ginckgo wrote:Seth wrote:ginckgo wrote:Seth wrote:CookieJon wrote:So do you believe Odin exists?
No, I believe that there is insufficient evidence to support the proposition that Odin exists. However, I cannot claim this as knowledge, because the question of the sufficiency of evidence supporting the existence of Odin is not subject to immediate rigorous proofs. Therefore I have a belief about Odin, but not knowledge.
There is exactly zero scientific evidence that anything supernatural exists.
This is a tautology. There is zero evidence that anything supernatural exists because the premise of the statement is that supernatural things cannot exist. The circularity of the argument should be easily perceived. If a thing is supported by (scientific) evidence, then it is ipso facto not supernatural. If it is presumed to be supernatural before the test of evidence is made, then it will never be discovered to be natural because the bias is towards rejecting the proposition because it's...well...supernatural.
Saying this is a tautology is as meaningful as saying that Natural Selection is a tautology: "those individuals that survive and reproduce better than their contemporaries, survive and reproduce better than their contemporaries". Yes, it looks like a tautology, but it meaningfully describes and illucidates what is actually happening.
Yes, the definition of science must preclude supernatural explanations, this is how we manage to keep making headway in understanding productively how the world works. Things that in the past, even very recent past, were thought to be beyond science to explain, are either now explained or withing reach. It is religion and its insistance on faith that is happy with some made-up explanation that purely originated in someone's imagination. 'Science is what we do to keep us from lying to ourselves' as Richard Feynman said, and relying on the infallibility of our own mind will keep us lying to ourselves.
The tautology is in the assumption that god claims are inherently supernatural and therefore must be rejected because they are presumed to be supernatural when there is no evidence that they are not in fact explainable through nature. As you say, things recently thought beyond science to explain, and therefore supernatural, were found to be natural.
Seth wrote:This is one of the most common atheistic canards which boils down to "God does not exist because theists claim god is supernatural, and since nothing supernatural can exist, and theists have not presented any scientific evidence that a supernatural god exists (nor could they because he's supernatural) God cannot exist because he's supernatural and there is no such thing as supernatural gods." It's tautology piled on circularity.
It's either supernatural, which means it's outside of our natural realm, and thus has no effect on it (i.e. it's irrelevant) or it can have an effect on our natural world and thus it can be detected.
Not necessarily. It may be that you are presuming it to be supernatural because science is currently unable to detect it.
Then we are told that this supernatural entity is intent on being random and thus not easily reproducible, but it would still leave a signature in the way things occur. Now we are told that it only does so in ways that do not leave detectable traces (like using quantum uncertainties). This is developing all the hallmarks of a variety of god of the gaps.
Which is a good reason to ignore those explanations and look for evidence without getting tied up in what theists believe.
I some ways it reminds me of Tim Minchin's "Storm" where he says
“By definition”, I begin
“Alternative Medicine”, I continue
“Has either not been proved to work,
Or been proved not to work.
You know what they call “alternative medicine”
That’s been proved to work?
Medicine.”
So, like alternative medical herbs that do bugger all for your health, explanations that require supernatural do bugger all for our understanding of the real world. I love a good fantasy story, but that does not mean I think any of it is true, it's pure entertainment.
The problem with Mr. Minchin's assertion, and your analogy, is that alternative medicine often works, it just has not been subjected to rigorous testing by traditional medical authorities because, sometimes, they have their own biases and rice bowls to protect and show studious disinterest in proving the efficacy of treatments that they cannot control and charge for. For example, herbal medicine has long been used worldwide, and despite being characterized as "alternative" the more science researches herbal medicine, the more actual pharmaceutical proof they find. Saint John's Wort has been used for more than a thousand years to treat depression, and while many medical authorities dismiss it in the US, in Europe, it's actually prescribed more often than other mood elevation medications.
Even if something supernatural exists, how do some people manage to have a direct line to it, while others do not?
Maybe it's not supernatural and some people have been chosen for communication and others haven't.
Seth wrote:This is a fallacy of course because there is nothing that precludes God from being entirely natural and completely subject to scientific examination, qantification and falsification, it's just that we may not be sufficiently advanced in our technology or understanding of the universe and physics to be able to detect, examine, quantify and falsify God. Or, it may be that he doesn't want to be scientifically examined, quantified and falsified, so he's eluding examination.
Well, that certainly doesn't sound like the Biblical God who has an unhealthy obsession with being praised and acknowledged all the time.
Right. But need it be? That's the tautology I'm talking about.
So we need to be clear if we are talking about a deity exactly as described in any of the established religions (we can say that none of them exists as described) or about some undefined/undefinable supernatural entity, which ends up becoming a slippery sucker as it can get redefined each time science explains another, previously unexplained, phenomenon. I certainly sounds like the OP is talking about the former.
We're talking about some sort of intelligent entity capable of exercising physical force in this universe and capable of direct brain communication with human beings.
Seth wrote: As you insist, that does not preclude evidence coming to hand at some future point. But more importantly than that, our current understanding of the world does not require any extra entities like Odin.
And this is the "necessity" canard that is a fallacious argument that presumes that merely because some phenomenon (like evolution) CAN be explained by naturalistic processes, that this means it WAS produced by naturalistic means EXCLUSIVELY.
Why on earth should we bother with contemplating unnecessary explanations, when what we've already got suffices?
Because "sufficient" is not the same thing as "truth."
This is a similar idiocy to what currently pervades the media that there is always another valid 'side' to any topic that must be consulted: be it global warming, evolution, HIV/AIDS, immunization, 9/11 etc.
There are very often other valid arguments that need to be considered if one is being rational.
There's also a fallacious assumption that religion or the supernatural are the automatic alternative to scientific explanations.
So, ignore that assumption and examine that which is scientific.
Seth wrote:This is false because there is nothing in our understanding of genetics that precludes the possibility of intelligent design or manipulation of genetics through time. We do know for a fact that it is possible to tamper with genetics to deliberately and intelligently design organisms for a specific purpose. Intelligent design is absolutely true because we puny humans have achieved it. What this means is that since our puny intellects can, with relative ease, manipulate genes to create flourescent rabbits, that an intelligence not all that much more advanced than ours could EASILY have done the same thing throughout history. A nudge here, a snip there, to end, split or modify a genetic line. A minor perturbation in the orbit of an asteroid in the Oort Cloud 65 million years ago to reset the genetic clock at the KT boundary. Any of these things are perfectly possible and completely in accord with known science, and none of them require, or preclude a god-like intelligence from existing or choosing to intervene in our planet's history. Is such an explanation "necessary" because, as Dawkins says, it's so much more elegant (and atheistically satisfying) that nature does it by random acts of evolution? No, it's not "necessary,", but then again neither is BT corn, and it exists and stands as proof of the possibility of intelligent design.
And there are very clear fingerprints left by deliberately influencing genetics as opposed to natural processes.
Really? Are you telling me that ten million years from now someone who has no knowledge of the genetic manipulation of BT corn will be able to tell that it's artificially manipulated? How?
No doubt you'll argue that God would be so crafty that his handiwork would be indistinguishable from the natural processes, but in that case, what's the difference?
Well, the difference would be than in one case,it's a non-intelligently directed process and in the other it is.
If the result looks like it could have happened be natural means, why invoke God?
Because if God did it, that's what science would require.
You realise that naturalistic explanations are 'satisfying' because they explain so much more, and they also improve our lives.
That's not science, that's social philosophy.
It's not 'atheistically satisfying' because it actually advances our understanding, rather than paralyse it by insisting that we have faith in the assertions of thousand year old books.
No one is asking science to have faith in anything.
What single improvement has a purely belief-based explanation ever achieved? And I'm not just talking about feel-good things like "oh, you'll see your loved one again on the other side".
What's wrong with "feel-good things?" They are of utility to humans are they not?
Seth wrote:Personal experience of God(s) is meaningless, as that implies an over reliance on the accuracy of that lump of grey meat in your skull.
It's only meaningless to you because you choose not to acknowledge the fact that there is nothing in science that precludes intimate, brain-to-brain contact or communications from an incorporeal, but entirely natural, albeit possibly extra-universal intelligence to our own brains.
And we may one day show that these things are possible. But for now all test have falsified them.
Precisely.
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