All intellectual endeavor starts with a conception of the world. If that
conception is not aligned with the world as it truly is, it fails to enable, or
even allow, proper examination of the world. By proper I mean, in a manner that
gives true knowledge of the discretely objective world. For instance,
> the ancients and pagans generally entertained fictitious
occasionalist (look it up) gods contained by the cosmos that were fickle derivations of man at
his stupidest, even the fates, that seemed to be over them also seemed to be
contained by the cosmos.
> animists as a type of pagan had gods that were enemies and the world
was their playground: again, fickle, needing to be appeased, usually by human
suffering and sacrifice (oops, we do that today with abortion). It was
spooksville all round.
> Aristotle had a view that made the world impossible to truly explore.
> Plato too, for that matter, and the
> German idealists more or less
the same (we are now entering a time that inherits their subjectivism and undoes science).
>
Islam views it as subject to a capricious god, making pursuit of knowledge
gained by study of the world impossible.
> Eastern monism, broadly speaking, reduces the world to a figment, so
science is irrelevant, so science is irrelevant and because 'god' is everything, impossible, and
> materialism reduces it to chance material conjunctions, or 'dirt' for
short, eliminating any hope that a mind that resulted from such random events
would have anything of value to say about anything.
Darwin also noted this risk, but he nevertheless went on to undermine
himself, sitting on the branch he was sawing off.
The Christian understanding of the world is utterly different, and thus
underpins the rise of modern science, explicitly.
The description of the creation in Genesis 1 and 2 gives us this: The world
(the cosmos, really) is separate from God, and brought into existence with
coherent purpose. At the same time God was active and present in the world, as
Creator, not creature.
The creation described, as analyzed below was set in the world we are in,
indicated by the 'days' of creation making what it teaches set in and about reality (indeed it 'grounds reality'): the reality that we are in and have
intellectual access to.
This was not off in some silly-ville of paganism or fantasy; it was located
concretely in the history we are in and so its characteristics were definitive
for us.
Its creation showed rational causality and propositional (intelligible)
content, with a clear dependency sequence, starting with the general energy
field (light). Each day's action rejecting 'chance' and showing its own
teleological arc. Something NDE fails in at every point.
It shows that we, created 'like' the creator, are able to correspondingly
(or conjointly) examine the world which we are to rightly
govern/subdue/superintend/steward (none of which means 'exploit', degrade or
destroy), gain knowledge and convert this to communicable and intelligible
propositions.
The basis for this is a confidence in the constancy of the world at some
level, regularity and rationality of material processes, and reliability of our
cognitive faculties to understand the world as deeply as we can go.
There is no limit because we are confident that the world is entirely
explicable. A 'designed' world encourages this, a random world jeopardizes the
project before it starts.
This mission is encouraged because we are also confident that we have a
purposeful role in the purposeful world: we have an in-built teleological sense
that encourages the worthiness of the project.
So, Genesis 1-2 is not a science text, per se. Rather it is the text that
explains why science is possible at all, worthwhile and within our grasp.
It demonstrates this where Adam is asked to name various animals brought to
him. Those sitting on the village idiot fence always get this wrong. Name
follows 'understand'. Adam necessarily observed, understood, evaluated and
classified in one way or another. The first example of empirical science that we
have. All other science has followed this pattern.
