Neo-Scholastic Wrote:Mister Agenda Wrote:If homeopathy was believed in for centuries and almost everyone but a few irrationally skeptical scientists believed in it unquestioningly, to prove it really works, the null hypothesis to overcome would still be 'homeopathically treated water is indistinguishable from the same water if not homeopathically treated in its medical effects'.
I guess what you are trying to say is that a world without God is indistinguishable from a world in which God exists. Is it? That begs the question by assuming you already know what a godless universe would look like.
In the homeopathy example you have the ability to isolate variables by comparing treated and untreated water. How does one create a sample set of all existence in which God exists to compare with a control set of all existence without God? It cannot be done and it is ludicrous to suggest an impossible test be used to test the proposition.
One would almost think you were trying to shift attention from your misunderstanding of how a null hypothesis works to the logistics of applying it to God's existence. I agree that it's difficult, especially when you can't think of a single variable that would be different in a world where God exists and a world where God doesn't. No evidence that the earth ever stopped turning for a few hours, no evidence of a global flood in historical times, no evidence that God responds to prayers in a detectable way...claims about God not surviving any hypothetical test don't affect the proposition that God exists because God can always be redefined to explain why the results expected if the claim were true weren't found, just like one could do with an imaginary being.
Neo-Scholastic Wrote:Mister Agenda Wrote:'The world is all that exists' is the null hypothesis. If you want to show that something besides the world exists, that's the proposition that you need to overcome.
If you are going to take that to the ultimate extreme then the null hypothesis is actually solipsism. Anything else, including 'The [physical] world is all that exists' is an alternative explanation or profoundly incurious. (I added 'physical' to the proposition to clarify my original meaning.)
Science is based on what's useful and what works and what's testable. Solipsism doesn't fall in those categories, it's like God in that while accounting for everything, it doesn't actually account for anything.
I'm not anti-Christian. I'm anti-stupid.