Logic

Originally posted by PatNovak
I want to address the topic of what makes someone pro- or anti-science. Being pro-science does not mean that one agrees with the conclusions of science, but instead means that one agrees with the way science approaches problems. If one person believes the Earth is a few thousand years old because of primarily religious reasons, and another person believes t ...[text shortened]... ence, and it makes no difference how often their conclusions coincide with scientific consensus.

I wish I had wrote this... Thumbs Up.

Originally posted by Suzianne
No, this is outrageously false. Just because I support a Creator's existence, and that He used established laws of physics and nature to have done the work of creation does not mean that I eschew the science behind the creation. Mankind would still be in the Dark Ages without science, and it is a testimony to the intelligence our Creator has endowed us wi ...[text shortened]... , I understand that both sides will have their "purists". But both types of "purist" are wrong.

No he was absolutely correct.

And calling us stupid for not agreeing with you is not any kind of
convincing argument.

In fact you have no convincing argument for why it is anyone should
believe anything on faith.

Your arguments are always circular because they assume the existence
of the thing that needs to be believed in as the reason for believing in them.

Go on, construct an argument for believing in god based on faith that doesn't
start out assuming that your god exists.

Originally posted by PatNovak
Your argument seems to assume (erroneously in my view), that anyone who was offered irrefutable proof of the Christian god’s existence would automatically side with this god, and that the only way to have the possibility of not siding with the Christian god is if we have a lack of proof of this god’s existence. I can certainly imagine a scenario where someo ...[text shortened]... , not information. Free will does not disappear when a certain level of information is achieved.

Consider the implications of irrefutable and absolute proof of God's existence. One can hardly choose to side against an omnipotent and omniscient being, jumping off a cliff would be a better option.

I think free will, or at least freedom of choice, does depend on information. Insufficient information can lead one to fail to realise that one has an alternative course of action. I don't think that it's paradoxical to also claim that too much information can remove freedom - if you knew your own future you'd could never make another decision.

Originally posted by DeepThought
Consider the implications of [b]irrefutable and absolute proof of God's existence. One can hardly choose to side against an omnipotent and omniscient being, jumping off a cliff would be a better option.

I think free will, or at least freedom of choice, does depend on information. Insufficient information can lead one to fail to realise that one ...[text shortened]... mation can remove freedom - if you knew your own future you'd could never make another decision.[/b]

Knowing your future [absolutely] requires that the future be predetermined...
Which is not a given.

No, if there exists an omni-max god that requires worship or it will send you to hell
[or non-existence] then I still wouldn't worship it. I will try to kill it, however futile
that might be.

Originally posted by DeepThought
Consider the implications of [b]irrefutable and absolute proof of God's existence. One can hardly choose to side against an omnipotent and omniscient being, jumping off a cliff would be a better option.

I think free will, or at least freedom of choice, does depend on information. Insufficient information can lead one to fail to realise that one ...[text shortened]... mation can remove freedom - if you knew your own future you'd could never make another decision.[/b]

Insufficient information leads to bad decisions, but they are still decisions, so long as the actor perceives they have more than one option.

Were choices made in the Matrix [movie] world not free choices, just because they were made in a simulation and thus all the information was faked? I would not say so.

Originally posted by PatNovak
I want to address the topic of what makes someone pro- or anti-science. Being pro-science does not mean that one agrees with the conclusions of science, but instead means that one agrees with the way science approaches problems. If one person believes the Earth is a few thousand years old because of primarily religious reasons, and another person believes t ...[text shortened]... ence, and it makes no difference how often their conclusions coincide with scientific consensus.

I don't think this post works either. Principally because science is empirical and in the case of God there isn't a consistent phenomenology to investigate. The claim that someone is anti-science because they believe in an unprovable first cause strikes me as too extreme. For one thing the scientific narrative doesn't give a reason for the universe starting other than as a quantum fluctuation, which is techno-babble for "it just did.". The question of whether God exists or not is not accessible to science since there is no way of detecting an omnipotent being that wishes to remain invisible. I therefore think Suzianne is justified in her claim that there is no contradiction between either scientific method or any given scientific result and her belief in a God. I don't think there's even a problem with the notion of a God that intervenes in the world, since it is a trivial matter for such a being to ensure any interventions could be rationalised in terms of natural explanations.

Originally posted by DeepThought
I don't think this post works either. Principally because science is empirical and in the case of God there isn't a consistent phenomenology to investigate. The claim that someone is anti-science because they believe in an unprovable first cause strikes me as too extreme. For one thing the scientific narrative doesn't give a reason for the universe st ...[text shortened]... such a being to ensure any interventions could be rationalised in terms of natural explanations.

Scientific methodology and philosophy requires not believing propositions until
there is sufficient evidence for them.

Believing in propositions simply because they haven't yet been absolutely disproven
is absolutely anti-science.

Allowing faith as a justification for belief, is anti-science.


Science is at root based on Bayesian reasoning. It's using evidence to correctly modify
our beliefs about the world. If you are not using Bayesian reasoning then you are reasoning
incorrectly by definition. Faith based beliefs are non-Bayesian. They are anti-science.

Originally posted by DeepThought
I don't think this post works either. Principally because science is empirical and in the case of God there isn't a consistent phenomenology to investigate. The claim that someone is anti-science because they believe in an unprovable first cause strikes me as too extreme. For one thing the scientific narrative doesn't give a reason for the universe st ...[text shortened]... such a being to ensure any interventions could be rationalised in terms of natural explanations.

I wish I had wrote this... Thumbs Up.

Originally posted by googlefudge
Go on, construct an argument for believing in god based on faith that doesn't
start out assuming that your god exists.

I cannot do this as God does exist.

You tell me to construct an argument based on fact but that I cannot start with a fact. Ummmmmm, no.

That you fail to recognize the fact of God's existence matters not to me, it doesn't change the fact. You will die in your ignorance, and even though I spend my breath here trying to state my case and change your fate, the fact is that you are in control of your own destiny, yet you insist on driving your train straight off the cliff. And at full speed. As someone once said, you can't fix stupid.

Ignorance I can deal with, it can be abolished by learning.

Willful ignorance is another matter entirely.

Originally posted by BigDoggProblem
Insufficient information leads to [b]bad decisions, but they are still decisions, so long as the actor perceives they have more than one option.

Were choices made in the Matrix [movie] world not free choices, just because they were made in a simulation and thus all the information was faked? I would not say so.[/b]

No, the characters in the Matrix were entirely forced to do what the scriptwriters wanted them to do. 😉

In the post I responded to PatNovak said the following:

If free will is dependent on anything, it is freedom, not information. Free will does not disappear when a certain level of information is achieved.

Which I don't agree with. He has claimed that either freedom is a necessary condition for free will or that free will depends on nothing. The latter cannot be the case, since one needs to be able to act non-stereotypically in order to be able to exhibit the freedom of behaviour required for free will to exist, so there is a condition for free will. Clearly it it doesn't matter how much potential one has for deciding one's own fate if the cell door's been locked. My claim is that one's freedom of action is so constrained in the face of absolute proof of God's existence that one can hardly claim to have free will any more.

Possibly the problem is that "free will" isn't a very good concept since no one has ever made a clear statement of what it actually is. There was an article in New Scientist a few months ago where a researcher into neuroscience (from memory) expressed the opinion that "free will" isn't a great concept and that what could be quantified is our ability to restrain ourselves, which is the next best thing - we are capable of overriding our own immediate desires - and we certainly need information for that, namely of the possible consequences of a decision. If the consequences were known to an actor at the time of the decision, they would not have a moral decision to make, so free will or at least self-restraint wouldn't be necessary.

Originally posted by DeepThought
I don't think this post works either. Principally because science is empirical and in the case of God there isn't a consistent phenomenology to investigate. The claim that someone is anti-science because they believe in an unprovable first cause strikes me as too extreme. For one thing the scientific narrative doesn't give a reason for the universe st ...[text shortened]... such a being to ensure any interventions could be rationalised in terms of natural explanations.

Nothing in your post even addresses my claims, and I wonder if you even read my posts. I was making very specific arguments: that someone who believes that faith is required before evidence can be evaluated is anti-science, and I also argued that someone who only believes science when it doesn’t conflict with their beliefs is anti-science. I never made the claim that “someone is anti-science because they believe in an unprovable first cause.” If you wish to argue against my positions, then argue against my actual positions. Your entire post is an attempt to refute things I did not say. My arguments were not against all Christians, only against the subset of Christians who believe evidence cannot be evaluated without first accepting the conclusion of a hypothesis as being proved, and those who think science is only valid when it supports their beliefs.

As to your other post, I think googlefudge and BigDoggProblem have offered successful refutations, so I will just second their arguments.

Originally posted by googlefudge
Scientific methodology and philosophy requires not believing propositions until
there is sufficient evidence for them.

Believing in propositions simply because they haven't yet been absolutely disproven
is absolutely anti-science.

Allowing faith as a justification for belief, is anti-science.


Science is at root based on Bayesian reasoning. ...[text shortened]... soning
incorrectly by definition. Faith based beliefs are non-Bayesian. They are anti-science.

I disagree with your first two paragraphs because of scope. You are insisting on applying scientific method to a question science has no answer to. Since the claim "not God" has not been absolutely disproven you might want to apply your reasoning to atheism.

The problem with applying Bayesian reasoning to the existence of God is that you have no evidence to use. One starts with a guess of the a priori probability, so you claim 0, Suzianne claims 1, and I go for 1/2. Since there is no evidence either way we can't do a Bayesian update so the method is no use. Interestingly assuming that the probability God exists is zero is more problematic than assuming the probability is one since if you start with an a priori assumption of impossible the Bayesian update will come out as impossible independently of the evidence - whereas assuming an hypothesis is true when it isn't works because the Bayesian update is well defined.

I don't agree that science is solely based on Bayesian reasoning, it may be a useful tool, but the most important physics advances of the twentieth century didn't depend on it. The starting point for the quantum revolution was Max Plank's work on black body radiation, which was an entirely theoretical piece of work. Einstein's theory came about because they found the speed of light in the direction of the earth's movement was (at the time) anomalously the same as that measured in the opposite direction. With the exception of some checking this is one observation. The alternative theory was that of the aether, and relativity was chosen as the better theory more or less on the basis of Occam's razor rather than Bayesian reasoning. In the nineteenth century, the extra term in Maxwell's equations is there because it is required for mathematical consistency, not because anyone did an experiment. The use of the wave solutions as a theory of light was justified on the grounds of the lack of a good theory for it.

Besides Bayesian reasoning doesn't automatically give the correct answer, until they discovered black swans it was, perfectly reasonably, assumed that all swans were white.

Originally posted by PatNovak
Nothing in your post even addresses my claims, and I wonder if you even read my posts. I was making very specific arguments: that someone who believes that faith is required before evidence can be evaluated is anti-science, and I also argued that someone who only believes science when it doesn’t conflict with their beliefs is anti-science. I never made the ...[text shortened]... e and BigDoggProblem have offered successful refutations, so I will just second their arguments.

My post addressed what was in yours with some precision. You said, Page 8 post 10:

When a person says that faith is a prerequisite to find evidence of god (as you have indicated elsewhere in this thread), they are declaring that you must accept the conclusion of a hypothesis as proven to be true before you can investigate the hypothesis.

Suzianne's post you referred to seemed to me to be this one, page 6 post 5:

However, even in a religious context, faith can discover its own evidence, indeed, it can be a form of evidence, and faith itself surrenders first place to love.

What Suzianne was expressing was a fairly standard Christian mantra that the only way of approaching God is through faith. I don't think this sentence makes her an enemy of science.

I don't think either googlefudge or BigDoggProblem refuted anything as I indicated above.

Originally posted by DeepThought
My claim is that one's freedom of action is so constrained in the face of absolute proof of God's existence that one can hardly claim to have free will any more.

I really don't see any reason to accept this claim.

Firstly, a compatibilist isn't troubled by it at all. All my choices are determined? So what? Doesn't make them any less free.

Even a libertarian can argue that your choices remain free despite God's perfect foreknowledge of them. If you had chosen something else, then God's foreknowledge would have been different, accordingly.

Originally posted by DeepThought
What Suzianne was expressing was a fairly standard Christian mantra that the only way of approaching God is through faith. I don't think this sentence makes her an enemy of science.

I am somewhat doubtful that this is true. My experience (which is admittedly anecdotal) is that Christian will tell you that any path to god is fine as long as you get there. I think most Christians (erroneously) think their religion is both logical and evidence based, so they do not discourage people from using purely logic or evidence as a path to god.

Secondly, and far, far more importantly: whether or not this is a "standard Christian mantra" is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether it is anti-science or not (see Argumentum ad populum fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum)