(December 13, 2015 at 9:25 am)SteveII Wrote:(December 11, 2015 at 8:41 pm)KevinM1 Wrote: Yes, it does defeat the truth of the premise. It said a thorough search. There hasn't been a thorough search because there haven't been other examples of life to look at. We're dealing with a woefully incomplete set - carbon based life on a singular planetoid that uses DNA as a mean to replicate and evolve. And given you're talking about a designer of the universe/reality, extrapolating from a set of 1 out of billions upon billions of other possible examples is mind boggling ignorant.
No, we don't need to subject every scientific inquiry to data from other worlds. Don't be dense. What we can't do is say that because life exhibits certain qualities here, that this is always the case either because this is the only planet with life (which we don't know) or because all life in the universe exhibits DNA or something similar (which we also don't know). Or that these processes are somehow special, or somehow impossible for nature to replicate. You're operating from willful ignorance at this point.
And it's difficult to draw conclusions from a lack of evidence. In this case, a lack of evidence does not point to god. That's the classic God of the Gaps fallacy.
So, your defeater for premise 1 is that we don't know (and logically can't know) what life on other planets will tell us. And you think that is more plausible than this argument? arguments are supposed to find the most plausible answer with the data we have. That is what this does. You are biased because of your scientism.
The best answer when you don't know, is "I don't know", making one up is irrational. If you don't know what life on other planets will tell us it impossible to say what is most plausible. Your just plugging god into places we don't have answers (God of the Gaps). Also arguments are not used for finding the most plausible answers, that's called research. Arguments are used to persuade or convince someone about a specific claim or point of view.
