In Reply to: Re: More from 'National Geographic' posted by empiricist on March 30, 2005 at 21:20:00:
Hi, again, everyone!
These are some very interesting posts. Actually, they're about one of my favorite topics, at least indirectly. I enjoy Analytical Philosophy (also Symbolic Logic!) a great deal, as thining along these lines post-TF was God's way of "regaining the brain", as I like to call it.
I would like to suggest a clarification ot terms, here, so that real communication may occur. Discussions causing heat and no "light" are not very useful.
I do prefer short concise statements, most of the time. However, with sequentially developmental logic of any kind, the complex cannot always be reduced to simplicity.
So, Here's an excerpt from a journal I had to write for a Philosophy class, where the instructor was an atheist--he conceded my arguments:
Mine: Definitionally, in regards to empirical science:
I must begin with the presuppositions that good science entails the following working definitions:
Hypothesis: a proposition assumed as a basis for reasoning and often subjected to testing for its validity: a speculation in regard to the probable cause of a phenomenon, which gains in reliability each time a prediction is based on it and found to be correct.
•It is never proved nor verified in a final sense,
•it is only supported or disproved depending on how the experiment comes out, because
•a false hypothesis may predict a result that has a different cause than that hypothesized, i.e. a merely tentative explanation of the data, advanced or adopted provisionally, often as the basis of a theory or as a guide to further observation or experiment.
Theory: more than a single hypothesis, a collection of them; i.e. an explanation or model based on observation, experimentation and reasoning, especially one that has been tested and confirmed as a general principle helping to explain and predict natural phenomena, a generalization reached by inference from observed particulars and proposed as an explanation of their cause, relations and the like.
Law: a statement of what always occurs under certain conditions, a declaration of something that has always been observed to be true under the given conditions but does not provide the kind of explanation that is found in a hypothesis or theory
•i.e.: For the always observable law of gravity, a theory of gravity would seek to explain observations—theories explain laws, they don’t become laws.
•Reasoning outside the scope of these definitions would also not fall within the necessary confines of linear logic, but would easily show evidences of the following self-explanatory logical fallacies (among others):
1.False Premise
2.Incomplete Middle
3.Begging the Question, and
4.Circular Argumentation
A respected educator writes of “fifteen of the most common myths of science common in science textbooks, in classroom discourses, and in the mind of adult Americans”:
1.hypotheses become theories which in turn become laws;
2.scientific laws are absolute;
3.a hypothesis is an educated guess;
4.a general and universal scientific method exists;
5.evidence accumulated carefully will result in pure knowledge;
6.science and its methods provide absolute proof;
7.science is procedural more than creative;
8.science and its methods can answer all questions;
9.scientists are particularly objective;
10.experiments are the principal root of scientific knowledge;
11.conclusions in science are reviewed for accuracy;
12.acceptance of new knowledge is straightforward;
13.models represent reality;
14.science and technology are the same; and
15.science is a solitary pursuit.
[My question: Given that mathematics is a
self-definitive numbering system, which may, or may not, describe something with actual correspondents in space/time, how can it be shown—& it CAN’T--that ANY math system could be used to LOGICALLY, much less EMPIRICALLY build a credible system outside of which God could NOT exist—much less inside of which it would be possible to JUSTIFY, in the formal philosophical sense, an apart-from-God moral system in which anyone could do anything he wanted—either God wills, and causes, originally as well as occasionally, or this is performed somehow by time & chance—which CAN NEVER BE CAUSAL?????
IF time & chance as causal powers were TRUE, then NOTHING ELSE COULD BE!!!!!
And, if time & chance as causal powers EXIST, nothing else DOES.
Here, I have a problem with both Nagel and J. S. Mill, who seem to have bought into this very assertion.
[See R. C. Sproul’s constructs below]
Mine (from R. C. Sproul):
•If chance existed, it would destroy God’s sovereignty
•If God is not sovereign, he is not God
•If he is not God, he simply is not
•If chance is, God is not
•If God is, chance is not
•Within mathematical possibilities, “chance” is a formal word with no material content; it is a pure abstraction, i.e.
•Chance has no being, it is not an entity, it is not a thing that has power to affect other things—it is no thing---it is “nothing” & cannot do “something”.
•The pretense that one can shift from the concept of a formal probability regarding “chance” to a real force, merely by adding the preposition “by”, to say ”by chance” and to beg the question that this suddenly makes “chance” an instrumental power is completely absurd, even possibly purposely fraudulent, because that construct would exactly equal to saying that
•Something that in reality is nothing has the ability or power to do something. i.e.
•see Jaki’s “magic tools” (citing P. Delbet (1913)):
•“Chance appears today as a law, the most general of laws…which only ignorance and disinterest can provide…”
Jaki:
•“…most successful mathematical formulas serve as magical tools for making shabby philosophizing a most respectable attitude”, or
•a compartmentalized magician’s hat is used to present the illusion that “ex nihilo nihil fit”, and likewise,
•when scientists attribute instrumental power to chance, they have left the realm of physics and have resorted to an identical “magic”.
•If taken seriously as a scientific method, this approach to knowledge reduces scientific investigation not only to chaos, but to sheer absurdity, i.e.
•because the scientific method “marries” induction and deduction; the empirical and the rational,
•attributing instrumental causal power to chance vitiates deduction and the rational, and
•it is manifest irrationality, which is not only bad philosophy, but horrible science as well.
[Mine: Here, I must say, “I have no need of THAT HYPOTHESIS”]
Also,
•“Unpredictable multiple causes”, or “UMC”
(Mine: in any number or within any length of time), do not equal chance. UMC cannot be used as a utilitarian shorthand to force a
pseudo-Ockham’s razor type of conclusion about probability. That cannot follow (false premise + any amount of time cannot = true premise).
Historical example: Immanuel Kant read David Hume, and wrote Critique of Pure Reason intending to save empirical science from Hume’s thoroughgoing skepticism.
Restated,
•Believing in chance as a causal power will lead science into nonsense, i.e.
•Choosing “magic” over logic means that logic must “give”, i.e. it must be asserted, absurdly, that it is possible to violate the philosophical law of non-contradiction, so that
•For something to create itself, it must have the ability to be, and not be, at the same time, so, of necessity, it must therefore be before it is in order to create itself (!).
•However, if “A” is, “non-A” cannot also be at the same time and in the same relationship.
Therefore:
•Chance is not an entity
•Nonentities have no power because they have no being.
•To say that something happens, or is caused, “by chance” is to suggest attributing instrumental power to nothing.
•Something caused by nothing is in effect self-created.
•The concept of self-creation is irrational and violates the law of non-contradiction.
•To persist in theories of self-creation one must reject logic and rationality.
Also,
•Self-creation is a concept that is analytically false (mine: like dreaming of a five-sided square is false by definition).
Such statements
•are not nonsense because they are unintelligible,
•they are unintelligible because they are nonsense.
Martin Luther said: “Nothing is not “a little something””. Creation "Ex Nihilo", a Latin translation of what the Bible says about the act of creation by God, means literally "out of nothing". This would render the weak hypothesis of the so-called "Big Bang" as logically absurd.
The statement that "Creationism, scientific creationism, intelligent design, whatever you want to call it (and the latter two are merely covers that Christians use to cloak the biblical account of creation in some semblance of respectability) are merely religious opinions that cannot be tested empirically" could be addressed at another time.
Be forewarned--I was a nihilist pre-TF (philosophically). The logic of rationalist/materialist/atheism-evolution held no water logically. I rejected this grouping of weak hypotheses (it DOES NOT qualify as a theory, strictly speaking--sorry ;-) )BEFORE I was born again and baptized in the Holy Spirit.
I'm looking forward to some ENLIGHTENED discussions. I think that defining terms and arguments is a good start!
What do y'all think?