(October 12, 2018 at 8:41 am)SteveII Wrote:(October 11, 2018 at 9:44 pm)LadyForCamus Wrote: You know as well as I do that one does not have to posit a formal, logical argument in order to engage in fallacious reasoning, Steve. I asked you to describe the method you use to distinguish a supernatural cause from an ‘as of yet unexplained’ natural cause. Your answer included a real life example; that if people first prayed for a child with cancer, and then the cancer disappeared, that could be a good reason to think the cause of the healing was supernatural. You and I both know that, “because the second event followed the first” is a faulty reason to think the second event was caused by the first. Your methodology, at least in this one particular instance, is invalid by way of fallacious reasoning. I don’t see that there is much to dispute here.
Your mistake is the larger set of reasons/beliefs that form the context. It's inductive reasoning based on the fact that brain tumors do not generally disappear on their own, the belief that God exists, the belief that God can heal, and the belief that prayer is part of that process as outlined in the NT to effect that intervention. As in any inductive argument, the premises are probabilistic and the conclusions still may not be true. In fact, perhaps the prayers did nothing to change the outcome--that God would have healed him anyway for some other reason. I said before, we cannot know for sure, there is no way to prove it.
Couple things to point out:
1. Cancer can disappear without a belief in god. You can't be so selective that you only look at one grid of the four-grid square of hits/misses. In fact, tumors in many cases have been observed to disappear right after bacterial (and other) types of infections. So it could mean that certain infections, given perhaps certain genetic predispositions, could lead to a spontaneous remission/regression of tumors.
2. If you're going to resort to Bayesian reasoning, you really have to do it right. And it's really important to be intellectually honest as you conduct such reasoning. In this world that we observe, we have observed that as our knowledge progresses in the various fields of science, naturalism progressively grows in explanatory power when it comes to the workings of, and in, this world. Whereas supernaturalism has continually been declining in explanatory power when it comes to such phenomena. This lends more credence to naturalistic explanations than it does to supernaturalism, and so we should also take this into consideration when trying to estimate all the various probabilities concerned. Furthermore, we haven't seen much, if any, clear [relatively unquestionable] evidence in this world that points to supernaturalism better than naturalism.
Quote:Entities that exist and are therefore part of a greater reality that are not bound by the laws of nature that govern the universe. Worldviews that belief it the existence of the supernatural have a particular framework that provide context to the interaction.
But, as LFC keeps pointing out, that context doesn't provide much clarity at all. It's almost as if it's necessarily vague partly because people make this shit up themselves and can't do any better than that to establish the supernatural.
Quote:Of course I believe in free will. So do most people...because...that is what we experience every waking moment of the day. If you are dualist, you believe the mind is a separate thing from the brain. My particular worldview holds that that mind is our soul and that it will continue to exist after we die.
Which seems to be nothing more than wishful thinking.