the natural world. Rather, he thought of his discoveries as illuminating for us how God acts in nature.)
In abiogenesis theory,the claim that chemical reaction of amino acids and proteins can produce living cells.
And if they are right, so what? How does that make any more difference than learning that gravity is what keeps planetary bodies in their orbits? What does it do other than illuminate for us how God arranged for the chemicals of the earth's oceans to produce living beings and empowered them to do so? (Does not even Genesis say God commanded the earth to bring forth living beings? Why would abiogenesis not be seen as the process by which the earth obeyed that command?)
That is a commitment to methodological naturalism,whereby only natural causes are used explain phenomena,on the false assumption that they are adequate to explain all phenomena.
No, there is an inherent
limitation in the methodology of science which prevents it from inferring other than natural causes. But why shouldn't natural causes be adequate to explaining all natural phenomena? Why would God make a natural world in which natural phenomena are not capable of being explained by natural causes? Surely we should only look for non-natural causes when the phenomena in question are not natural?
Is life not natural? Does agreeing that life is natural imply that it is not God-given?
Basically, we are getting back to semantics. What exactly do we mean by "nature"/"natural"/"naturalistic".
You said earlier that you distinguish between "natural" and "naturalistic". I would take my numbered point 2 above (the belief that the natural world constitutes the whole of reality and their is no deity or supernature beyond it) to be "naturalistic".
But much that you say about nature (especially the expression "nature alone") suggests that you yourself view nature as something that exists apart from and always outside of God, such that the only way nature and God can be present to each other is in the way an inventor can be present to a machine he or she made. It suggests that you yourself view a natural process as something that occurs on its own in the absence of God's attention. So if anything can be explained adequately in natural terms you see that explanation as excluding God--and therefore to be rejected.
What I am suggesting is a different (yet historically Christian) way of viewing nature and natural process so that this dichotomy is resolved without needing to reject the scientific observations and inferences.
