RE: Dr. Craig is a liar.
May 6, 2016 at 10:59 am
(This post was last modified: May 6, 2016 at 11:02 am by Angrboda.)
(May 6, 2016 at 8:54 am)SteveII Wrote:(May 5, 2016 at 6:23 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: It wasn't drawn from any particular source. I tried to list them clearly in my reply, but philosophy of science is a favorite topic with me and the information is drawn from my experience as much as from online sources.
Then please elaborate on Relevance, Explanatory Power (before and after comparison), and Predictiveness and why God fails in these marks while another cause might score higher on such a thing as the creation of the universe. I have to think that applying principles in lab might be a little different when applying them to the creation of physical reality from nothing.
Quote: Consider the usual elementary textbook “scientific explanation” of the motion of the balls in the above example following their collision. This explanation proceeds by deriving that motion from information about their masses and velocity before the collision, the assumption that the collision is perfectly elastic, and the law of the conservation of linear momentum. We usually think of the information conveyed by this derivation as showing that it is the mass and velocity of the balls, rather than, say, their color or the presence of the blue chalk mark, that is explanatorily relevant to their subsequent motion.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scient...planation/
It's easy to see why natural preconditions are relevant to any naturalistic explanation of the creation of the universe. It's less clear why the pre-existence of a supernatural being leads to that creation without plenty of ad hoc assumptions.
Explanatory power is a measure of how well we understand the phenomena from the explanation. Saying that a car "burns gas" to make it go does not have as much explanatory power as a detailed examination of the workings of a typical internal combustion engine.
Quote:The sense of explanatory power that this paper seeks to analyze has to do with a hypothesis’s ability to decrease the degree to which we find the explanandum surprising (i.e., its ability to increase the degree to which we expect the explanandum). More specifically, a hypothesis offers a powerful explanation of a proposition, in this sense, to the extent that it makes that proposition less surprising. This sense of explanatory power dominates statistical reasoning where scientists are “explaining away” surprise in the data by means of assuming a specific statistical model...This notion finds precedence in many classic discussions of explanation. Perhaps its clearest historical expression occurs when Peirce (1935, 5.189) identifies the explanatoriness of a hypothesis with its ability to render an otherwise “surprising fact” as “a matter of course.”
http://fitelson.org/few/few_10/schupbach_sprenger.pdf
Quote:Deutsch takes examples from Greek mythology. He describes how very specific, and even somewhat falsifiable theories were provided to explain how the gods' sadness caused the seasons. Alternatively, Deutsch points out, one could have just as easily explained the seasons as resulting from the gods' happiness - making it a bad explanation, because it is so easy to arbitrarily change details.[1] Without Deutsch's criterion, the 'Greek gods explanation' could have just kept adding justifications. This same criterion, of being "hard to vary", may be what makes the modern explanation for the seasons a good one: none of the details - about the earth rotating around the sun at a certain angle in a certain orbit - can be easily modified without changing the theory's coherence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explanatory_power
The notion of "goddidit" doesn't provide any real detail on the how of it. The process remains as much of a mystery after the explanation as before it.
Predictiveness is the ability of a hypothesis to generate novel predictions about the phenomena. Einstein's relativity has generated numerous predictions which can be tested against the natural world. The hypothesis of "Goddidit" doesn't really generate any predictions about what we should observe about either the material or non-material world.