1+1 can give us the result of 2 or 3.
If that's true for you, then you've become untethered from empiricism and are on a fantasy journey. You don't need to make this so difficult, and it interferes with making other progress. You have no foundation. You undermine yourself. I have chosen a different path. 1+1=2, not 3. It works.
it is equally logical to presume that 1+1=3 simply by completeing the math and examining the possibilities that remain. One entity plus another entity, combined, describes three entities. The first one, the second one, and the combined one.
1 entity plus 1 other entity = 2 entities. If you want to add the sum in with the addends as a single third entity, then you have 1 addend + 1 other addend + 1 sum = 3 entities.
Your definition fails to encompass known laws.
My definition of evidence doesn't need to address any laws. Nor need it.
The interpretation of that evidence requires valid rules of inference.
A man and a woman have a baby. 1 + 1 = ?
1 man + 1 woman = 2 people.
1 man + 1 woman+ 1 baby + 3 people.
You,
@PureX, and a few other RF posters are epistemic nihilists, but only in your musings. In daily life, you're empiricist like I am. You make decisions all day every day based in the application of reason and memory (knowledge acquired experientially in the past) to the evidence of your senses. You see the toast, you see the butter, you remember that you like buttered toast, so you apply the butter to the toast and eat and enjoy it, possibly while posting on RF that 1+1=3. Apparently, that kind of thinking serves some need that you and
@PureX have but most others don't:
"Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence."
"Solipsism is the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist."
I am confused, aren’t you granting that there is evidence for a designer above in red letters?
I am saying that nature can be explained both with and without an intelligent designer. Both hypotheses are logically possible.
parsimony is just one of many criteria used to establish the best explanation
If one has two narratives that account for what is observed, the simplest one is preferred.
a hypothesis doesn’t automatically win just because it is more parsimonious……
The alternative is not ruled out because it is less parsimonious but will not be the leading hypothesis until it describes the evidence better, which in this case means some new evidence better explained supernaturally than naturally.
The claim that I am making is that if there is conclusive evidence against a hypothesis “A” and there is no conclusive evidence against Hypothesis “B” one should prefer “B” over “A” even if A is more parsimonious...........agree?
If there is conclusive evidence against A, it is ruled out and no longer considered. Remember, the preferred hypothesis is the one that accounts for all relevant observation with the fewest number of suppositions or elements.
the way I see it, Fine Tunning is consistent and predicted by both an omnipotent deity and a non-omnipotent deity
Then make the counterargument that refutes my argument that the fine-tuning argument implies a god that must discover what those fine-tuning parameters are, meaning that it is not their author, merely their discoverer.
The most relevant weakness against the multiverse is that we have a conclusive argument against this hypothesis.
You went on to suggest Boltzmann brains. That's not a conclusive argument against anything. It's just another of the ways of suggesting that reality is not what it appears to be. Others include a matrix, a brain in a vat, and last Thursdayism. None of those invalidate an empirical epistemology even if correct. Allow me to illustrate:
Suppose you discovered for an indisputable fact that the world outside was an illusion. Nevertheless, you still see your hand and finger and a flame on a candle. It's not real, you think, and stick your imagined finger into the imagined flame, it burns and hurts, you imagine that you quickly withdrew you imagined finger from that imagined flame, and the pain ends. Are you going to do it again, or just go back to the old rules that always worked before and still work now?
So if we live in a multiverse, while I grant that eventually some finely tuned universes will emerge by chance alone………….for every finely tuned universe there would be trillions upon trillions of “simple universes” with persons with mental illness who live under the illusion that we live in a complex finely tuned universe.
No. Persons with mental illnesses only exist in universes that can support their evolution. Those
failure to launch universes aren't tuned properly to permit that.
In other words, if you observe yourself winning the lottery 100 times in a row and you are not open to the possibility that maybe someone is controlling the lottery in your favor (design),,,,,,,,,,,chances say that you are in a hallucination or a dream ………………
OK. I actually do feel like I hit the lottery. I was born into a universe where my birth was possible, at a time and place that was especially fortuitous and to a good family in a country where I had opportunity and the gifts and privileges needed to live an easy and satisfying life.
How lucky is it to be born in mid-20th century America to kind and responsible parents that nurtured my development and encouraged me to be a good person and get a good education that was available for the taking, who promoted art and reading, and not a victim of poverty or discrimination. That's a lot of good luck. Was that a divine plan? Maybe. Maybe just good luck.
But here's what don't do: invent explanations. Well, I invent them, but I don't choose one.
My universe is the same as yours. The difference between the worlds we live in psychologically relates to the fact that I haven't made such a guess, whereas you have, so now your world has a god and magic in it, and these things have shaped the rest of your thinking differently from mine.
Even if we grant that life arose by natural mechanism…………..it would be very likely that life arose as a consequence of a very specific combination of molecules in very specific environment, in the correct time and place and under very specific conditions
That's not the hypothesis. It used to be. The original model for abiogenesis involved a lucky lightning strike into a luck combination of ingredients. Today, we understand life in terms of thermodynamics. From
A New Physics Theory of Life :
"Why does life exist? Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill."
"when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.
“You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,” England said."
Does that description involving heat baths sound familiar? It's also why randomly moving air molecules organize into tornadoes and hurricanes, and why they are stronger and more frequent as the heat bath warms. These are all what is called dissipative structures, life being understood as a more complex one.
you already decided that naturalism it is difficult to reach at sound conclusions if the process of thinking and evaluating evidence is being guided by this unfalsifiable world view.
I don't know what that means.
Let’s say that the hypothesis “an intelligent designer is responsible for the fine tuning of the universe “ happens to be the correct answer……………..how would you know?
Only if and when compelling evidence for it arises. Otherwise, never.
It seems that your mind has a process of filtration that rejects ID by default.
It's called critical thinking, and it doesn't reject ID. I don't know how to get you to understand that. I've told you repeatedly that I can't and don't rule that out. I also won't take the leap of faith you have and conclude that it is correct.
And you are looking for a natural mechanism that can cause abiogenesis that you already decided exists………….in what way am I being more naïve than you?
You still don't understand my position. If you can't see what I'm telling you, then I would suggest you stop presuming that you know what I believe.
This seems to be the most difficult concept for many people - understanding the distinction between I don't embrace an idea because I don't know that it is correct, and I declare the idea incorrect - sometimes written the difference between not knowing and knowing not. Until and unless you (and dozens of others here on RF) can comprehend that, you have no chance of understanding the agnostic atheist's actual position.
