The Postulation of a Designer (The nature of a \'Creator\')

by John Clinch , London, Wednesday, February 27, 2008, 13:14 (5902 days ago) @ dhw

Then you'll believe or disbelieve anything. I need a good reason to admit the possibility of miracles. I refer you to the excellent discussion in the "Teapot Agnostic" thread and my previous posting. - You condemn me for having "made up my mind", ie. adopted a closed position. But science doesn't close the mind. It is not a position but a method, to be applied to all reasonable hypotheses. I have "made up my mind" only in the sense that I have reached the position that, based on logic and on the evidence thus far yielded up by scientific discovery and what I believe will be reasonably possible throughout the rest of human history, the explanation for the origin on life will be a natural one. See my other, latest, posting in this thread for why I have done so on the grounds of logic. - Show me conclusive evidence of a miracle, of God's intervention to disturb the laws of nature - just one - and all bets are off. But, so far, all phenomena of nature have revealed themselves to be wholly natural - ALL of them - and this provides powerful inductive support for the logical deductive statement that anything of nature cannot by definition be supernatural, mystical or metaphysical. And the magisterium of science covers the whole of Nature. Science, remember, is not a subject or a body of knowledge, but a method - and the only reliable one we have to distinguish between truth claims about Nature. - Your comments on what you call "out of body experiences, ESP, spiritualism, healing etc" are revealing of a very profound difference between us. These so-called phenomena are much more than merely unproven: the scientific explanations for them have a much greater explanatory power than... than what? There has been no other advanced. The evidence that we are encountering supernatural phenomena in any human society on the planet is so piss-poor as to be risible - and Fortean Times doesn't count! The brilliant de-bunker James Randi's $1m prize for a repeatable experiment that proves telepathy actually happens has had NO takers. None. Zilch. Have you ever been to a "spiritualist" gathering? A rather ugly, pitiful affair full of gullible and often vulnerable people, or spirits genuinely paying a visit to members of the audience through a self-appointed "medium". Take your pick, but I know what is the more reasonable to believe. You've heard of "alien abduction", right? People experiencing hynopompic hullucinations when awakening from deep sleep or aliens visiting earth and kidnapping Americans to probe their genitals? Take your pick, but I know what is the more reasonable explanation. - I say that if psychological phenomena like "out of body experiences, ESP, spiritualism, healing etc" are open to scientific investigation, so are physical phenomena such as abiogenesis. There is no good reason to suppose that the reach of the scientific method, in principle, must stop anywhere in Nature. - If a person's mind is "open" to the possibility of hocus-pocus explanations, or orbiting teapots, that's their privelege, but they shouldn't expect sceptical people to agree. So, speaking personally, of ESP etc I am a sceptic because of the sheer dirth of evidence. Of anti-evolutionists, I am sceptical of the sceptics because overwhelmingly the evidence points the other way. My sceptical approach to truth claims has led me to a position on these two issues which accords with the conclusions of science. - But your approach seems to me to be incoherent. On the one hand you seem to be adopting a radical sceptical position as regards abiogenesis by doubting that humanity will EVER satisfactorily explain life (for no good reason and I'm still not sure why). However, you seem to want to suspend scepticism where it matters - to distinguish what is probably true from what is probably false. "ESP, spiritualism etc" belongs firmly in the latter category. Yes, in a limited, Humean sense, science hasn't disproved the truth of ESP etc - just as it hasn't disproved the existence of fairies at the bottom of my garden - but it has presented a perfectly good explanation for it all. That you don't want to accept these explanations is revealing. It suggests to me that you still hanker after those fairies. From that there is but a short leap to the Sky God.