deadman_932
Posts: 3094
Joined: May 2006
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| Quote (FloydLee @ Nov. 04 2009,10:51) | | Quote | | Even the points you try to raise "how earth is precisely positioned...for life, but also to allow us to find answers to the greatest mysteries of the universe" relies on argumentam ad ignorantiam to make a claim that is preassumed and subjective. |
1. "preassumed."
Refuted. No evidence of any pre-assumptions in the book itself. Their hypothesis starts with observations and data, not assumptions. |
FALSE You have not demonstrated any such thing by pointing to Gonzalez' book and claiming there is no presumptive conclusion present from the beginning of Gonzalez' career.
Long before Gonzalez published "The Priviliged Planet" he was using the same arguments to conclude "Goddidit" http://www.reasons.org/resourc....niverse It is reasonable to assume that he knew of his own publications, the conclusions in those publications such as "Facts for Faith" magazine and even if he didn't state so in "The Priviliged Planet," that he had arrived at the "Fine Tuning" argument as a result of his culturally-derived preconceptions which led to his "conclusions" :
| Quote | | "Why would the Creator make the universe so measurable? What’s the point of allowing humans to measure the characteristics of the universe? To those who hold a Christian worldview, the answer is clear. In fact, the Bible explicitly states it: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse (Romans 1:19-20).” -- Guillermo Gonzales, writing in "Facts for Faith" magazine, long before publishing "Priviliged Planet" |
| Quote (FloydLee @ Nov. 04 2009,10:51) | 2. "subjective."
Refuted. Fine tuning cosmo and planetary situations have been empirically observed. Many many times, btw.
They're just going off what has been observed already, and were themselves careful to distinguish between well-observed phenomena, less-well-observed, reasonably theoretical, and speculative. |
FALSE The issue is not whether "fine tuning" parameters merely exist, the issue is what conclusions Gonzalez arrives at while ignoring the fallacies, illogic and his own willingness to discard equally-viable conclusions in favor of his culturally-derived preconceptions.
In an earlier post, I mentioned several cosmological arguments that are equally-viable as Gonzalez' preferred "Goddidit" : Multiverse, Holographic, concious Universe...and there are others, such as a Time-Reversal proposal that Gonzalez doesn't even touch on before (apparently) rejecting as improbable... in regard to which, you might want to read Eliot Sober's criticism of Gonzalez-type claims:
| Quote | " if the hypothesis of mindless chance processes entailed that it is impossible that organisms exhibit delicate adaptations, then a quick application of modus tollens would sweep that hypothesis from the field. However much design theorists might yearn for an argument of this kind, there apparently are none to be had...
If modus tollens cannot be pressed into service, perhaps there is a probabilistic version of modus tollens that can achieve the same result. Is there a Law of Improbability that begins with the premiss that Pr(O * H) is very low and concludes that H should be rejected? There is no such principle (Royall 1997, ch. 3). The fact that you won the lottery does not, by itself, show that there is something wrong with the conjunctive hypothesis that the lottery was fair and a million tickets were sold and you bought just one ticket. And if we randomly drop a very sharp pin onto a line that is 1000 miles long, the probability of its landing where it does is negligible; however, that outcome does not falsify the hypothesis that the pin was dropped at random.
The fact that there is no probabilistic modus tollens has great significance for understanding the design argument. The logic of this problem is essentially comparative. To evaluate the design hypothesis, we must know what it predicts and compare this with the predictions made by other hypotheses. The design hypothesis cannot win by default. The fact that an observation would be very improbable if it arose by chance is not enough to refute the chance hypothesis. One must show that the design hypothesis confers on the observation a higher probability, and even then the conclusion will merely be that the observation favors the design hypothesis."
Eliot Sober "the Design Argument" http://74.125.155.132/scholar....n |
| Quote (FloydLee @ Nov. 04 2009,10:51) | 3. "argumentum ad ignorantium."
Hardly. We humans ARE astonishingly well-placed for the huge astronomical discoveries we make. That's not ignorance, that's what we know scientifically. Taken together with all the other fine tuning facts, one could rationally infer design instead of accident.
Check out this one little co-inky-dink, one of many:
| Quote | "Thanks to its large, angular size, the Moon occults many stars along its path. In this way, the Earth-Moon system acts like a giant telescope, allowing astronomers to resolve objects normally to small or close together to measure from the ground.
A slow angular speed of a moon across its host planet's sky, like our own, allows for more detailed measurements. This method works best with a large moon without an atmosphere--which produces a crisp, knife-edge sharp edge on its limb--orbiting far from its host planet (but not too far, because the smaller a moon is, the fewer stars it occults over a month.) [
---pg 110 |
No wonder Earth is called the privileged planet!!
FloydLee |
FALSE The argumentum ad ignoratiam aspect of the fine tuning argument for deistic design doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. Here are some arguments from ignorance (and subjectivity) examples which you have never addressed:
| Quote (JohnW @ Nov. 02 2009,16:22) | | Quote (FloydLee @ Nov. 02 2009,14:07) | And in their book, Gonzalez and Richards specifically write about how to Falsify their ID hypothesis.
| Quote | | "The most decisive way to falsify our argument as a whole would be to find a distant and very different environment, which, while quite hostile to life, nevertheless offers a superior platform for making as many diverse scientific discoveries as does our local environment. |
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I went through this earlier, but here it is again for you to ignore a second time:
1. How do we define "diverse scientific discoveries"?
2. Can we count them? If so, show us your list.
3. How do we define "distant and very different environment"?
4. How do we count the "diverse scientific discoveries" we haven't made, but which could be made elsewhere? |
Here are a larger number of points that were made 6 days ago regarding the 'fine tuning = supernatural deistic design" that you also failed to address:
| Quote | The "fine-tuning" argument or Strong Anthropic Principle (SAP) has some major problems when applied to "inferences for god". It also contains a large number of fallacies that disqualify it as a valid scientific hypothesis -- especially one that provides evidential support for deities (which is what you're supposed to be supporting, Flody.)
1.) Tautology. These anthropocentric arguments always come down to statements that at least imply circular conclusions : " My god exists, therefore whatever we find proves it --heads I win, tails you lose"
If we manage to explore our universe and find no life anywhere, what should we conclude? That this is evidence for a loving God who crafted life on Earth despite the fact that this universe is otherwise very inhospitable to life? What if we find life everywhere we go? Gonzales would simply then conclude that this same god created a universe where life can thrive, and therefore must also exist! -- "Heads I win, tails you lose."
They ignore the obvious illogic of their claims...Would it surprise you to find yourself living in a universe that cannot sustain life? I know it would surprise me. Since we are, in fact, alive, it should come as no surprise at all to us that we inhabit a universe that can sustain life, but what does a “life-sustaining universe" mean? Does it mean a “universe identical to this one-- the universe is fine-tuned to be just like this universe?" That's a neat tautology. All of us are fundamentally ignorant about the parameter space in which something we would be willing to call life can occur. Thus Gonzales is also guilty of Argumentam ad Ignorantiam
Gonzales et al. simply have assumed their conclusions BEFORE evidence is in, and more importantly, according to what actual choices are available, whatever evidence is found, it will be claimed by Gonzales or some other creonut to tautologically provide support for the conclusions they have already arrived at.
Importantly, also, what the fine-tuning argument for God also does not do is to show that life is in any way favored, supported, or designed for anything except to die out as the universe slowly runs out of energy.
People, scientists and theists, often argue as if fine-tuning did show a concern for life, when life will in fact still face all of the problems that everything in this universe faces. One would have to show that life is some sort of "goal" or "preferred outcome" even to suggest that a single universe with life is "unusual" in any way. Creationists/IDists only assume that life is a meaningful outcome, while we have no excuse to suppose that it is meaningful in a cosmic sense (as opposed to our own sense), however likely or unlikely it may be. The fact of the matter is, we have a sample set of *ONE* universe that happens to contain life so far as we know. We have *ONE* planet on which life exists so far as we know.
We have NO IDEA how many other possible universes there are--multiverses have been mentioned here, but I also like Steinhardt and Turok's "cyclic" model, which is at least theoretically testable via gravity waves. ( see: P.J. Steinhardt and N. Turok: "Why the Cosmological Constant is Small and Positive." Science.312, May 26, 2006. ) We DO know that 180 or so likely planets have been tentatively discovered, though. But NO ONE knows what the "odds " really are. It has also been demonstrated repeatedly that life on Earth tends to evolve to fit the environment available. [i]It has never been demonstrated that the parameters for the environment were put in place first BY A SUPERNATURAL GOD [i/] (not an alien, Flody!!) with the preconceived "idea" or "plan" that life would exist there later.
2.) Post hoc ergo propter hoc, also known as "coincidental correlation" or "false cause," is a fallacy which assumes or asserts that if one event happens ( the development of life) *after* another ( the emergence of the Universe and its "fine tuning" ), then the one must be causally linked to the other.
An analogy: Imagine a 10,000-person "russian roulette" game, with pairs of people facing off in a "round-robin"-style competition. Winners are paired randomly against winners until there are only two left. Should the last person standing alive conclude that he or she is favored by God? Because "fine-tuning" seems to exist, can I reasonably conclude that life is causally linked to it? Or that chance favored it? Or that God caused it to be so?
3.) God of the Gaps -- see :"Is There Anything Wrong with 'God of the Gaps' Reasoning?" (International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 52: 129-142, 2002). A place you can plug God in, if you so wish, is before the Big Bang. You can also claim that this is where God did his "fine-tuning" , but, fundamentally, the god of the gaps argument is the logical fallacy of the argumentum ad ignorantium : basing a conclusion on a lack of information or understanding. The mere fact that we do cannot explain something is not a valid justification to rely upon something else, even more mysterious, as an "explanation." Such a tactic is also risky here because, as science progresses the "gaps" in scientific explanation grow smaller.
The theist who uses this to rationalize their beliefs may find that, at some point, there simply isn't enough room for their god anymore. In the past, it was common to point to lightning, thunder, earthquakes or other mysteries in nature and attribute them to some god. Unfortunately, even today many people think of God primarily as the explanation for things they don't understand. To define God in those terms, especially when Christians base their apologetics on the existence of such gaps, is a major error.
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More importantly, Gonzales et al. are not distinguishing what YOU claim to be supporting, Flody. Read their statements and they have no way of distinguishing between "deities" and "extraterrestrials" capable of seeding a planet. This, along with the other fallacies and logical errors cited by myself and others, disqualify it as an actual scientific hypothesis that could provide support for Gods -- such as what YOU are nominally SUPPOSED to be trying to support, Flody.
If Gonzales can't show how to distinguish Gods and aliens, then how does this support your view, Flody? How does it make it a scientific program to research supernatural deities?
Given all the logical lapses, holes, and sheer ridiculous fallacy-mongering of Gonzales, it is perfectly obvious to point out that his nattering does NOT constitute a valid scientific research program FOR THE INVESTIGATION OF SUPERNATURAL DEITIES (which is what you were supposed to be showing, stupid).
Look back at all my posts on this matter -- I was asking you to show a valid scientific research program for the investigation of deities, and you post up crap , which --even if evidence is actually found for life being artificial on this planet -- cannot distinguish between "intelligent aliens from the planet Glurrgh " and "supernatural deities." You haven't presented any research program for the investigation of supernatural deities at all, dumb-ass |
Those can be compacted down to this set:
1.) Tautology.
2.) Argumentam ad Ignorantiam
3.) Assumed conclusions
4.) Post hoc ergo propter hoc
5.) God of the Gaps
6.) Improper use of "falsification"
7.) Purely subjective criteria for "falsification"
8.) Gonzalez' claims don't constitute a valid scientific research program FOR THE INVESTIGATION OF SUPERNATURAL DEITIES and cannot distinguish Gods from "Aliens from the planet Glurrgh"
Again, Floaty, I'll remind you that the large post I made was given to you SIX DAYS ago, and that you stated clearly that you were going to address the concerns therein.
So far, you have failed to do so, just as Gonzalez ignores these issues which are obviously not original to me -- they've been around a long, long time. But Gonzalez ignores them in favor of his preconceived, ad ignorantiam subjective conclusions
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AtBC Award for Thoroughness in the Face of Creationism
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