But I think what has been suggested is that the rocks too were supposedly designed by your magic genie. So why don't they exhibit the tell tale signs of design? If everything is designed, what sense does it make to argue that some things show the signs more than anything else?

(December 15, 2015 at 12:49 am)RoadRunner79 Wrote: Would you agree, that specified complexity; that is a quality which is both ordered and varying in parts with a low probability requires an intelligence to make a choice?  There was no answers to this question at uncommondescent.  Perhaps you would like to take a crack a similar question.   You come across a table with 500 quarters on it in the formation of an array equal distance apart.   Every third quarter is facing heads up, the remaining are tails.   Would you assume chance and natural forces for this configuration or something else?

If we take away the familiarity of the quarter, and assume instead that they are molecules in a crystal lattice, then I would want to conclude that it is natural; whether any vague "complex specified information" test would indicate as such is the important question. Note that the pattern of the quarters was easy to describe in a short sentence, because of the repetition.

Philosophy can't be dead. It underpins science. Science wouldn't exist without the branches of ontology, metaphysics, epistemology, and even ethics. I recently had a discussion about Hawking's "philosophy is dead" quote and someone said "what got us to the moon, science or philosophy?" To which one can simply reply, "the very idea that we should go to the moon is philosophical", and that's the end of the discussion. But obviously one could have gotten more into the metaphysics, epistemology, etc. of the physics that got us there. As for "scientism" I look upon that term with suspicion. The Hawking quote may have been an example, but it often seems like a favorite smear of the regressive left. No one is a logical positivist anymore. Steven Pinker wrote a pretty good essay (and subsequently got into a debate) defending scientism.

Steven Pinker - "Science Is Not Your Enemy": https://newrepublic.com/article/114127/s...humanities

(December 15, 2015 at 6:11 am)Amine Wrote: No one is a logical positivist anymore.

If it walks like a duck...

(December 15, 2015 at 5:02 am)Jörmungandr Wrote:

(December 15, 2015 at 12:49 am)RoadRunner79 Wrote: Would you agree, that specified complexity; that is a quality which is both ordered and varying in parts with a low probability requires an intelligence to make a choice?  There was no answers to this question at uncommondescent.  Perhaps you would like to take a crack a similar question.   You come across a table with 500 quarters on it in the formation of an array equal distance apart.   Every third quarter is facing heads up, the remaining are tails.   Would you assume chance and natural forces for this configuration or something else?

If we take away the familiarity of the quarter, and assume instead that they are molecules in a crystal lattice, then I would want to conclude that it is natural; whether any vague "complex specified information" test would indicate as such is the important question.  Note that the pattern of the quarters was easy to describe in a short sentence, because of the repetition.

I would agree, that in this instance, knowledge of the forces likely involved in a natural cause would likely preclude them as a suspect.   Also, I would agree, that this example would fail the complex specified information test.  While highly specified, in is not complex.  It's not really about testing for specified complexity, but about trying to force natural causes into a gap where an intelligent agent makes the most since.

(December 14, 2015 at 3:18 pm)Aoi Magi Wrote:

(December 14, 2015 at 2:54 pm)Kingpin Wrote: I never understood the whole God of the Gaps thing.  I've never argued that God answers the gaps of knowledge we don't understand.  God is the creator/author of the parts we don't understand as well as the parts we do understand, ie he's the God of the whole show.  Only way I've ever looked at it.

god of the gaps is basically what the justification for god is.

Ask yourself this, is the existence of God justified or necessary among anything the human knowledge can explain today?

God only exists as an explanation for the unknown

So very very wrong. God is the reason why we can trust the knowledge we have already gained.

(December 16, 2015 at 10:04 am)ChadWooters Wrote: The reason why we can trust the knowledge we have already gained.

Ooh. So if a scientific result we thought was correct turns out to be false, it shows that reliable truth can only be found with God, and if a scientific result turns out to be correct, it shows how God's grace made it reliable. You can't lose!

(December 14, 2015 at 1:05 pm)SteveII Wrote:

(December 14, 2015 at 12:36 pm)Minimalist Wrote: Let's cut to the chase.

What does YEC have to do with anything?

It means we are on to you, bozo.

(December 16, 2015 at 10:11 am)Quantum Wrote:

(December 16, 2015 at 10:04 am)ChadWooters Wrote: The reason why we can trust the knowledge we have already gained.

Ooh. So if a scientific result we thought was correct turns out to be false, it shows that reliable truth can only be found with God, and if a scientific result turns out to be correct, it shows how God's grace made it reliable. You can't lose!

That's not what I mean. When natural science gets detached from absolutes, the kind that provide a glimpse of Nature’s God, nothing rationally justifies efficient causality, the reliability of intellect, objective being, or consideration of essential natures. The validity of any particular proposition based on an uncritically accepted ‘brute fact’ devolves into either 1) an infinite regress of prior propositions or 2) a vicious circle in which the series of supporting propositions loops back to include the original premise.

(December 16, 2015 at 3:56 pm)ChadWooters Wrote:

(December 16, 2015 at 10:11 am)Quantum Wrote: Ooh. So if a scientific result we thought was correct turns out to be false, it shows that reliable truth can only be found with God, and if a scientific result turns out to be correct, it shows how God's grace made it reliable. You can't lose!

That's not what I mean. When natural science gets detached from absolutes, the kind that provide a glimpse of Nature’s God, nothing rationally justifies efficient causality, the reliability of intellect, objective being, or consideration of essential natures.

No, reliability of intellect is not justified rationally. Even worse, if intellect were unreliable, we would have no reliable way to ever know it, right? The reliability of intellect therefore must be a working hypothesis which appears consistent with observation.