Agnosticism IS the most dishonest position

[LadyForCamus]

I think I disagree that you can separate science and logic in that way. Logic is grounded in the physical realty we experience. The laws of logic are descriptive of that realty. Consider the law of identity. A, meaning “a thing,” must be identical to itself. Without a physical reality where things exist, there is nothing to describe or identify.  Many of the common logical arguments for god still depend on the truth or likely truth of their premises, and many of those premises are commenting on some purported truth or truths about the physical, detectable universe.

I didn't mean to say that in thinking carefully about the world we can separate science and logic. We use them together, though a given case may demand more of one than the other. 

A paradigm case is maybe Zeno's logical arguments as to why motion is impossible. Though the conclusions are obviously false -- because motion happens -- it's surprisingly hard to show why his logic is bad. Demonstrating through logic that Zeno is wrong led Aristotle to develop his whole system of act and potency, which has ever since affected the way we think about both theology and science.

Sure. Those paradoxes are definite mind benders, but perhaps the reason it seems there is no solution to say, the arrow paradox, is because it operates on false, faulty, incomplete or misunderstood assumptions about the physical nature of space-time. An incorrect understanding of the fundamental physics at play; a material issue; could certainly lead to false or seemingly unsolvable logical paradoxes that maybe aren’t truly irreconcilable paradoxes at all. 

Another way to approach it might be to think about math as a form of logic. It seems likely that math began for purely practical reasons in the real world. (If your tribe has 34 members, and consumes one wooly mammoth per month, how many mammoths do we need to make it to spring, assuming that as always one third of the tribe will die from disease during the winter?) But the logical development of math has led to negative, irrational, and imaginary numbers, which may have very little relevance to the material world. Math tells us that there are infinities of different sizes, which seems pretty unrelated to any mammoth problem I can think of.

Perhaps mathematics tells us what is possible, but not necessary actual in every instance. I’m no mathematician, so this is where things get fuzzy for me.

Natural theology works entirely as you say: it begins with purported truth about the world as we see it, and works from there. If people's logic seems wrong to us, then we either point to the empirical world as a rebuttal, or show that the logic is wrong. 

But our knowledge of the empirical world is often flawed. And our logic is often wrong as well. So it's an ongoing problem to use them in dialectic to improve out thinking.

Yet, you’ve drawn from logic and evidence of material world to reach that conclusion, lol. I’m fine to agree that our knowledge is often wrong, and our logic is often flawed, but we have to call on those things in order to make those very assessments of them, right? If not, what else is there? I’m not saying that a person can’t be convinced by, say, divine revelation, that a god exists, because I have no access to their experience. But, if we get to the point where we’re revering individual, subjective, unverifiable experience the same as logic and methodological naturalism, I think that’s a problem. If you tell me you have an invisible, pixie-farting unicorn in your basement, would it be wise for people to just take you at your word because, ‘there might be other ways to know things besides methodological naturalism’?