Scientific method proves order cannot exist w/o intelligence

[rjh4 is back]

No I do not, I operate under no presuppositions

Sounds like a presupposition to me.

Do you want to elaborate?

Really my remark was me just being flippant. You say you operate under no presuppositions. I think you are wrong. One cannot take bare facts and interpret them to mean something without some unprovable premises to begin with. Especially when one talks of origins, all the facts that we observe are put into a framework of unproved premises. For you, you interpret all the facts in using uniformitarian/evolutionary/materialistic/naturalistic premises that you take as your unprovable presupposition and I interpret all the facts in a Biblical framework which I take as my unprovable presupposition. If you think this is an inaccurate characterization of your position, then please indicate how any fact that we see today can shed any light on the question of origins in the absence of a framework within which to interpret the fact.

You say you weigh all the evidence. Have you read everything there is to read on origins from all perspectives? I doubt it. If not, how can you say you have weighed all the evidence. In fact, I would bet in most cases that you have not even been doing the observations. So without knowing the observers (as I am sure you do not know and have not spoken with all scientists or observed how they do science), how do you come to the conclusion that there is no bias in their observations or their conclusions? When scientists come up with competing positions on a subject, how do you choose which one to go with?

Do you disagree that concepts exist or not?

I agree that concepts exist. What is your point?

I answered this in the last post, you didn't bother to respond, in fact you just dismissed most of my arguments. What's the matter, can't refute them so you just dismiss them without explanation? Intellectual dishonest at it's prime.

First, I do not think you really answered my questions. Relative to the prayer thing, you begin with:

If God manifests Himself in reality in any way, then His presence would create causation that can be measured and represented statistically as more significant than the control group.

That is a truth claim and you have not explained how the scientific method has determined the truthfulness of this claim. The testing that was done (and constitutes the rest of your argument) was not establishing the truthfulness of the correlation between the "if" and the "then". The testing was done in a manner so as to deny the consequent so that one can validly conclude that God does not manifest Himself in reality in any way. While the logic may be valid, it does not appear to be sound as the truthfulness of the initial premise has not been established. It may be that God manifests Himself in reality to such a great degree that any measurement we take is a measure of His causation.

So again I ask...How has the scientific method proved the truthfulness of the if-then statement that you use as your starting point?

Based on your previous indication that the scientific method is the appropriate method for measuring truth claims, another question that you never answered was: How does the scientific method evaluate the following truth claims?

“The scientific method is an appropriate method for measuring truth claims.”
“Any statement is either true or false.”

Secondly, I did not see anything in the rest of your post that I thought was worth refuting. If I missed some questions that you really want me to answer, feel free to ask again and I will try to answer.

Lastly, in two previous posts I said the following:

"You seem to hold to an atheistic/materialistic/evolutionary world view. 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."

Please answer the questions embedded in there and/or explain where I went wrong in characterizing your worldview.

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Let's see how can I begin? The first problem with your worldview is that you are basing everything you claim on a book written mostly by anonymous authors that dates back to at least 6 thousand years. The next problem is that the so called facts in this book have been proven false on many occasions when it comes to the various sciences. For instance such silly assertions that the sun stood still and that the Earth revolved around it. Archaeology has been unable to find physical evidence of the so called Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt or even their so called 400 hundred years of captivity in Egypt. The so called drowning of the Egyptian army in the Red Sea/Sea of reeds whichever interpretation you deem correct, we haven't found not even one chariot wheel in any of these locations. You would assume that there would be buried in these locations golden chariots, weapons, etc. so far we have found nothing, nada, zilch!

To bring this information closer to your beliefs we have not been able to find the tomb of Jesus, he is rarely mentioned by secular historians, the exact location of the crucifixion, in fact all the so called holy sites are symbolic. If we can't find any evidence to support the claims made throughout the bible, then what makes you think that the rest of it is correct and more importantly with so many errors, the word of god?

Most basic scientific assertions have been proven such as evolution by the process of natural selection, the movement of the planets around the sun, the certainty of the existence of gravity etc. etc. Sure scientist get it wrong from time to time but they are open to find other workable solutions. As opposed to theists who make claims that they themselves cannot substantiate.

You have said all this before but I am interested in finding out more about your worldview, not about how you view mine. So if you would, see the last three paragraphs in my response to Void above and answer the questions there. Thanks.