(April 4, 2014 at 7:18 pm)rasetsu Wrote: That's bullshit. Besides which, if you don't have any way of determining probabilities, my first argument (here) that you are either a) making an argument from ignorance, or b) arguing on the basis of the most plausible hypothesis with a hypothesis whose plausibility is unknown, holds, and your argument fails, as neither argument can be successfully completed ('a' is fallacious, and 'b' argued using the principle of indifference yields no winner, even if accepted as an argument). [In arguing to the most plausible hypothesis, if there is no "most plausible" hypothesis, the entire argument fails as there is no reason to prefer one hypothesis to the other. If you say that there is a reason to prefer one hypothesis to the other, you've abandoned the principle of indifference. Either way, you lose.]
Besides, you gave four possibilities, so the odds of a designer are 25%, not 50%.
We started with 4 possibilities and found objective reasons to dismiss 2 of them. That left us two remaining possibilities to consider. I will concede that if Alex K is correct about the cosmological constant, I may have to heavily discount possibility D instead of outright dismissing it. That being said, nothing Alex has said leads me to believe that D would ever have a substantial probability of being true....and by substantial I mean greater than 1%. Its probably much less than that but perhaps not beyond the realm of imagination. I still toss it out, but I'm not as comfortable as I was before about tossing it out.
Your claim that this is an argument from ignorance is rubbish. An argument from ignorance is made when a proposition is said to be true because it hasn't been proven false. Please show how I argued something was true because it hasn't been proven false instead of just saying I did. I would like to see you come up with a quote where I make that error.
