RE: Debate: God Exists
March 13, 2017 at 11:21 am
(This post was last modified: March 13, 2017 at 11:23 am by Angrboda.)
(March 13, 2017 at 11:15 am)Mister Agenda Wrote:Neo-Scholastic Wrote:If you have no explanations for those things, then by default God is the best explanation.
By that logic, in your scenario, it's also the worst explanation.
Indeed. We have other ways of evaluating explanations other than by comparison, and according to them, God is a very poor explanation.
Quote:Philosophers of science have proposed a number of comparative approaches [to evaluating hypotheses], usually involving some combination of the following criteria:
Likelihood. The probability of the evidence occurring given the hypothesis in question.
Prior probability or plausibility. Our degree of belief in the hypothesis prior to observing the evidence, or assuming we had not observed it.
Predictive power. The degree to which the hypothesis determines which potential observations are possible (or probable) and which are impossible (or improbable).
Falsifiability. The degree to which the hypothesis "risks" being falsified by new evidence.
Parsimony. The degree to which the hypothesis observes the principle of Occam's razor: "Do not multiply entities needlessly."11
Other criteria often cited include explanatory power, track record, scope, coherence and elegance.
http://www.talkorigins.org/design/faqs/nfl/
Of these, God only registers on likelihood, scope, and parsimony, if that. In particular, it's almost completely lacking in explanatory power.