In Defense of Evolution

[mahler10th]

DAVID ROSS said:  "You are confused about the difference between knowledge and belief...and also about the difference between something--God, gravity, beauty--and concepts about the thing itself."

Hmm...I am sorry David, that you choose to 'believe' I have no 'knowledge' on the difference between belief and knowledge.  Let me explain some more.
Knowledge has a number of definitions, none of which can be applied to a 'knowledge' of God because all existing 'knowledges' on deity(s) are in conflict. Many God(s) are 'believed' with certainty as 'knowledge' to exist.  These certain 'knowledge(s)' of so many divided and individual God(s) become unbelievable on such analysis because these 'knowledge(s)' are not what those who have them think they are...
They are just belief ...belief is something unproven and not universally recognised as being true on the scale of its assumed polarity.  An assumption or construct of belief coming from 'knowledge' of a 'true' God from a matrix of 'certain' and 'true' Gods Worldwide which in itself is a belief is nothing short of nonsense, but continues to be the posit of religious fundementalists. 

NORBEONE said: "I've argued with you before that theists cannot 'know'."
Precisely.

[drogulus]

Fine. I won't tell you that you're trivializing the comparison to bridge the gap between the point beyond which empirical evidence and logic fail and the point where your desired conclusion is a necessary consequence. That, however, doesn't really change anything, does it? The simple truth of the matter is that you can apply whatever standard you like, strict or permissive, and you still won't be able to decide the question. Your approach doesn't deal with such propositions by saying that the answer to an unanswerable question is "likely" this or that. Such an approach requires interpretation of a body of evidence, and interpretation, as I've said, doesn't count for much. Doubt as the default position is merely an interpretative choice, and it produces no more validity than does credulity, since both produce a "likely" answer. A "likely" answer is no answer at all, though, speaking strictly; either something has an answer, which can be shown or derived, or it doesn't have an answer. There's no middle ground here in a formal, logical sense. Indeed, any attempt to get around the undecidability of this proposition is doomed to fail in a vacuum, unsupported by neat tricks or logical leaps. Let's call a spade a spade and admit that both positions that deviate from a clear-eyed admission that there's no way to know one way or the other are guesses.

    Spoken like a true absolutist. Of course from the absolutist perspective the empirically derived looks like just a guess, a guess that the future will be, in certain ways, exactly like the past. This is a notorious problem in philosophy that I'm sure professors offer to students to shake them out of their complacency. It says that you don't know what you think you do. This tends to work since students, like many others tend to spend their thinking lives trading one set of absolutes for another, like religion for some naive realist version of science, or the other way around in some cases.

     What for the absolutist counts for little counts for quite a bit for the empiricist that operates on the best evidence, Occams razor, and inference to the best explanation. This flies planes, builds bridges, and gets you to the Moon and back in one piece. Viewed as a prediction, you have Lucretius ("no god, just nature") and the disciples of Jesus ("he'll be back in a minute"). For the absolutist nothing matters about these stories except that neither one passes an absolutist test, and therefore the favored story can be indulged (why this doesn't equally mean we can indulge the "We're going to kill you Jewish vermin" story doesn't have to be considered, because we've seen that's exactly what it does mean).

     So the guesses that underlie all empirical science, much of modern philosophy, and every last scrap of engineering with its close but not perfect tolerances show that the only concept of truth that matters functionally for our civilization is the kind I endorse. Your kind, where arguments about the existence of likely and extremely unlikely entities are seen as equivalent because no proofs are involved is only useful when you study medieval philosophy, or theology from any era, I suppose.

     

[Shrunk]

Yes. However what Shrunk, to whom you responded, meant (I think) is that for some religious people their beliefs go beyond scientific evidence in the sense that: "if my religion says otherwise, science cannot be right". Both he and I have an issue with that.

Yes, that's what I meant.

[Al Moritz]

Furthermore, I would say that the growing body of scientific evidence of a knowable, rational order underlying existence is nothing but empirical evidence of God.

Agreed, especially with respect to the fine-tuning of the laws of nature, but with a caveat: the "empirical evidence of God" here is a commonsense philosophical interpretation of the scientific evidence, it is not the scientific evidence proper. That evidence in itself is neutral with respect to world view (theism and atheism alike). Data are just data.

[mahler10th]

   
     So the guesses that underlie all empirical science, much of modern philosophy, and every last scrap of engineering with its close but not perfect tolerances show that the only concept of truth that matters functionally for our civilization is the kind I endorse. Your kind, where arguments about the existence of likely and extremely unlikely entities are seen as equivalent because no proofs are involved is only useful when you study medieval philosophy, or theology from any era, I suppose.

Yes indeed.

[drogulus]

Agreed, especially with respect to the fine-tuning of the laws of nature, but with a caveat: the "empirical evidence of God" here is a commonsense philosophical interpretation of the scientific evidence, it is not the scientific evidence proper. That evidence in itself is neutral with respect to world view (theism and atheism alike). Data are just data.

     Then you don't agree. Data are just data. Neither can you use the beauty of nature, or its vastness, or any other attribute. As you said earlier:

     

A universe where the natural laws that govern it were created by God (theistic version) is, on the level of scientific observation, indistinguishable from a universe where the natural laws just are (atheistic version). It is really that simple.

      And the best I can do in support of this is to say thank you. 

[Al Moritz]

      And the best I can do in support of this is to say thank you. 

You don't pay accurate attention to what I say. I said "on the level of scientific observation" which is, indeed, consistent with my last post. However, I said that the philosophical interpration of the data can point to theism (an atheist of course would claim the opposite, of course).

[Al Moritz]

I should specify more clearly. Just like theists, atheists also perform their own philosophical interpretation^*) of the scientific data, which in themselves are neutral towards any world view. Only the agnostic stays neutral towards the scientific data.

^*) they may claim their views are strictly based on scientific evidence, but this has been shown here not to be true. They are based on an interpretation of the scientific evidence.

[drogulus]

You don't pay accurate attention to what I say. I said "on the level of scientific observation" which is, indeed, consistent with my last post. However, I said that the philosophical interpration of the data can point to theism (an atheist of course would claim the opposite, of course).

    As I said it can point anywhere. But why invoke the universe for this? If you don't need evidence you really don't need it. You want the authority that evidence will give you without it actually pointing towards anything other than the empirical facts derived from it. You're basically playing a double game here. Scientifically (hard-headedly, you might say), the regularity of nature supports no more than what we agree it supports. At the level of beliefs (soft-heartedly, following William James) it supports the beliefs you hold. How convenient.

   I've decided that the gloriousity of the Milky Way supports my favorite deity (which at the moment happens to be Quetzalcoatl).

   

    Of course, this is silly, isn't it? Or, it would be if we hadn't dismantled our empirically derived standards to keep our Mysterians happy.   

    _{(Incidentally, I'm having tamales tonight, in support of the Ferocious One, and because they're tasty! )}

[mahler10th]

God as some have understood him / her:

Philisophical interpretations welcome.

[mahler10th]

God as thought of in the Western World:

Scientific interpretations welcome.

[drogulus]

God as some have understood him / her:

Philisophical interpretations welcome.

    Of course I welcome them as what they are (which means what they appear to be), artistic renderings from a specific prescientific tradition. Why cheapen it by insisting on a literal factual interpretation unless you're in the grip of an ideology that instructs you there's no difference between the plausible supported by evidence and the highly implausible (often with components that are literally impossible like omniscience and omnipotence). What's the purpose of this leveling? To lower the profile of one belief in support of another. It doesn't work, though. Each one must stand on its own.

     The ID'ers try this with evolution, talking about the supposed problems as though their model could possibly gain something. This is what's behind the "all unproven ideas are equal, and my god idea is even more equal" idea  . Most knowledge is unproven in the formal sense, that is the result of observations rather than logically or mathematically certain. By a little bit of theistic Jiu Jitsu our empirical knowledge is subordinated to the perfect knowledge of deities! Now that's an amazing trick which only works because we tolerate it.

[PSmith08]

So the guesses that underlie all empirical science, much of modern philosophy, and every last scrap of engineering with its close but not perfect tolerances show that the only concept of truth that matters functionally for our civilization is the kind I endorse. Your kind, where arguments about the existence of likely and extremely unlikely entities are seen as equivalent because no proofs are involved is only useful when you study medieval philosophy, or theology from any era, I suppose.

I said I wouldn't comment on your best-beloved deft move, and I'll stick with that. I will say that you're fundamentally off-track from the outset. You see, the question of the existence of an incandescent lightbulb, for example, is easily answered. Once one can say that the incandescent lightbulb exists, then we can do the whole prediction game. It has become knowable. How one knows anything about something whose existence is undecidable is another question. Indeed, one might call it a matter of faith. Your empiricism and materialism have nothing to say about an abstract entity whose existence can never be certain. That's just how it works. It would make more sense, then, to leave such questions alone while simultaneously acknowledging an upper bound to the reach of the system. To put it another way: No one tries to replicate Euclid's proof on the infinitude of prime numbers by using the second derivative.

[drogulus]

     A working assumption that something doesn't exist is leaving it alone. That's what you do when you abandon these turkeys. Unless you think that the Graveyard of Propositions contains a bunch of neglected truths. Where do you get the idea that un-disproven things need to have their status finely tuned this way. They aren't false, they are banana! _{(is it cheating if we know what banana means?)}

     This reminds me of A.J. Ayers assertion that he wasn't an atheist because unfalsifiable propositions, not even false, don't rise to the level of something to be disbelieved. He wouldn't dignify them to that extent. I share his disdain (one thing I appreciated about him ), but if this isn't picking philosophical nits I don't know what is.

[drogulus]

Your empiricism and materialism have nothing to say about an abstract entity whose existence can never be certain. That's just how it works.

     Gosh, you are persistent (good for you)! Why would I need to say anything about these nonmathematical, nonlogical, plays-no-role whatever abstractions other than they just sit there not taking up space. It's as though my inability to say anything about them somehow enables an argument on their behalf, which I notice you don't make!  Anyway, I think I've covered this. These entities don't suffer from my inability to specify what they are, they suffer from the inability of anyone who tries to describe them. Some ideas are so bad it's a shame to try to hold them.

[PSmith08]

My point is that you cannot assume anything about this question, absent some deft move to bridge the gap, since that assumption requires an answer that is definitionally excluded. Standing in a vacuum, there is no argument to be made either for or against a solution to this question. Such a status, in my view, necessarily precludes - absent my much-loved deft move - a value judgment like good or bad. We're talking about a hole where human reason cannot go.

Short of starting over, in which case, 1.e4, I'd say we've reached our stalemate.

[DavidRoss]

DAVID ROSS said:  "You are confused about the difference between knowledge and belief...and also about the difference between something--God, gravity, beauty--and concepts about the thing itself."

Hmm...I am sorry David, that you choose to 'believe' I have no 'knowledge' on the difference between belief and knowledge.  Let me explain some more.
Knowledge has a number of definitions, none of which can be applied to a 'knowledge' of God because all existing 'knowledges' on deity(s) are in conflict. Many God(s) are 'believed' with certainty as 'knowledge' to exist.  These certain 'knowledge(s)' of so many divided and individual God(s) become unbelievable on such analysis because these 'knowledge(s)' are not what those who have them think they are...
They are just belief ...belief is something unproven and not universally recognised as being true on the scale of its assumed polarity.  An assumption or construct of belief coming from 'knowledge' of a 'true' God from a matrix of 'certain' and 'true' Gods Worldwide which in itself is a belief is nothing short of nonsense, but continues to be the posit of religious fundementalists. 

NORBEONE said: "I've argued with you before that theists cannot 'know'."
Precisely.

I see you also are confused about the difference between learning and knowledge.  And note that Norbeone may be entitled to his belief that theists cannot know, but it is logically incorrect and cognitively nothing more than an expression of his unreasoning prejudice.

[Al Moritz]

    Scientifically (hard-headedly, you might say), the regularity of nature supports no more than what we agree it supports. At the level of beliefs (soft-heartedly, following William James) it supports the beliefs you hold. How convenient.

Scientifically (hard-headedly, you might say), the regularity of nature supports no more than what we agree it supports. At the level of beliefs (soft-heartedly, following William James) it supports the beliefs you hold. How convenient indeed, Drogulus.

As PSmith08 points out, both atheism and theism go beyond the actual scientific evidence. Both are philosophical positions, not scientific ones *).

Somehow you, like other atheists, still suffer from the mistaken assumption that your position is somehow "the more scientific one". Yet, how can your position be "more scientific" when it is not a scientific one in the first place? Again: it is a philosophical position, just like the theists'.



*) Apart from the fact that there is no scientific evidence for a naturalistic origin of the universe, science holds no views on the ultimate origin of the natural world and the laws of nature. The working model of science is methodological naturalism, not metaphysical (or philosophical) naturalism. Atheist who don't acknowledge this distinction and its importance are either ignorant or intellectually dishonest (it is a fact, not an opinion, look up any mainstream definition of science). Individual scientists may or may not adhere to philosophical naturalism, yet not science itself, which is just a tool to study the natural world, nothing more.

[DavidRoss]

As PSmith08 points out, both atheism and theism go beyond the actual scientific evidence. Both are philosophical positions, not scientific ones *).

Except that atheism, unlike theism and agnosticim, is logically insupportable without omniscience as a premise.

[Lilas Pastia]

How would the following statement fit into that scheme of arguments and counter arguments?

faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen

.

Another translation reads:

faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.

Things hoped for may be real or imaginary or simply conceptual ("eternal bliss"). Then things not seen ... How can they appear as evidence or produce certainty in the believer?

Are we not in the realm of the unprovable and undisprovable?