Kantian Naturalist: You simply have not provided any account of truth, reason, and logic. Until you do, there is no reason for me to believe that a correct understanding of these concepts has anything at all to do with God.
Some initial first thoughts.
What would it mean to provide an account of truth, reason, and logic? Don’t all of us take all three of these for granted?
Can science settle the question of what would it take to provide an account of truth, reason, and logic?
If science cannot settle the question of what would it take to provide an account of truth, reason, and logic, what does that tell us about the question?
If science cannot settle the question of what would it take to provide an account of truth, reason, and logic, what does that tell us about science?
Who were the first scientists to ask and attempt to answer these questions and what answers did they offer?
Who were the first philosophers to ask and attempt to answer these questions and what answers did they offer?
Is the argument that because someone has not provided an account of truth, reason, and logic there is therefore no reason to believe that a correct understanding of these concepts has nothing at all to do with God a non-sequitur?
What is true. What is logical. What is reasonable. Are these not all inter-twined? Which of these can we dispense with while retaining the others?
Patrick,
What test/tests would you think would validate universal common descent as a hypothesis?
Patrick is reeling, he is like a boxer that has been in the ring too long, he is just swinging at air, and wobbling around against the ropes.
There is no test for Universal Common Descent.
If you read the article carefully you will find a descriptive overview of the experiments done to generate the evidence presented. Those experiments and their results constitute a test of common descent. If different results had been observed, common descent would be falsified. That didn’t happen.
Given Behe accepts common descent and Dembski assumes it is true in some of his work, you have to accept you are an outlier even among IDers right?
Here is an analogy for Patrick.
I have a theory, tonight some fairies are going to sprinkle the heavens with blue fairy dust. If tomorrow morning, when folks across America wake up and see blue, that will confirm my theory that fairies sprinkled fairy dust last night.
Now, my theory of course can be falsified, because if tomorrow when everyone wakes up the sky is not blue, then my theory must be wrong. So that must be a test of my theory, according to Patrick.
The fact that there could be other reasons why the sky might be blue tomorrow, well, that is not really my problem now is it? My theory still won’t be falsified.
OMagain,
Blue fairy dust O’Magain.
The ones described in the article are a good start. You should read it.
The observed nested hierarchy, discussed here many times, is the result of further, ongoing tests.
If a face-to-face encounter would not suffice, then nothing would. I suspect that if a deity wanted to have a face-to-face encounter with you, the deity would be capable of demonstrating who they are. This assumes that some deity actually exists, of course.
If a face-to-face encounter is the minimum necessary for certainty that one’s “revelation” comes from a deity, then a conclusion can be drawn from the absence of any face-to-face meeting: the source of the “revelation” is definitely uncertain. That is a conclusion about the revelation. Conclusions about the accuracy or validity of the “revealed” information are not possible on the basis of the absence of a face-to-face.
I will say that “in essence” is a qualifier that accomplishes nothing. It’s just a fancy way of saying “maybe …”.
sean s.
OMagain,
Colewd never said whether or not he believes in Universal Common Descent, what he said was you can’t test it.
Evidence is not a test. Try to comprehend that. Evidence can be interpreted to have many meanings.
Patrick,
The observed nested hierarchy is a test of God, because he uses a common design palate.
Done, I just tested for God.
Gee, Patrick, maybe I like how you think.
You just broke the first rule of Intelligent Designer Club: Never talk about the Designer.
You are correct
You may be justified in believing that she loves you even if she doesn’t.
the point is however that you can’t know she loves you unless it’s true that she loves you.
Knowledge is impossible if truth does not exist.
God is truth
peace
OMagain,
I don’t really consider myself an IDer. I have looked closely at it and consider it an interesting but limited hypothesis.
I have discussed UCD with Behe. He claims that it is an unimportant theory to him and choses not to engage.
I agree that there is evidence here in similarities in biochemistry. What the theory falls short of is explaining the differences and how they arose.
Yes you can test individual pieces of evidence but you cannot test the transitions which is what the theory is claiming.
Which, of course, is ridiculous. What Bill does every time, after the evidence for UCD is presented, is to fall back to “you’re still missing a mechanism”, ignoring the fact that the mechanisms are known, and that even if there weren’t, one can know what happened without knowing how it happened
An omnipotent deity would be capable of demonstrating who they are with out a face to face encounter.
Before we entertain that argument you need to demonstrate
1) That a face-to-face encounter is the minimum necessity to establish certainty
2) that certainty is necessary for knowledge
Good luck with that
peace
Revelation
peace
Asked you this same question before, not sure you ever answered. How can we test the transition from nebula to Solar System? Is Gravity not living up to it’s claims?
That is apparently Patrick’s position. He rattles on endlessly that certainty is required for knowledge at least when it comes to revelation.
peace
To be actually infallible He must be omniscient first ,I would think. Else He could be mistaken about being infallible.
Phoodoo’s fanciful examples do bring up a crucially important point: the falsification test for a hypothesis is too weak to be authoritative for epistemic practices. It is too weak because any hypothesis can be tailored ad hoc to suit whatever it is that was going to be observed anyway. Conversely, any hypothesis can be tailored post hoc to explain away why it was falsified!
The solution is to strengthen the falsification test in two ways: (1) by comparing the hypothesis to be tested with competing explanations of the same phenomena, and (2) to prefer — when possible — the more parsimonious explanation (the one that introduces fewer ad hoc qualifications and posits) and the one that coheres with other generally-accepted hypotheses that are not being tested within that specific inquiry.
But this introduces a new problem, and one that we must accept as best we can as a feature of inquiry: judgments of parsimony and of coherence are themselves prone to implicit or even explicit bias, cognitive distortions due to unexamined background beliefs, institutional structures (e.g.. funding agencies) that shape expectations as to what sorts of hypotheses are plausible candidates for comparison, choice of techniques for measuring parsimony, and so on.
For all these reasons (and more) I think we must accept, as an ineliminable fact about our all-too-human epistemic condition, that falsification itself is fallible.
Now you are correctly anticipating my responses. It’s good to know that someone gets it
peace
But you do know that knowledge is certain when it come to revelation ,correct? Isn’t that been your whole point?
dazz,
Can you show me a test for UCD that is equivalent to the eclipse experiment or even the apple experiment?:-) And you have it right gravity has a defined mechanism that has been modeled and experimentally validated.
I don’t think this theory passes Patrick’s rigorous test for something worth discussing.
At least simultaneously.
I think if the more you take the time to ponder what is required in a revealer for knoledge. The more you will find yourself contemplating the Christian God.
peace
No perhaps you should repeat along with Patrick
Knowledge does not require certainty
It does require truth
peace
Kantian Naturalist,
This is why most people would differentiate between an actual test of an hypothesis, and evidence for an hypothesis. Those are different things. Nothing in the case of UCD being discussed here is being tested.
UCD is something that may or may not have occurred in the past, but it is not a testable claim. It is like suggesting that we can “test” that the Egyptians built the pyramids. Well, you can’t do that. Maybe aliens built them. We don’t know because it has already happened.
You can make your best guess if you like, but that is totally different from testable science.
But that’s just micro-gravity! The moon is still the moon! You need the apple to be there in the first place! You have no evidence that the moon could be formed by gradual accretion! Were you there when that happened? How can you test the formation of planets in a lab?
See where I’m coming from?
Phylogenetics alone is undeniable evidence for UCA anyway you look at it, but there’s much much more:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/
But now sean acts as if he never claimed that you’d need to meet your deity face to face in order to be certain. This after wondering how knowledge came to be about certainty. Man oh man.
colewd,
What are the odds that all planets and stars are spherical? Let me try some simple math:
There are between 200 and 400 billion stars in the milky way alone (clearly a higher form of galaxy because we live there, a specially created galaxy, so I will ignore the rest) Let’s take the lower limit: 200 billion stars or
Stars could be shaped like a cube, or pyramidal, even if there were no more possible shapes, what are the odds that ALL stars are spherical?
I therefore submit that stars must be designed and couldn’t have come about by a blind purposeless process
As you know (slash “believe”) I agree with that bit. The rest, nope.
dazz,
This is from the paper you gave me. I don’t agree you have a theory without a change mechanism. Behe is ok to agree with the theory at this point because he knows without a change mechanism it is weak.
Lets remember that the discussion at hand is the testability of the hypothesis. Your first major transition is prokaryotic to eukaryotic. No one even has a good start to explain this. IMHO this is almost as difficult as origin of life.
Furthermore, that parsimony (and explanatory coherence, and fecundity) are good things, is also not falsifiable. The version of empiricism that gets spouted around here as if it’s the lastest thing in modern science is early 20th Century logical positivism, something that nobody who’s read much in the field has defended since about 1950.
It’s just another form of religious dogmatism. I mean, after all, this is supposed to be the Skeptical Zone, right?
LOL! computer models are DESIGNED! Where’s your evidence that this mechanism can arrange the marvelous celestial bodies in the sky in just the right way so that they don’t crash into each others? If you removed a single planet from the Solar System, it wouldn’t be the Solar System anymore! The Solar System is Irreducibly Complex!
That’s a cool analogy. (I like it, anyhow.)
dazz,
Are you coming out of the creationist closet Dazz 🙂
It’s a nice argument for God, if you happen to enjoy 17th Century occasionalism. It makes God responsible for every stupid thing, like that fart in the concert hall yesterday.
Smelly, pranking deity.
walto,
The first question to ask is what is the cause of the shape of stars?
It could be just the laws of physics and chemistry.
What is the cause of the laws of physics and chemistry. Design maybe a potential hypothesis.
There are several meanings for the word “cause,” colewd. You should pick one and stick with it.
For the emptienth time, you don’t need to know HOW something happened to know that it happened, and you don’t need to know every little detail in the process to know that the process is real.
Your demand for the prokaryotic to eukaryotic transition is roughly equivalent to my demand that you provide a detailed account for the formation of the Sun. Endosymbiosis is a great candidate for that transition, BTW
A rather stunted and anemic form of skepticism, that’s for sure.
Intelligent Design is NOT creationism!!!!11!11111oneoneoneonehundred
It’s a dirty business, being a deity. It’s not at all like being a skeptic!
🙂
Ripped right from the pages of the latest intelligent design propaganda!
And it hardly matters, because science still operates largely according to logical positivism. Philosophy doesn’t smile upon that fact, but it works in science anyhow (and its weaknesses should be understood, of course).
Alternatives come under heavy attack themselves, since, whatever Popper says, we have not learned what we know (scientifically or otherwise) by any kind of tenuous falsification criteria, rather by positive and negative reinforcements (and repetition, etc.). Add in logic, and you’re pretty much at logical positivism. Psychology, it matters, whatever its own weaknesses. You can tweak it, you can blather about “falsification,” but we really cognize in certain ways (a lot like logical positivism when not in thrall to confirmation bias or other cognitive biases), however much philosophy might dislike it. Evolution really does need, and has, positive evidence in order for it to be meaningful (rather than teetering on the edge of failure, ready to fall if one finding goes contrary to expectations, as Popper and IDists liked to think–no theory is treated that way in real science), and if philosophy has a problem with it that’s philosophy’s problem.
It’s sort of a mess, which is recognized in some quarters. Probably in part because philosophy pays too little attention to psychology, and has since Nietzsche lost it.
Glen Davidson
Only that we have a pretty good idea of how evolution happens, and ID doesn’t explain a single fact of what happened. Nice try tho
dazz,
How do you know it happened? Or do you just believe it happened? Can you put a confidence level on your knowledge or belief. How do you establish that confidence?
Its a little more like me demonstrating that an apple will fall from a tree 🙂 BTW endosymbiosis can possible explain mitochondria origin but what else? Offline until tomorrow.
Chloroplasts, anyway. Actually, you should know that there has been a host of endosymbiotic events, I mean, if you really understood evolution, rather than learning from the pseudoscientists.
But aside from that, how do we know that chloroplasts and mitochondria (for the two widely common endosymbiotic results in eukaryotes) came from endosymbiotic events? Well, it was guessed early on due to morphology and physiology, however it wasn’t well-accepted until DNA evidence indicated that the remaining DNA is (for the most part) bacterial.
So apparently you accept that evidence for common descent, yet cavil at other evidence for common descent, based on your lack of full knowledge. You’re being inconsistent, but that’s hardly new.
Glen Davidson
Because of the humongous body of knowledge and evidence in support of UCA. The evidence is there, in fact I’m pretty sure there’s far more evidence for UCA than there is for the formation of the Solar System by accretion.
You insist in equivocating. Apples fall from trees all the time. Well, mutation and selection do too, if the apple thing convinces you that gravity is a sound theory and explains “macro-gravitational” events, then you’re without excuse re: UCD
If truth did not exist, we would invent it. And that’s probably where truth came from anyway.
We invented God, too.