(January 11, 2010 at 12:03 pm)rjh4 Wrote:Origins is a scientific question, hence why materialism is used to answer it (as I stated above). Of course, science has no way of knowing whether the universe didn't just come into being last Thursday and that everything was crafted to look older by some kind of extra-dimensional being. Since the possibility that this happened isn't 0, it could be how it all happened.(January 9, 2010 at 11:02 am)Tiberius Wrote: Hence why I reject materialism, on the basis that although it's very nice to believe that physical matter and energy is all there is, you can't prove it either way. Materialism is useful, however, for science, since science by definition deals with the material world.
Adrian, in past discussions with you on origins it certainly seems to me like you were using materialistic presuppositions as a basis for your argumentation and yet you say here that you reject materialism. So what areas of your thinking does this rejection of materialism affect and how does it affect this area? Or do you merely reject materialism on an intellectual agnostic basis, effectively living you life as a materialist? (I am not trying to be argumentative here. I am just curious as your quote above seems (but is not necessarily) inconsistent.)
However, if the material evidence tells a certain story, and there isn't any other reason to disbelieve it, science will follow that evidence, and so will a lot of people rationally.
I reject materialism on the level that materialism is defined as "energy and matter is all that exists". I can't make that statement and be intellectually honest, since I do not have this knowledge. However, that isn't to say that making an assumption of materialism in certain subjects (science specifically) doesn't lead to good results, because it very clearly does. The material world does exist, and it seems to act very well on it's own, but "seeming" and "being" are very different things.
Unless there is a good reason to believe that something other than material happened, the material evidence is usually the best way to go. The material evidence says that the universe began 13.7 billion years ago. It *could* have begun 6,000 years ago, with various supernatural occurrences making it look like it began 13.7 billion years earlier, but there isn't any good reason to believe such a thing.
So I don't ask for "evidence" that God exists, I ask for "reasoning". Logical arguments would convince me that a God existed, but no such arguments have been convincing as of yet. All of them either rely on presuppositions that cannot be verified themselves, or faulty logic and fallacies.
