Intergalactic Summit

My ethnicity is not in any way relevant to the factual accuracy of my opinions, neither is it relevant to my qualification to express said opinions, nor my capacity for knowledge and understanding.

and for goodness' sake there are TWO "t"s in my callsign. I may not like my callsign very much but you could at least spell it properly.

No, not okay. As I pointed out already pointed out ¬A(X) isn't quite the same as A(¬X): While the latter implies the former, the former doesn't imply the latter. A negative claim is a claim that claims a negative (that is: A(¬X)), not negating the claiming (which is: ¬A(X)). Also, as I already pointed out above and I even linked and quoted a authoritative source: Negative claims are just as provable as positive claims.

[/quote]Having established that, we now see that if we treat the negative claim "god does not exist" as a positive claim in its own right, then every other unspoken negative claim must also be treated as a positive claim. If that were the case then the law of parsimony could never be applied because any two competing hypotheses would always involve making the precise same number of assumptions - one for every possible statement regarding every possible thing or group of things.[/quote]
Well, we don't treat "god does not exist" as positive claim. All claims - be they of the type A(X) or A(¬X), that is positive and negative claims - have to be listed and get into the calculation if you apply the heuristic of the law of parsimony. What doesn't go in are non-claims, that is propositons of the type ¬A(X).


And therefore you need to list the assumptions you make that are containing a negative.


Yes, it does place god in the logical category of "things that don't exist" if you say "God does not exist". If you want to express that god is not assumed by you, you say "I don't believe in God" or "I don't assume that God exists".

You claim to be rational and to strive for truth when not even familiar with these really basic rules of modal logic? Worse, when you ignore them and state things in direct conflict with doxastic modal logic? I don't think you are.

Your very choice of words here validates my point and shows your lack of understanding on this matter.

You are an outsider. You will always only see words on a page, and I'm sure you have many logical axioms that prove conclusively and without a doubt why your opinions are the right ones. How clever!






Whatever you say Mr. Sticher!

The problem exists not only if God is a core axiom: It just needs to be a proposition of the type that aren't justifiable by the scientific method, the base axioms of science are just one example of those claims. If I claim that "a god does exist" it's not a naturalistic claim. I don't claim that this god is a natural phenomenon, I merely claim that he exists. Thus, if you are a naturalist, you can't disprove the God hypothesis, unless you have first shown that nothing exists, if it's not part of nature.

The assumption that there is nothing outside of nature is in fact in a way the working basis of science: Science is naturalistic by its very nature and should be. But - and that's a big but! - it's a methodological naturalism. It doesn't imply that ontologically nothing exists outside of nature. It simply remains silent on that matter.

And there start the problems of epistemomological naturalism, which is the claim that one can only rationally know something if there is scientific evidence for it. Science already did exclude the non- or super-natural in a methodologic decision. If you now apply it as the only possible way to produce knowledge, you ruled out non-scientific knowledge. Not because there is no such thing, but simply because you earlier made the decision not to cover that subject.

Worse, even, the proposition that "one can only rationally know/believe something if there is scientific evidence for it" is itself lacking scientific evidence, just as the base axioms of science. Thus epistemological naturalism has some really deep problems and the paradoxes you run into if you embrace it are so nasty that I wouldn't have much hope of ever seeing them being solved, if I were you. There are really strong arguments for it being an irrational position.

If you have no problem to part with epistemological naturalism, you should be more equipped to defend an ontological naturalism that claims that nothing outside nature exists. You will have to use non-scientific methods to argue that point, though. Until now, though, no one came up with a convincing argument that there is nothing outside nature.

If you just want to go through with your scientific program and you only want to claim that "when doing science, I don't need the assumption of god" you're quite right and you are justified in that by your methodological decision. If nature is what you want to deal with, then you don't need to deal with the non- or super-natural, by virtue of that decision. That's part of what science is. It is, though, in a way obliging you to keep non-committal in regard to those things you don't deal with in your capacity as scientist - which of course doesn't prevent you from having opinions on the matter in other capacities.

Alright. let's make this as clear as I'm able.

1: The law of parsimony states that between competing hypotheses, all other things being equal the one that requires the fewest assumptions is more likely to be true.

2: The terms "theism" and "atheism" concern only one subject and no other - whether or not a person believes in a god or gods.

3: Theism comes in two forms: Gnostic and Agnostic theism. Both forms mean, with regard to the subject of a god or gods, A(X)

4: Atheism also comes in Gnostic and Agnostic forms. However, their meanings are different.

5: Gnostic Atheism means that, with regard to the subject of a god or gods, A(¬X)

6: Agnostic Atheism means that, with regard to the subject of a god or gods, ¬A(X)

7: Theism and Gnostic Atheism are both equal assertions and make the same number of assumptions.

8: Agnostic Atheism is not an assertion and makes zero assumptions.

9: Agnostic Atheism is most likely to be correct, according to the law of parsimony.

10: Because theism and atheism are statements concerning only a single specific subject, any hypothesis no matter what it may be which involves a theistic stance [A(X)] contains one more assumption than an otherwise identical hypothesis based on an agnostic atheistic stance [¬A(X)] and is therefore less likely to be correct.

*

Another way to express it would be to give numeric values to the following statements:

A(X) "God exists" = 1
¬A(X) "The possibility of god existing is not being considered" = 0
A(¬X) "God does not exist" = -1

...and say that the law of parsimony means that between competing hypotheses, all other things being equal the one requiring the number of assumptions closest to 0 assumptions is most likely to be true.

*

There are other issues. For starters, parsimony, the razor, whatever you want to call it, is not in itself proof of a hypothesis' accuracy, but rather gives us the information to adjust our probability tables.

Secondly, the law of parsimony applies only if all other factors are equal

In order to be considered "true" or to be accepted as a working theory, the hypothesis must be demonstrated and proven. Demonstrating and proving a hypothesis requires producing supporting evidence for all of its component parts, including its assumptions (correctly, "null hypotheses")

As such, any hypothesis founded upon an assumption which has no supporting evidence is not equal to a hypothesis for which all the assumptions DO have supporting evidence and the razor does not apply.

In other words, in order to be considered sufficiently equal to an agnostic atheist argument for the razor to apply in the first place, (and as we've established, in such a contest the agnostic atheist argument wins), any hypothesis which includes a god must first provide evidence for the existence of said god. Which would then render the razor comparison irrelevant, of course.

It all comes back down to evidence. We can argue about parsimony and suchlike, but until such time as there is good solid proof on the table to demonstrate the existence of your or any other deity, such arguments are moot points.

Reality, you see, doesn't care about our ability to engage each other in twisting duels of logic and philosophy - what's true is true, and what's not true is not true. What exists, exists and what doesn't, doesn't. No matter how clever it may be, nor how poetic, nor how appealing, an argument for god is not, and never will be, evidence of god. The evidence for god is something that we argue about, rather than argue into being.

You've taught me a valuable lesson about how to clearly and properly express myself, Pilot Mithra, and for that I am sincerely grateful. But you've not convinced me that your stance is correct - quite the reverse, you've only reinforced my understanding that it is not. I also think that if you could be deconverted, you would have been by now. Maybe there's more to learn from this conversation, but at this point I think the time really has come - and I know I've said it before but by the Kariola I intend to stick to it this time - to bring this conversation to a close.

Thank you for an intellectually stimulating time.

That's a lot of words to not actually answer my question.
Let me make it really simple: your belief is agnostic, you believe God(s) can't be examined scientifically because they are outside the scope of science. Why do you see it this way? Why is God set apart from everything else in your worldview in this manner?

The point is why should it be inside the scope of science to begin with? It was never meant as a claim about natural things. Science is deliberately choosing to opnly deal with nature though and thus can only deal with claims about natural things. God isn't set apart from everything else in that manner: Qualia for example can't be fully accounted of by science either.

Oh, well there's a neat little word to draw my attention. "Can't" as in our current understanding does not reach far enough to provide a satisfactory scientific explanation, or "can't" as in the subject matter can't be meaningfully explained by science by definition? There are large issues looming ahead no matter which fork in the road you take.

Ah, very well; then it becomes important what definition of qualia you're operating under. Although there's some general agreement that they refer to individual instances of subjective experience, there are many and varied definitions.

I'm not terribly impressed by the ones that include non-materialism or inexplicability in the definition; "the parts of sense datums that are beyond the reach of science to explain" may, after all, turn out to be as vacuous a concept as "the parts of thunderstorms that are beyond the reach of science to explain."

(Post-scriptum - in hindsight, my apologies. I need to watch my trigger words. It seems the last thing this discussion needs is another tangent. Some other time and place, perhaps?)

Sure, it's an interesting debate.


Because the god-hyposthesis isn't a scientific nor a naturalistic hypothesis.