Bloggist plagiarizes me

[_EAllusion]

EA

You and I are on the same page regarding the uniformity of nature and induction, and yes, I'm using the transcendental argument for God's existence.

"Assuming God is law-like, then saying nature is law-like as a result of this has failed to explain anything. It simply takes the brute fact of "law-likeness" and assumes it of God thus failing to explain why existence has a law-like quality to it."

An all-powerful God absolutely allows us to give a reason for why we believe nature to be uniform. A chance universe does not.

You assert this, but it does not make sense. By "chance" here you just mean not created by an intelligent entity. For all we know that "chance" universe could be a necessity (much in the same way you likely believe that God is uncreated and exists.) There's absolutely no reason that kind of universe cannot be regular. That doesn't answer the question why it is regular, sure, but you haven't exactly accounted for that in your created universe either.

Presuppositionalists have a habit of getting caught up in the voodoo of their argument with repetitions that cannot be penetrated by simple reason. Think about this for a second. You keep faulting an secular explanation of uniformity that goes, "It is because it is. Uniformity just is an unaccounted for brute fact of the world." You fault it for not explaining anything. That's true enough. You have to realize that as we explain our explanations, eventually the problem of infinite regress leaves us with unaccounted for brute facts like this. The problem that I'm pointing out here is that proposing your God doesn't change this situation. When we ask why the universe - meaning everything that exists, including God - is uniform, you still haven't accounted for it. It's not explaining the uniformity of nature; it's hiding the mystery of the uniformity of the rest of nature in the inexplicable fact of God's nature. This is worse than the secular response above, because it is doing the same thing, only attaching it unecessarily to other claims.

If God grounds the uniformity of nature, that must either be contingent on God or a necessary trait of his nature. If it is contingent, then God could simply change his willingness to make nature uniform at any moment, thus contradicting the uniformity of nature. If it is necessary, that means it could not be otherwise and therefore there is something about the ultimate nature of reality that makes law-likeness of God necessary. If that is the case, it can just as easily be the case for a godless reality that leads to the existence of 1 or more physical universes like ours. So the brute fact of law-likeness can't be used to preference God over no-God.

So far, we agree that we're both assuming that the entirety of nature is uniform based on our very limited experience.

I'm not doing that. I could be, but I'm not. I'm saying that we must act as though nature is uniform because rationality itself necessitates it. It's a pragmatic argument that is distinct from that.

You are objecting to my assumption that God is inherently law-like. Fine, but how is this different from your assumption that MATTER is inherently law-like?

It's not different with one serious exception. That's my entire point. The serious exception is that assuming the universe is law-like is more parsimonious than assuming God is law-like and created a law-like universe. If Christians like yourself are permitted to assume the existence of God having the brute-fact property of securing epistemic foundations, we are permitted to assume the existence of the epistemic foundations themselves, sans any kind of singular intelligence. Parismony favors that position. But even if parsimony wasn't on the side of either position and they were exactly equal, you coudn't use our desire to ground knoweldge to preference God-belief, so one would not be justified in believing in God on those grounds.

What you are offering is a God of the Gaps argument (i.e. argument from ignorance), but instead of offering for something more typical like eyeballs, lightning, or the existence of life, you are offering it for a fundamental problem of epistemology. Instead of saying, "You can't account for lightning, but I can. Zeus did it," you instead use the foundations of knowledge.

[_Roger Morrison]

Roger

"I get the impression that you think it impossible/improbable that a person not declaring themselves to be Christian could be correct in this discussion? That an Atheist, simply by that fact, cannot arrive at universal truth???"

I was under the impression that, to the atheist, universal truth didn't exist. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

In my opinion being a believer or a nonbeliever has little bearing on Universal truth, as belief/nonbelief is simply a state of mind that little effects reality except as in the actions of individul thinkers, or collectives thereof. What one finds frightening another finds exciting--states of mind. What one is alergic to another is imune to--physiological. Beliefs effecting one but not the other.

Personally, my belief in the traditional Judeo-Christian "God" is zilch. Does that make me an Atheist? Which term itself is meaningless except to those who give/get meaning to/from it. Be that as it may.

I depend on Universal truths as I understand and utilize them. Such truths function unprejudiced universally effecting most activities humans are involved in. ALL science is based on Universal truths as they emerge through the efforts of scientists whether they be theists or atheists.

Are you "wrong"? I'm not the one to say. If you chop wood left-handed and it burns for you...
Warm regards, Roger

[_EAllusion]

You might well argue that there's no rational basis to suppose that just because living creatures have been drinking water every day for millions and millions of years on Earth and it hasn't yet burned away all the internal organs, it won't do so tomorrow, but I'm OK taking that bet.

Unless the future resembles the past and present, that bet wouldn't make sense, right? In order for past experience to provide a basis for predicting the future, you already need to presume that the future resembles the past. No amount of past experience can do that because hidden in every inference from past experience to future outcomes is the premise: nature is uniform. You still haven't quite absorbed that. As a result you are missing the mark in your replies.

Even if we accepted that uniformity of nature implied some kind of God, which we don't accept, you still have failed to explain why this necessarily must be the Christian God. Why couldn't this God have been the Flying Spaghetti Monster? Or the Juju up the Mountain? Why isn't the version of God believed in by the Muslims the real one? Or why isn't it "God" in the sense that the Hindus believe in, with its multiple avatars or whatever it is the Hindus believe?

It get's more awesome than that. Typically, when they talk about the "Christian worldview" they don't just mean broadly a God like Christians believe in. They mean Christian theology and a usually a very specific theology at that (usually a hardcore fundamentalist version of Calvinism.) You've heard of the Christian Reconstructionists, right? Presuppositionalism is closely associated with them. This usually involves shallow critiques of other faiths to show how they "destroy knowledge."

Here's a TAG apologetics website:

http://www.reformed.org/apologetics/index.html

Go down to the essay on buying milk.

Here's how they go after opposing ideas:

When you first walk up to the grocery store, you assume that you and the store are two different things, not one, thus showing your rejection of most Eastern and New Age religions.

The odds that Cypress is including Mormonism in his "Christian worldview" that accounts for induction is pretty low, so you could ask him about that instead of wondering about the Hindus.

[_EAllusion]

You deride atheists since the uniformity observed in nature is unaccounted for (much like the creation of your God) yet you give credit for uniformity to an unexplainable force.

A lot of theist arguments boil down to this argument:

The world has property X
I define God as having the ability and desire to create a world with property X

Therefore, God explains why the world has property X

You can't explain why the world has property X
(I don't have to account for God existing with the ability and desire to create a world with property X)

Therefore, God.

Yep. That would be the original point in this thread, already nicely stated:

Again, asserting God allows you to simply bypass every single substantive question about how the universe came to be the way it is (nor does it answer the question of whether it even came to be in the first place). The philosophical idea of God has any and every capacity you can imagine, and so of course can simply be presented as an answer to every question. But it is not, in reality, an answer to any of those questions.

It’s as if you were given a multiple choice question, and you claimed that you’d gotten it right because you’d chosen EVERY option, and thus, chosen the right answer in the process. That still doesn’t tell us anything about which answer was, in fact, the right one.

The difference between you and I is simple: you are jumping to a very particular and extremely extravagant philosophical assumption on how and if the universe came to be, while I am remaining honest in admitting that we don’t know. I’m not “excluding” anything. What I’m demanding is that explanations actually get around to explaining things, instead of simply leaving the original subject a mystery and adding an even bigger and more inexplicable being (God) into the picture.

[_EAllusion]

A lot of theist arguments boil down to this argument:

The world has property X
I define God as having the ability and desire to create a world with property X

Therefore, God explains why the world has property X

You can't explain why the world has property X
(I don't have to account for God existing with the ability and desire to create a world with property X)

Therefore, God.

Atheists naturally like to respond to this kind of argument by saying something like, "Well, why don't I just say the world by its very nature results in property X and cut out the middle-man?

The theist reply usually is, "Well, that doesn't explain anything and you have no evidence if that's the case. You're just saying it is because it is. That's dumb."

The theist then walks away in triumph while the atheist does this:

[Guest]

I'm confused to what assertions I made about the scientific method because I do not remember making any.

“Science requires the uniformity of nature”

What is learned by ascribing the uniformity of nature to God is that we now have a reason for our belief that nature is uniform!

The act of ascribing the uniformity to nature to a god is arbitrary you have no reason for doing so. Thus, your reason for your belief in the uniformity in nature is not supported by anything other than you desire to ascribe it to your god. The very definition of circular reasoning.

Without God accounting for the uniformity of nature we must believe it is without a reason for doing so.

It would be folly to assume that all of nature is uniform. We have not tested all of nature for uniformity. Your desire to believe that it is stems from your desire to believe in a god which you also want to have created nature uniform. Instead of taking nature as it is, without preconceived notions, you wish to bend it to a creationist worldview.

You say that God is unexplainable

I didn’t say that. You did.

The God of the Christian worldview is unexplainable.

Even IF I was attributing the uniformity of nature to some unexplainable force (God), how is this any different from your belief that somehow the unexplainable Big Bang brought everything into existence?

You ARE attributing the uniformity of nature to an unexplainable force (god). Let’s assume that I do believe in the Big Bang (I never said that). This is exactly my point. You view the Big Bang as void of explanation as does the atheist view your god. There is no difference. If god created uniformity in nature, he did because he did. That is the same as nature is uniform, because it is.

[_Some Schmo]

Ok, challenge accepted. In a disordered universe, science wouldn't be possible because induction wouldn't be valid. There would be no universal, natural laws so any natural phenomena that occured would be an isolated, random occurance, that would have nothing to do with any subsequent natural phenomena. As such, cause and effect would be invalid, we wouldn't would have any reason to think that one event would necessarily lead to another. In fact, our entire sense experience would be unintelligible. Since there are no natural laws, and as such nature won't act the same way given the same set of conditions, I stub my toe today and it would an incredibly painful experience but tomorrow I could stub my toe and it would be the best thing I've ever felt. Since things could be so variable in a disordered universe, we wouldn't be able to make rational decisions about what to do next, because literally ANYTHING could happen next.

I got this far and had to stop to comment, so I don't know if anyone else has point this out, but...

Theology is actually the one that advocates this kind of universe. God can (apparently) perform miracles. What is a miracle other than a disruption in the natural order of things? People pray to him (presumptuously, I might add) to ask him to do this for them every day. What's the point of asking him for anything in prayer if it's not to gain special favor and make the world go in a different direction than one would reasonably expect, given the history we've observed?

It's odd that you would claim the perceived order of the universe is evidence of god when it would seem most people think god's there to disrupt that order for the benefit of mankind.

[Guest]

Mad Viking -

Induction requires the uniformity of nature. Science, in so far as it is an inductive process, does require the uniformity of nature. There's nothing wrong with Cypress making that assertion. It's taken for granted that most people capable of discussing philosophy of science understand that. What he's referring to here is a classic version of the problem of induction developed by Hume. There technical distinctions in ways of talking about the uniformity of nature, but those aren't necessary for what is being discussed here. By "nature is uniform" he isn't saying that force must equal mass times acceleration everywhere. He's saying more something like, "the future will resemble the past in a way such that one can infer from past experiences what the future will be like." The problem is more about inferring a general rule like "force equals mass times acceleration" from limited instances of observing this to be so because any future observation could blow that up. There's no real deductive proof of this and an inductive proof just begs the question. That's the problem of induction. That's not what is wrong with what he is saying.

[_Some Schmo]

What is learned by ascribing the uniformity of nature to God is that we now have a reason for our belief that nature is uniform! Without God accounting for the uniformity of nature we must believe it is without a reason for doing so. You say that God is unexplanable, and yet I am telling you a small part of what He did explain to us, that He created the universe uniform.

Even IF I was attributing the uniformity of nature to some unexplanable force (God), how is this any different from your belief that somehow the unexplanable Big Bang brought everything into existence?

Your argument is a false dichotomy (and a rather old and annoying one, at that). In your view, there are only two ways the universe becomes ordered: by chance, or god did it. If chance didn't do it, by default, it must have been god. Without god, there's no reason to believe the universe is ordered. Don't you see the limitation of this line of thinking?

Just because you don't know of something (a rational cause for the order in the universe that doesn't rely on the supernatural) doesn't mean it's not there. It just means we either haven't discovered it yet, or we never will be able to, but introducing god as the alternative only impedes the progress toward a possible discovery.

[_EAllusion]

Your argument is a false dichotomy (and a rather old and annoying one, at that). In your view, there are only two ways the universe becomes ordered: by chance, or god did it. If chance didn't do it, by default, it must have been god. Without god, there's no reason to believe the universe is ordered. Don't you see the limitation of this line of thinking?

If you follow what he is saying on the blog, Eric's big hangup seems to be that he can't understand the notion of an uncreated, yet regular universe. The idea just makes his head hurt. There's nothing incoherent or self-contradictory about such a notion, but to him, uncreated means random and random means not regular. If he "got" what is wrong with that there's a chance his entire apologetic would come crumbling down and his faith would be shaken.