Posted: Mar 07, 2010 9:56 am
ray wrote:I have attempted the Celler Argument for God in this thread, as well as
in others sections of the forum, but they keep running away from them:
islam/i-am-muslim-t632.html
nontheism/theists-why-should-i-believe-t94-110.html#p13496
creationism/who-designed-the-universe-t709.html
.
Atheists are only Atheists pretty well because we have not yet seen credible evidence for god (or gods). It's not just Allah, in theory there are something over 2000 buildings with people on top saying "Look at my God". Perhaps they are all describing the same scene from their own point of view but if that was true then we would see strong commonality of view but what it appears to us uninvolved people is that they seem to be on the roof, noticed that God was not there, and have rapidly invented many different stories to justify why the people have just spent all this money building the building in the first place.
If you are describing stars and we are in the cellar then we simply would like you to install a camera. You sending us a photo or describing the night sky isn't good enough because it's not even a matter of us not trusting you (all human relationships are reducible to trust) but that we need to verify our trust. There are a lot of people out there who abuse other people's trust.
The scientific method does this; we trust someone to present a paper that has results that can be reproduced. If they cheat on the results (and this does happen) then others can't reproduce the results and the original paper is retracted. What is trustworthy is what is left. Don't feel wronged if we simply ask for evidence and then pick this to pieces to reproduce the results because what is trustworthy is what is left.
What you cannot expect us to do is blindly believe according to some rules that presume trust without verifying this trust. Your cellar analogy is no more evidence for god than my description is evidence for their not being god but you can't also expect us to restrict ourselves to your worldview.
The scientific method has few restrictions but Islam does have some clearly defined restrictions and we would like it if you could explain why you limit yourself and expect us to limit ourselves too.
The basis to claim the restriction are true is that the universe is large (information large based on the entropy) and there will be many more scientific discoveries to come (these discoveries simply document how the universe works and how to predict how it will work in the future and so must be definition only be limited by the size of the Universe) but the Qur'an, which is claimed to have scientific foresight, is limited in what it could ever predict (even if it could predict in the first place). There is a limit to the self-information the Qur'an could hold (based on the actual physical size and the entropy rate of each symbol).
Just as there were science before the Qur'an the limited size of the Qur'an means that there is a limit to the discoveries in the Qur'an and so there will be many more scientific discoveries than there ever can be in the Qur'an.
Or did I miss the Qur'an part 2 ?.