NoName
Posts: 2729
Joined: Mar. 2013
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| Quote (Otangelo @ Nov. 19 2015,13:19) | | Quote (NoName @ Nov. 19 2015,12:01) | How is your argument anything other than "poof"?
How does 'God did it' a mechanism?
So, I challenge your assertion that I am misrepresenting your argument. As it stands, I see no other argument being made.
As to 'a compelling case for naturalism', not my job. You are attempting to make a case for the existence of, indeed, the necessity of, an alternative explanation.
I'm challenging that, because no satisfactory case for any explanation, any explanatory mechanism, other than naturalism has ever been made.
As such, it is at the very least, the default position.
If you want me to abandon it, you need to do much better than "I don't accept it". I, on the other hand, do not.
That's how burden of proof works.
Neither I nor the other participants on this thread showed up at your doorstep, literally or figuratively, and began asserting that your position was wrong.
You, on the other hand, showed up here and began insisting that our position is wrong.
I, and others, have pointed out that your arguments are unsupportable.
You have failed to meet the challenges raised.
So stop misrepresenting what's going on here. |
| Quote | How is your argument anything other than "poof"?
How does 'God did it' a mechanism? |
[URL=http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t1794-how-exactly-did-god-create-the-universe-and-the-world-what-process-was-involved?high
light=create]http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t1794-h....=create[/URL]
The causal power is intelligence. |
Intelligence is not a cause as such. Intelligence is a broad descriptive term for a variety of acts, poorly specified (at best). Insofar as we are talking consciousness, it can provide motivation, but it is not a cause.
| Quote | | Conscious activity. The deliberate choice of a rational agent. |
In and of themselves, these lack causal efficacy.
Consider the case of the quadriplegic, who lacks all motor ability from the neck down.
He can still engage in conscious activity. He can still make deliberate choices.
He cannot act. He has no causal efficacy by virtue of his intelligence nor by virtue of his consciousness.
| Quote | | Indeed, we have abundant experience in the present of intelligent agents generating specified information. |
'Specified information' is either redundant or meaningless.
In it usual usage (by the ID crowd), I reject it as meaningless, for it is strictly ad hoc, post hoc, unquantifiable, and useless. It has no explanatory power. Worse, it has no discriminatory power -- you have to know something is 'specified information' before you can decide that it counts as specified information. It is the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy in the extreme.
| Quote | Our experience of the causal powers of intelligent agents -- of "conscious activity" as "a cause now in operation"
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You confuse 'cause' and 'motivation'. They are distinct and different. Precision of terminology matters, very very much.
In particular, I hold that 'cause' is material agency. In all cases we can identify clearly, cause is matter interacting with matter.
| Quote | | -- provides a basis for making inferences about the best explanation of the origin of all creation. |
Unsupported assertion that amounts to begging the question.
All intelligence we know, without exception, is bodily, it is embodied.
We only know intelligence through interaction with matter.
Therefore, all we can infer about 'best explanation' is that matter is involved in both cause and effect.
Thus, we can infer that no disembodied intelligence exists, or if it does exist, it is indistinguishable from an unconscious being or a totally paralyzed person.
| Quote | | It offers an alternative causal explanation involving a mental, rather than a necessarily or exclusively material, cause for the origin of reality. |
No, it does not, because it cherry-picks the evidence out of the phenomena presented.
Consult M. Merleau-Ponty for one amongst countless discourses on the bodily grounding of intelligent being.
You are assuming your conclusion.
You need to establish the truth of your grounds before they become shared grounds for discussion.
I reject them, for the evidentiary reasons presented.
You've presented no evidence or reason to accept either disembodied intelligence nor disembodied or non-material cause.
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