(December 11, 2015 at 7:28 pm)SteveII Wrote:(December 11, 2015 at 7:04 pm)KevinM1 Wrote: No, it doesn't, because Premise One is where the ignorance comes in.
We're dealing with an embarrassingly small sample size. Namely, one known planet that contains life in a universe with potentially many billions/trillions/numbers I don't even know the word to describe planets and moons that may harbor life. A thorough search simply hasn't actually happened for all reasonable definitions of the word 'thorough', therefore the first premise is faulty.
Science says "We don't know." To infer anything beyond that is wish casting.
First, your appeal that some other possible world might provide answers do nothing to defeat the truth of the premise. Second, what does sample size have to do with anything? Life on one planet isn't enough to draw conclusions from? Are we to subject every scientific inquiry to "well, if we had more data from other worlds...?"
If science says "we don't know" does not mean we can't draw conclusions from the lack of evidence and/or theory.
Yes, it does defeat the truth of the premise. It said a thorough search. There hasn't been a thorough search because there haven't been other examples of life to look at. We're dealing with a woefully incomplete set - carbon based life on a singular planetoid that uses DNA as a mean to replicate and evolve. And given you're talking about a designer of the universe/reality, extrapolating from a set of 1 out of billions upon billions of other possible examples is mind boggling ignorant.
No, we don't need to subject every scientific inquiry to data from other worlds. Don't be dense. What we can't do is say that because life exhibits certain qualities here, that this is always the case either because this is the only planet with life (which we don't know) or because all life in the universe exhibits DNA or something similar (which we also don't know). Or that these processes are somehow special, or somehow impossible for nature to replicate. You're operating from willful ignorance at this point.
And it's difficult to draw conclusions from a lack of evidence. In this case, a lack of evidence does not point to god. That's the classic God of the Gaps fallacy.
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