A shotgun approach to my beliefs is probably not going to yield anything interesting. I mean, have you thought about how stupid of a way that is to gain understanding?

I mean, just look at questions 2 and 3:

2) Do you believe that the creator designed the universe with us in mind?
3) If so, at which point in our evolution did the creator start to take extra interest in our species?

Let's suppose for a moment that there is a creator that designed the universe with humanity as the ultimate goal of the entire project. If that's the case, then at what level does it make sense to say that the creator "started" to take "extra interest" in our species at a moment in time?

"So yeah... I built this thing with the singular goal of creating widgets. But I don't really care about the widget building process, so after I built this thing I just kind of zoned out until the widgets started appearing."

Maybe if you ask questions that aren't stupid, you'll get a more meaningful answer.

Edit: I mean, this might be even more baffling than jeccross' "OMG - What's a fossil? Explain THAT!"

I'm just trying to find out what you actually believe. You believe in the resurrection. You believe that Jesus is the son of God and that he died for the sins of humankind. You presumably believe that if you are a good person and/or if you accept Jesus Christ in your heart you continue to exist in some form in a not-unpleasant afterlife.
This presumably only applies to humans though, not to any other species. That makes us special.

The notion that God, several billion years after his creation of the universe, would send his only son to die for the sins of one primate species on one planet in one tiny part of the universe just seems wildly implausible to me. What makes us so special?

This particular act is understood to apply only to humans, yes*. It seems presumptuous that God can't have other interests, and I know of no part of Scripture that says God loves humans to the neglect of other creatures. God may have other plans for other creatures. I don't think I need to declare one way or the other.

(*Understood to be means that the existing understanding is like this. If we discover other intelligent forms of life out there, it could be that there will be a reevaluation of this particular statement. Or maybe not. I'm not a fortune teller. I don't know what the future will bring.)

And even if it were true that humans are somehow special, I don't really see any specific issues with that, either. Some rich guy's dog probably gets better treatment than the dogs of people living in rural Mexico. Why did that dog get special treatment, but the other one didn't? Sometimes that's just how things are.

Um, the Bible doesn't tell us how old the earth is, it doesn't even
address the subject.

Care to try again?

I would say that it's not necessarily the beings that we differentiate as 'humans' that are special. What's special is the category of being that is able to aim at the transcendent. It just so happens that humans are the only beings that we are aware of that fit that category. That distinction fits well within the evolutionary framework.

This does not add anything in the way of plausibility for me.

"God's plan" is not very kind for many species in the animal kingdom. If antelope heaven, chicken heaven and shoebill heaven existed, they would be filled with martyrs.

If only humans go to heaven then it really sucks to be a chicken or the younger shoebill chick right?

Why does it suck, when you're dead, you're dead?

I never claimed it would.

Sure. You're free to hypothesize whatever you want. I'm not going to stop you.

Given that I already can't adequately imagine what it's like to be a different creature with a different form/type of intelligence, I'm really not sure it makes sense to try to venture into that while also carrying along some sort of hypothetical philosophical perspective.

But you can go ahead and imagine whatever you would like. Pretend you're a chicken for a while and let me know how it goes.

Are numbers divine? They're certainly not physical.

Again, what of numbers? Show me the number 5 and not some representation of it. Oh, so numbers don't exist? And what does that say of all the math that's used in modeling science?

More importantly, you should realize here that you're making assertions about the universe that you can't prove.

You're right that it's not relevant to the scientific paradigm. However, that's not the point you've been making in this thread. You've been quite clear that you're saying more than irrelevance. You're now demonstrating that you don't even have your own thoughts worked out carefully. You need to stop being stubborn, accept that you're wrong, and try to work on this some more. You're right on that cusp being arrogantly wrong (where you're wrong, but so certain of your rightness that you start to come off as having your head up your rear end). You don't want to go there.

You are wrong about science. You don't know what you're talking about.

Please quote them. I may have missed it, but I haven't seen a specific concept for what you mean. I'm suspecting that you're going to be 100% circular.

There's no such thing as the luminiferous ether. But it explained something. It wasn't useless. It turned out to be wrong. But not useless. It spurred the Michelson-Morley experiment in search of it. We drew some very important conclusions from it. We concluded that it didn't exist.

Heh... Just noticed this:

I would consider this a type of independent verification that you haven't actually described what "natural" is in a meaningful way.

Nor 'supernatural'. I'm not sure I'd want to define either of these terms!

MB, I'm not unsympathetic to some of what you're saying, but I think of 'supernatural' as being a category that defies definition, perhaps a form of non-cognitivism, so it wouldn't make any sense to reject the undefined /undefinable.

Where did you get the basis of your claim, that the majority of scientists reject the supernatural as a necessary requirement of 'doing science'? Is it a conclusion, or do you think you've seen or heard it somewhere? I'd be surprised if any scientist mentioned the supernatural when talking about the scope of their work.

I had asked earlier "If it required the outright rejection of the supernatural, how could miracle-believing theists honestly go into science?" and you responded "You tell me". But either the work they are doing is scientific or it isn't. Could you (or more importantly, peer review) differentiate the science done by a miracle-believing theist vs. a non-believer? Obviously not. This should tell you that it's the method rather than the person that make something 'science'.

You have a concern that it leaves the door open for some underlying supernatural cause. But any such possibility needs to have sufficient reason to be considered, in a way that's no different to considering some undiscovered natural explanation for whatever phenomenon is being investigated. You cannot put something forward without a reason, that is a core of the scientific method. Anything unfalsifiable, arguments from ignorance, god of the gaps, etc are already dealt with and dismissed by science. There is no reason for this concern.

I'm referring to life + afterlife
Sucky life + no happy afterlife = sucky totality of existence

I don't need to pretend to be a chicken to conclude that chickens experience pain and discomfort and that they react to those states in ways similar to humans.

Why does 'God's plan' for the animal kingdom involve so much suffering?

By your definition, any belief that you don't agree is plausible 'to a high enough degree' (from your "plausibility of the correctness is too small." comment), is not rational. There are three obvious problems with this, that you still haven't addressed even though I've mentioned them twice now, perhaps you could deal with them this time.

1) If you transfer 'rational' from being a property of the thinking behind the belief, to being a property of the belief itself, you leave us needing a new way to assess the thinking, something to replace 'rational'. You haven't said what that would be.

2) You make the concept of 'justified' redundant as a property of the belief since it has been replaced by 'rational'. Where does 'justified' fit into your viewpoint?

3) This is the fatal problem for your definition. 'Plausible' is something that can't be assessed without coming to a belief about the belief itself, rather than the thinking behind it. But as soon as you have this belief, we now have to assess whether or not your belief that the belief is plausible, is itself plausible. And then that belief has to be checked, and we end up in a never ending chain of assessing belief for plausibility. A final verdict on the rationality of a belief could never be achieved in reality.

With my definition, we can at least assess the thinking behind the belief and decide whether or not the person is rational to hold that belief, regardless of the truth value of the belief. This is useful in a way that your definition isn't. If we decide that the thinking isn't rational, we can fix that problem before having to assess the belief itself, just as you would fix an invalid deductive argument before examining the truth value of the conclusion/premises.

If plausibility is a requirement for rational, and that the plausibility has to be of at least a high enough degree for that belief to be rational, then you're saying that a highly plausible belief can be wrong, and this is just a further demonstration of how useless the 'must be plausible to be rational' requirement is.

Inductive reasoning can be irrational too, and it's not always easy to tell the difference (Goodman's problem) you can't claim that "Inductive reasoning is perfectly rational". That's trivially wrong.


By claiming with certainty that at least one head *will* come up every million tosses, you're actually committing the gambler's fallacy here. There is no rule of simple induction that says that if you observe a large number of instances of a pattern that it will continue. A million tails coming up is a possibility, as is that happening consecutively a number of times, as is the coin landing on it's edge a million times and there not even being a head or a tail.

What we can say reasonably and 'rationally', using the available evidence is that probability shows that the distribution should be roughly long the lines of 50/50 heads and tails. It's irrational to go beyond that and claim with certainty that a specific pattern will emerge, and you would be ruling out possibilities not closed out by the evidence e.g. that a million tails could come up.

What's your point here? Please be explicit.


You're failing to understand that I'm not making any assertions about the universe, I'm explaining what the scientific paradigm is. I don't know if there is a supernatural, something beyond the physical, or not. What I do know is that when we rule that possibility out, when we act as if it's simply not something that can exist,and we treat the universe as purely physical, we start being able to generate useful explanations for what we observe. So within that paradigm, the question 'can the immaterial interact with the material' is meaningless, just as within the theist paradigm, it's meaningless to ask 'what causes, other than god, could explain the universe existing?'.

Yes, it's the point I've been making throughout the thread, but if you disagree then please quote where I've said anything that contradicts anything else I've said. Just telling me repeatedly that I'm wrong, or don't know what I'm talking about, or being stubborn, or confused or whatever else, is a waste of the time it's taking you to type it out, it's achieving nothing at all. This is the only time I'm going to say anything like this, I'm more interested in discussing the subject than how it's being discussed.

Provide evidence to back up your claims, or don't make them.

See above.

At this point in the conversation, 214 posts in, you're thinking to ask me what I mean by 'natural explanation' despite me having used terms like this since post 13, and you can't understand how I could be using the word 'natural' in the context of the multiple references to Philosophical naturalism and methodological naturalism and the fact that throughout the thread I've done nothing but talk about how science doesn't deal with the 'supernatural' but only with the physical, material and the 'natural world'.......

This is huge comprehension failure by you and does not fill me with confidence. Whether you agree with my viewpoint or not, I would have hoped that at this point you would at least understand it.

I don't. I consider it a failure by both of you to understand something quite simple.


Then that thing wasn't useless, but what you're saying is. Science that includes the possibility of supernatural, non-physical, immaterial, spiritual explanations, is useless. There are no meaningful conclusions that can be drawn from such a paradigm. No useful understandings, no useful theories. We'd still be in the dark ages if that paradigm was still prevalent.

Wut? That's what empiricism is.... are we talking about the same thing? What do you understand empiricism to be? I've also made a few criticisms of empiricism that you haven't addressed, are you going to?

It's to distinguish between the natural and the supernatural. The natural, unlike the supernatural, is that which is physical, i.e can be detected using the senses. As I've previously said quite a few times now...

'tends to'? As I've already said in this conversation with you, "Empiricism holds that beliefs are justified when they are connected by reasoning to evidence obtained through perception.". There are no other ways that an empirical approach can be applied, except through acquiring beliefs based on 'sense data' that is collected using the senses, so what do you mean when you use a words like 'tends', what other options are there?


See above.

For me, supernatural has a day to day application of being the way people can dispense with scientific explanations that conflict with what they'd prefer to believe about things or for which science hasn't been able to provide evidence, such as ghosts and gods. They say things like 'ah, but that's because it's supernatural....'.

I don't remember if I've read the word 'rejects' anywhere, but it's a clear implication of the assumption in the scientific method that there are only 'natural' causes. And then there are plenty of sources to support that idea like this one;

Eminent scientists reject the supernatural: a survey of the Fellows of the Royal Society


Their personal beliefs are irrelevant if they still adhere to a particular method. I'm an atheist, but I could argue as a theist simply by adopting the theist paradigm that 'there is a god'. Now I know what questions are relevant and what answers meaningful. My own view is not relevant in acquiring and understanding knowledge through that specific paradigm.

So yes, I entirely agree with your final sentence and it's what I've been arguing throughout the thread.


I don't consider it a 'concern', it's more a case of it being useless to us as a paradigm, you simply can't explain anything in a meaningful way if you use the supernatural. Science has only been so successful because it doesn't include the possibility of the supernatural. When science says that the natural world is all that there is, and we're going to define that by saying that it's anything 'physical',i.e. that which can be perceived using the sense, it's not saying 'and there's always the supernatural but we'll just ignore that', it's saying that there is no supernatural.

No, it is not. Empiricism is the position that knowledge stems from sensory experience. You are going far, far beyond that in your claims in this thread.

You are even running around proving negatives, which empiricism can't do.

You are also repeatedly conflating "methodological" with "ontological", claiming that naturalistic method implies that "science" rejects the supernatural. Seriously, the entire point of coining "methodological naturalism" was to not make the unsupported claims of ontological naturalism. Your only reply to this has been to claim that you are aware of the distinction, only to two seconds later go back and make those claims again. Why? If you are truly aware of the distinction, why do you insist on ignoring it?

It seems rather obvious that you either do not understand the terms you are throwing around or that you can't be bothered to use them correctly.

You are free to conjecture about the experiences of other creature in any way that you choose.

I don't know. But what I do know is that the flip side of suffering (pleasure/enjoyment/etc) is not understood in the absence of it.

For example? Rather than just telling me I'm "going far, far beyond that", quote where I'm doing that. Otherwise, all I'm left with is 'no, I'm not' and we get nowhere.

And again I'm going to point out that I've made a number of criticisms and asked you several questions about it and you've roundly ignored them all. Are you not seeing them? Don't want to answer them? What?

When have I done that? Perhaps, again, you could quote me. I'm not searching the entire thread trying to figure where you might think I've done that.

Nope, you're still making the same mistake, but perhaps that's because you're wrong about science in general. Since you're base understanding is incorrect, you're still failing to see why the assumption of philosophical naturalism when working with the scientific method, which we call 'methodological naturalism' requires treating the universe as if only natural causes are possible.

That there are scientists that don't use a 'full' version of MN doesn't change what it is.

"Methodological naturalism is the label for the required assumption of philosophical naturalism when working with the scientific method. Methodological naturalists limit their scientific research to the study of natural causes, because any attempts to define causal relationships with the supernatural are never fruitful, and result in the creation of scientific "dead ends" and God of the gaps-type hypotheses. To avoid these traps scientists assume that all causes are empirical and naturalistic; which means they can be measured, quantified and studied methodically."

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Methodological_naturalism

Shrugging off the immaterial means shrugging off mathematics. Shrugging off mathematics is much closer to undermining science than a religious person doing science according to the expectations of the peer review process.

Round and round and round you go. When will you learn, nobody knows.

Okay.

And here's my response:

Now let's take a look at something you've said.

So, you are CLEARLY going beyond just "irrelevance" to stating that a truth claim is being made.

http://www.pewforum.org/2009/11/05/s...ts-and-belief/

More than half of scientists as of less than a decade ago believe in God. Do you think that more than half of scientists are doing science disingenuously?

The fact that you use words doesn't imply that you know what they mean. Up to this point, I've been assuming a shared vocabulary. As the conversation has progressed (especially with the word salad post) it has become clear to me that we aren't. So at this point, I'm asking you to bring clarity to the conversation by explaining what you mean.

Your defensive reaction here is an indication that you can't actually do it. I'm pretty certain that you can't because I know that I can't clearly define it. However, I recognize that my inability to carefully define it is an indication (at a certain level) of the utter irrelevance of the labeling method. This tells me in particular that science doesn't need to make a declaration about what is and is not "natural" or "supernatural" in order to advance.

You, on the other hand, seem to be insisting on it. And that's another reason why I think you're wrong in your understanding of science.

I don't care about your confidence. And that you think I don't understand what you're desiring to say is simply you being wrong again. I know that what you're trying to communicate is wrong information. Your misunderstanding of science (that list of capitalized words you keep throwing around), your misunderstanding of the difference between methodological and philosophical naturalism (and how they are and are not related to each other), and the fact that you literally don't understand what the word "redundant" means all tell me that you've got huge failures of understanding of the topic that's being discussed.

Pro tip: Don't cite rationalwiki when SEP and IEP have articles. Rationalwiki is a TERRRIBLE resource compared to those two.

I'm not sure how I've done this. Considerations of plausibility are part of the process of thinking about a belief. My reasons for thinking that various conspiracy theories are irrational is because of the implausibility of the connections that are required to maintain those beliefs.

Rationality is a broader concept than justification. Justification is a sub-category of rationality. Rationality is a category that basically encompasses all the ways of "right thinking." Justification is a bit more narrow. Justification has a lot more to do with squaring up ideas against information/knowledge. At least in my view of it. There are others views.

For example:

http://www.iep.utm.edu/epi-just/

But in any case, rationality is clearly a broader category than justification.

Nope. But I barely even know how to address this except by pointing out that we have primitive notions, concepts, and experiences that form the baseline of our understanding.

I can accept that "If P then Q is true when either P is false or Q is true" and that I can accept this as being absolutely 100% true, and not really feel the need to question whether or not this is a plausible belief.

I don't see why this is a problem unless you're trying to use "rational can never be wrong" as part of what it means to be rational. But I don't know of anybody who accepts this requirement.

You're on a gambling website, and you can't even get the gambler's fallacy right. How embarrassing.

The gambler's fallacy is a reaction to previous data, that because the previous data was such-and-such, the future data will be (or is more likely to be) such-and-such. I'm going into this with a claim BEFORE any data has even appeared.

Oh, wow... that was a poorly done survey. Here's the question that people were supposed to rate on a 7 point Lickert scale:

The double usage of "strong" basically ruins the result. (Edit for clarity: "Strong" in the prompt and "strong" in the Lickert scale.)

-----

But beyond that, this doesn't actually even speak to what you're talking about. The personal attitudes does not indicate what you need, which is that the practice of science itself requires such a philosophical commitment.

Mightyboosh, I doubt you could pass a Method-101 course.

That in itself isn't a big deal, but please stop posting about what "science thinks of X".

You have also just repeated yourself over and over since I first replied to you in this thread, basically echoing your first dubious OP. I don't think it is worthwhile to try and discuss this issue with you, as you a ) don't understand the concepts you are talking about b) seem incapable of understanding that you don't.

Adios.