EAllusion and Sethbag
Sorry for taking so long to get back to you guys. I actually wrote a long post last night and as I hit "submit", the site asked me to sign in AGAIN and deleted everything that I had written. As I didn't feel like writing it all over again, I'm waiting until now to mostly repeat myself.
I will be responding to both of you because your points are similar. This is also probably the last long, argumentative post I'll be writing on this topic because it seems we are just going to repeat our positions at this point in the discussion.
"The universe could be uniform, and though it would be rigorously irrational for us to describe it thus, we could have "lucked out" and been right anyway, this explains the present success of science, and why things have appeared for all this time to us to have been operating on uniform principles. Nowhere is God required or necessary."
The ironic part here is that you object to me describing the atheistic universe as coming about by "pure chance" but yet to account for the uniformity of nature you postulate that we have just "lucked out". Do you see the inconsistency there?
And here is one of my main points to you Sethbag, you can object to a "chance" beginning to the universe all you want but, when speaking about the beginning of the universe, you can't help but use language that suggests randomness. Let me show you:
"We have no rational basis to assert that the universe was uncaused. For all we know, the universe's coming about was the direct result of some other physical process, however we haven't got enough information to even begin speculating what that process might have been."
Using this "for all we know" type language, the uncaused position is just as viable.
"We can't say whether it "just happened" to lead to uniformity in nature, or whether there was really no other way it could have come out. . . But what that means also is that you have no basis for claiming that the way things came about in the universe was any more or less probable than any particular other way you imagine it might have turned out. Indeed, you would have no rational basis for attempting to imagine it coming out in any other way."
Following this logic, we have no basis for saying that the universe should come about in any certain way at all, right? Not being able to ascribe any kind of cause, effect, or knowable event like you just, isn't this the definition of chance?
"For all we know, this uniform universe is the only kind of universe that can even exist, and there was no "just happened to" or "chance" or "cosmic roll of the dice" involved. We just don't know, and we have zero basis for speculating otherwise."
And, just as easily, we have no basis for speculating that it did or didn't or would or wouldn't come about in any particular way at all, right? More chance language.
Also, Sethbag, you switch what we are talking about and contradict yourself:
"For all you know there really is a God, but he's a capricious, evil God, and he's only letting us think we live in a uniform world to f*ck with our heads, and tomorrow the water will start burning our organs."
1. You make this argument because you can't get around the fact that a law-like, rational God just plain allows us to account for the uniformity of nature. Instead of attempting to give an atheistic account besides "It is because it is" you attack my assumption about the nature of God. That's not what we're talking about. Bottom line: Does a rational God allow the Christian to account for the uniformity of nature? You can't get around the fact that the answer is "yes". Wether or not you believe this God exists or that a certain attribute of God is or is not likely is besides the point, and is has nothing to do with the Christians ability to account for that uniformity
2. You just stated that we can't know that any attribute of the beginning of the universe is more likely than any other. But here you suggest that a capricious, evil God, is just as, or more likely, than a benevolent, rational God. Do you see the inconsistency there? We can't make probability distictions with the universe but you can do so with God? You are arguing against the Christian worldview, in the Christian worldview, God is benevolent, rational and law-like. Creating an evil God strawman and arguing it is not arguing the issue at hand.
Another main point of mine towards you and EAllusion is this: In order to defend your assumption that nature is uniform without God, you attempt to pass off irrationalities as possible/viable.
"You see, I do have to get up in the morning, and I do have to make some assumptions about the world. The rationality of doing this is supported by past experience. The sun really has risen every morning since I've been alive, or at least it appeared to my brain-in-the-jar to do so. I accept the world as it appears to us to be as a more useful, and more pragmatic choice than assuming the existence of an all-powerful magic old man living outside the universe somewhere who created it all just so we could sing his praises."
Here, Sethbag postulates circular reasoning as viable. You are basically saying, "I know the sun will rise tomorrow, because, in past tomorrows, the sun has always risen." This is circular reasoning and begging the question.
"Evolutionary biology and genetics don't contemplate abiogenesis. They contemplate what happened after abiogenesis occurred. However it occurred, life did in fact come about, and evolution has done a fine job explaining what happened ever since then."
First Sethbag, you contradict yourself here because in a previous post you stated that scientists have done well on their own describing how we came about without God. Yet here you say that they don't worry about abiogenesis and then make an absolute statement of faith about it happening. Second, you are basically saying, "I don't know how it came about, and I'm going to ignore the question, but I do know what happened directly after the beginning". This is rational or viable?
"Again, we might wish to know everything about how things happened, but we haven't figured that out yet. The universe doesn't "owe" us an explanation. We might know how life came about someday, and we might not. My fajitas still tasted delicious."
Naturalism-of-the-gaps passed off as rational/viable.
EAllusion said:
"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."
You admit that "It is because it is" is irrational yet you do nothing to remedy your philosphical problem. Instead, you claim that I have the exact same problem, allowing you to ignore your situation. This brings me to my final point:
You're right, my explanation is "Nature is uniform because God is uniform".
However, THIS ISN'T CIRCULAR. Why? I'm not attributing some self-repeating, begging the question attribute to matter. I'm attributing the characteristic to an all-powerful, all-knowing Creator God who is outside of the rules of that matter. I'm not making two assertions that end up back at the same point. I'm making two assertions about two different entities. It can't be circular unless I come back around to the same point. God is on a different plane than matter so anything attributed to God can't be circular. You're next objection will be, "Well then God is a cop-out explanation for EVERYTHING!". Yes! Exactly!
Of course, this isn't what I'm doing because we're talking about just one metaphysical issue, and I'm not throwing out empiricism out the window because I find it just as useful as you do. I'm merely asking how we account for our belief in that empiricism. What you can't get around is that a law-like, rational God, absolutely accounts for our belief in empiricism (a point that is completely independent of your non-belief in that God or your assertions about His attributes) while "It is because it is" passed off as possible, rational, or viable does not.