The Human Question

Alfredo, I appreciated very much what you had to say about choosing the right method when studying nature. In the article from nature that you reviewed, a scientist who is promoting intelligent design (ID) spoke of the need to prove one item of his faith through purely scientific methods." If the scientific method concerns only what we can measure, then it is hard to see how this method could prove the existence of God, who is immeasurable. But being a dilettante at science as I am, I am tempted to ask whether natural science 1.) deals with things solely inasmuch as they are measurable, or 2.) whether it deals with things inasmuch as they act for a purpose. If one were to say that only the first alternative is correct, then wouldn't it be a case of science deriving its own method from mathematics? Would this be an extrinsic imposition of a method? If, on the other hand, one were to say that the second alternative is included in a genuinely scientific understanding of nature, t...

I red the article about intelligent design. I want to read more about the reasons that the people that support this movement have but, I disagree with a position that affirm that intelligent design exist because there are things of the “biological” world that are not possible to explain. As Alberts said, science is the attempt to understand the world and all the science history shows that little by little we are answering important questions about our material world. I think that this doesn’t restrict two conditions that I consider very important: 1) the necessity to recognize that in the human experience there is a kind of reality that can not be treated in the same way as the material world. 2) to recognize that in the root of the material reality there is something that never will be explained with science. how things exist?, what set up the physical rules?, what is the origin of everything?. And these are very important question that one needs to try to answer, and the answer is n...

Here's the article that Alfredo found in the online journal Nature : http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v434/n7037/full/4341062a.html . Shall we discuss it?