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Post by James Hannam on Jul 8, 2012 9:28:17 GMT
Any thoughts on this argument from Jeff Lowder of the Secular Web? secularoutpost.infidels.org/2012/06/evidential-argument-from-history-of.htmlSeems to me that there are some hidden assumptions here. From a historians point of view, the doctrine of secondary causes pre-dates almost all the successes of science. So science was developed on the assumption it would find naturalistic explanations. If it hadn't it would have failed as a project but the fact it has succeeded doesn't have a bearing on whether God exists. J |
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jonkon
Master of the Arts
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Post by jonkon on Jul 8, 2012 22:57:24 GMT
A doctrine of divine miracles demands the existence of a science of naturalistic explanations to distinguish between the two and establish the legitimacy of miracles. The atomists were perfectly content with the haphazard behavior of the planets. It took the outrage of Plato at the scandalous behavior of the "gods" in undermining his moral reforms of Athens during its decline in the aftermath of the Peloponesian War to create planetary astronomy. Much of the impasse of the Creation-Evolution controversy is caused by the thoroughly unscientific treatment of what constitutes evidence of "design" in nature.
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Post by fortigurn on Jul 9, 2012 4:54:37 GMT
A doctrine of divine miracles demands the existence of a science of naturalistic explanations to distinguish between the two and establish the legitimacy of miracles. Excellent observation. Adelard of Bath's 'Natural Questions' (1116), expressed the view that God had ordained natural laws which the universe followed, rejecting the popular idea that unexplained phenomena were necessarily the work of God. He did not believe that God regularly intervened to disrupt the natural order. Miracles were rare because God had ordained laws by which the universe should run, and so did not need to intervene: Miracles, he said, were the interruption of the natural law by God, and therefore should not be used to explain all natural phenomena: |
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Mike D
Master of the Arts
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Post by Mike D on Jul 9, 2012 7:50:00 GMT
Essentially, the argument boils down to:
(where N = naturalism and T = theism)
and this is held to be the case because:
I guess it comes down to whether this contention is true, that under theism you would have expected to find some aspects of the natural world that could only be explained by supernatural means. I don't find that a very convincing idea - not to say that there aren't people who believe that there should be bits of the world that could only be explained by an appeal to the supernatural (I suppose intelligent design is an example) - but like other people have said, mediaeval science was founded on the idea of a regular universe where natural phenomena were explicable in terms of other natural phenomena i.e. they weren't looking for supernatural explanations.
Interesting points as far as I am concerned:
1. He stops short at the conditional probabilities - Pr(E/B&N) & Pr(E/B&T), saying that the former is greater than the latter - but never says that Pr(N) is greater than Pr(T). I wonder why? It makes the argument feel a bit like a story with the last page missing...
2. He adds as part of the formulations of the argument:
I think there might be a lot of disagreement on this - many might argue that the fact that there is a universe at all (rather any of the details contained therein) was evidence against this.
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