(November 1, 2017 at 7:05 pm)Hammy Wrote:
(October 27, 2017 at 8:42 am)SteveII Wrote: Regardless as to your position on evolution, this statement just isn't true unless you equivocate on the definition of 'evolution'. The word can be used in three senses:
1. Evolution (defined as "decent with modification")
2. Evolution (defined as "the mechanism that accounts for evolutionary change")
3. Evolution (defined as "reconstructing evolutionary history")
The second and third definitions are not testable and there are significant gaps in our knowledge about them. You think they are correct because #1 is correct and then through inferred by a naturalistic worldview, the other two must be correct--but that is a far cry from fact.
That's not what the equivocation fallacy is. The equivocation fallacy would be if she was equivocating back and forth from one of those meanings to the other without letting it be known that she is doing that. Whereas here Mathilda is simply using the definitions of "evolution" that are actually relevant to science. (I.e. the theory of evolution as opposed to a layman definition of the word "evolve").
You can equivocate without making a formal argument. If you know #1 is a fact and then use that to claim #2 and #3 are facts in the same sense, you are equivocating.
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(October 27, 2017 at 1:22 pm)Gawdzilla Sama Wrote: We should have a list, "The 73 stages of Evolution Denial".
I think it's more like a 3 stage loop repeated over and over
(October 27, 2017 at 2:32 pm)SteveII Wrote: That's funny, because from your own link, the very first sentence starts with..."While the mechanisms of evolution are still under investigation..." Why do you think they start the entire description of their paper off with that phrase? It's not even like it was buried on page 47, it's the very first sentence.
The very fact you take the scientific method itself, as it continues to investigate things as opposed to pretend to know stuff absolutely, as a criticism of it just demonstrates that you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
If you have a theory meant to explain something yet you don't understand the mechanisms--that is what you have--a theory that you don't understand. In no way is this a scientific fact.
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(October 27, 2017 at 3:01 pm)SteveII Wrote: That wasn't my point. I was giving the reason why #2 and #3 are inferred. An inference fueled by an observable fact and a philosophical worldview does not a fact make.
I have no problem with methodological naturalism and the related principles as part of a philosophy of science. But we need to be more precise when we throw around the word 'fact' and ridicule people who object.
They're scientific facts. Not absolute facts.
Philosophical naturalism need not be absolutely true for the sensible conclusion of philosophical naturalism probably being true after the tons of evidence gathered by methological naturalism to support its strong likelihood of being true. [1]
But I would say that philosophical naturalism is absolutely true if the only alternative is supernaturalism and supernaturalism fails to have even a coherent definition. Is there any difference between something supernatural and something non-existent? That's the question. [2]
I mean, if you take the whole of noumena/thing-in-itself to be "supernatural" then that just waters down the whole concept of supernatural. I assume supernatural is supposedly more than that. Noumenological + specialness, maybe?
I believe that the noumenological world is fully natural but it's the parts of the natural world that are by definition unexperiencable and undetectable by science. It need not be supernatural at all. We can never know objective reality we can only know and experience subjective reality (science studies our perceptions of the observable world not our non-perceptions of the unobservable world) but objective reality may not be much different to subjective reality at all, provided that our perceptions and scientific evidence is accurate . . . why bring God into the picture? [3]
1. I don't disagree with any of that.
2. If the supernatural has affected the natural world, then there is no in incoherency.
3. You are just replacing God with "we don't know" and ignoring the possibility of God having a causal effect on the natural world. You are defining reality to exclude God and then saying why bring God into the picture. You are question begging.
