Scientific method proves order cannot exist w/o intelligence

[rjh4 is back]

Yet unless you can prove God exists (and that the God you prove exists is the Christian God), your Biblical world view is nothing more than mindless speculation, thrown together and held as truth without good reason.

Mere opinion. I could say the same about your world view. But neither statement (from you or me) is helpful in moving a conversation forward.

I could equally argue that the Flying Spaghetti Monster accounts for the uniformity of nature, laws of logic, etc, etc, or any other God I can think of.

Straw-man. If it was my position that God alone was my presupposition, then maybe you would be right…except then the only difference would seem to be that God = FSM.

But as I have said previously, my world view involves more that just God as a presupposition. It also involves God’s revelation through His creation and His Word, the Bible. While I understand you could attribute the universe to FSM’s revelation also, without some written word of the FSM, such an argument is not on the same level as what I have indicated as my world view. Furthermore, as I indicated above, even if you attributed the Bible to FSM, that would just mean that you named the God of the Bible something else, i.e., God = FSM.

It should also be pointed out to you that the Bible has an abismal track record of making truthful claims about reality. In Genesis alone, we have a creation story that reflects none of what nature tells us happened, the moon being described as a "light" (it is not one), and a global flood that le, leaves no trace whatsoever (despite it happening recently in terms of geological time), and fails to account for the diversity of animals and their locations on every land-mass on Earth.

But again, this is all based on your interpretation based on your own presuppositions.

I do not see a problem with describing the moon as a light in the night. It does light up the sky in the night to some degree. You are simply using a hypertechnical definition of “light” and applying that to the Bible and since the Bible doesn’t fit in with your hypertechnical definition, you conclude that the Bible is wrong. Maybe you should conclude that your hypertechnical definition is not appropriate here.

Relative to the global flood, again you are merely showing your bias. I think this is a classical case of not being able to see the forest because of the trees. The majority of the fossil record is evidence of the global flood. But you look at the fossil record through uniformitarian glasses and see millions of years of build up.

Regarding the diversity of animals, the Bible certainly accounts for this. I have no idea what kind of basis you would have for saying it doesn’t. Relative to their locations, the Bible doesn’t go into how that occurred, but that does not mean that it cannot be accounted for in a Biblical world view.

No, science would not discover this answer, and I still hold that science is not meant to discover such answers! Science is the observation of nature, not super-nature. If the super-natural exists, and someone develops an accurate way of observing and learning about it, then the study of the supernatural shall sit next to science. However, I no of no such methods (at least not reliable un-debunked ones) that do this.

Then I wonder why you hold the scientific method and the conclusions made by materialistic scientists relative to origins in such high regard.

Not all proofs. Certainly the three laws of logic and their proofs of validity rest on no unprovable premises, since for one of them to be untrue would be a contradiction of another law, which would lead to the "untrue" law to be true.

Could you please explain further as I am not familiar with this proof? However, from the little you said, it seems like the proof merely show that the three laws of logic work well together but it does not appear to provide any proof regarding the truthfulness of each law on its own. Therefore, it seems like each one is being taken individually as an unprovable premise even here.

All arguments that come directly off these laws are likewise confirmed and true. An example of such an argument would be "I think, therefore I am" which is the famous Descartes proof of self-existence. Using the principle that anything with an attribute exists in some form (otherwise it cannot have that attribute), further defining something that thinks as having an attribute of "thinking" and therefore of existence, to ponder about whether you actually exist is to prove that you do.

And yet even for this proof, one begins with the unprovable premise that “anything with an attribute exists in some form”. While one might say that this is self-evident, that is not a proof. Therefore, I still stand on my previous statement that all proofs to back to some unprovable premise which could be wrong by definition.

No, that is not how presuppositions works. Presuppositions are as good as assumptions (and by that, I mean not very good at all). For instance:

X - Some presupposition.
Y - Some other presupposition that contradicts some part of X (but is not necessarily equal to ¬X)

One could argue, "presupposing X, we see that Z is explained, therefore C1". However, one could also argue "presupposing Y, we see that Z is explained, therefore C2".

I do see what you are saying here, but that is not really how I am using the word “presupposition”. My use is more along the lines of equating it with “first principles”. And in this sense my previous argument regarding circularity does still seem to apply.

It is in this sense that TAG fails as well. One can presuppose Christian theism, explain the existence of morality or knowledge, and say that God exists. One can also presuppose evolutionary morality, the evolution of brain patterns, etc, etc, and explain the exact same thing, coming to no conclusion about God's existence.

One could do that, that is true. But where does presupposing evolutionary morality, the evolution of brain patterns, etc, etc, and explaining the exact same thing, coming to no conclusion about God's existence lead. As I pointed out in my previous post to Void:

“It does not seem to me that such an atheistic/materialistic/evolutionary world view can support anything other than relativistic truth since it seems that truth, morals, logic are accounted for in such a world view as being solely due to the genetics of a person and the electrical impulses in a person’s mind (possibly as a result of other causes, such as environmental ones). If this is the case, from your world view how can you say that any other person’s view or interpretation of evidence is any more accurate than yours? Wouldn’t it just mean that they have merely different electrical impulses in the brain that are no better or worse than yours? Furthermore, it would seem to follow from this that interpretations and conclusions made in the scientific method would be subject to this same relativism. This, in turn, seems to lead to the conclusion that an atheistic/materialistic/evolutionary world view cannot account for any truth claims in any objective sense, even given the scientific method. Without being able to account for any truth claims in any objective sense, I do not see how the claims of this world view relative to origins is anything more than a shot in the dark.”

If that is true and how you look at things, I do not see how you could ever criticize my view of origins in any credible manner (even from your own world view). Nor do I see how such a world view could reasonably lead one to conclude with any sort of certainty things like “We have the fossil record…we win.”