RE: How we determine facts.
January 8, 2015 at 1:44 pm
(This post was last modified: January 8, 2015 at 1:57 pm by Heywood.)
(January 8, 2015 at 12:31 pm)Stimbo Wrote: Indeed. I'm not the one drawing unsafe conclusions from startlingly insufficient data.
Take your Pandora analogy. In this scenario, we will have found intelligent life on exactly two planets - intelligence on Earth being ironically relative, of course. The only safe conclusion is that intelligent life arose on two planets, extending our range of expectation for such life to the physical extremes of both worlds combined. Thus we can anticipate that the next planet we find that fits into those parameters might conceivably have intelligent life, but we can hardly state categorically that it does, or that it must.
You're not only putting the cart before the horse, you're saying that all carts have horses behind them until proven otherwise.
I'm not stating anything categorically. I am saying each observation which is consistent with a proposition increases the probability that proposition is true. Consider this proposition:
The coin being used in the toss is two headed.
The probability of this proposition being true is X. Each time the coin is flipped and comes up heads while never having previously come up tails, X moves closer to 1.
I may never be able to examine the coin and know for sure. Lets say I am only privy to the results of completely random flips. After 10 flips which turn out all heads, I might suspect the coin is double headed. After 100 flips which turn out to be all heads, I might believe the coin is double headed. After one googleplex of flips which all turned out to be heads....I'd be certain the coin was double headed(but it is possible I could be wrong).
I might be wrong about evolutionary systems. They may not need intellects. However each time I observe one and find that it requires or required an intellect while never observing one which I know did not require an intellect, then my confidence in the proposition that all evolutionary systems require intellects grows.
I made this thread because I apply this line of thinking in many arguments I make. It is sound thinking and I wanted to use this thread to show that it is sound thinking.
(January 8, 2015 at 1:26 pm)Cato Wrote: Likelihood on the other hand more accurately describes what you are attempting to convey. And no, likelihood and probability are not synonymous. If your bag contains 100 marbles, you are much more likely to have a bag of all white marbles after pulling 99 white marbles than you were after pulling the second. In this case, likelihood is a qualitative evaluation. Again, this has no influence on the probability of your bag containing all white marbles.
Probability is an estimate of how likely something is to be true or be the case...or come to pass. I don't need to have computed a probability to know if certain results increase or decrease it. That is part of my point.
When an atheist claims there are no observations which support the existence of God, they are wrong. There are observations which support the existence of God. They do not prove categorically that God exists but they do support the proposition. Each time that observation is replicated with out being contradicted it moves the probability of the proposition closer to 1.
