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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Solon who wrote (77842)	10/20/2003 3:53:28 PM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

Sure, if we are prepared to reject as "merely subjective" all value judgments, all intimations of a deep structure to the universe which amounts to an overall purposive plan, and any sense that we have that individual human life matters in the long run, then we may as well throw the idea of God in the waste bin. Otherwise, it does indeed deal with matters that science, per se, cannot touch, matters that are at least approachable through philosophy, but which may, indeed, involve a component of faith.

To: Solon who wrote (77842)	10/23/2003 12:17:58 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

The alternative hypothesis, that it was all started by a supernatural creator, is not only superfluous, it is also highly improbable. It falls foul of the very argument that was originally put forward in its favour. This is because any God worthy of the name must have been a being of colossal intelligence, a supermind, an entity of extremely low probability--a very improbable being indeed. In Richard Dawkins opinion and that of other people, probably including you it is a very low probability but the probability of supernatural things, or even purely physical things that are not yet understood or known about by science , are not matters that science can really determine. The agnostic response, that we don't know because we have no real evidence is a logical response to that uncertainty. Other responses, including atheism, are leaps of faith, or matters of relatively unsupported opinion. I want to end by returning to science. It is often said, mainly by the "no-contests", that although there is no positive evidence for the existence of God, nor is there evidence against his existence. So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies? The trouble with the agnostic argument is that it can be applied to anything. There is an infinite number of hypothetical beliefs we could hold which we can't positively disprove. On the whole, people don't believe in most of them, such as fairies, unicorns, dragons, Father Christmas, and so on. But on the whole they do believe in a creator God, together with whatever particular baggage goes with the religion of their parents. No it is not well applied to "anything". It only applies to those things where there is neither evidence for or evidence against. There is evidence against for example the existence of dragons on earth. And there is less logical or philosophical reasons to believe in dragons. Tim