Evidence for a Creator God Who Likes Creating Things

[Subduction Zone]

Wouldn't it be an argument from incredulity instead? But it arises out of ignorance since the objects mentioned are clearly things that most people understand very little about.

Incredulity, ignorance, what's the difference? I don't think that there is any.

 

[Dan From Smithville]

Incredulity, ignorance, what's the difference? I don't think that there is any.

It probably matters most that a fallacy is being used in support of a conclusion. A conclusion that would therefore fail as a result.

It is true that both involve ignorance. Whether it is ignorance of understanding or of perceived lack of contrary evidence may just be a subtle distinction.

 

[Subduction Zone]

It probably matters most that a fallacy is being used in support of a conclusion. A conclusion that would therefore fail as a result.

It is true that both involve ignorance. Whether it is ignorance of understanding or of perceived lack of contrary evidence may just be a subtle distinction.

I don't know what you are talking about.

At any rate I do believe that both apply. On a more serious note both the people that he later referred to were Christians that accepted the fact of evolution. And like Newton when they came across something that they did not understand fully that was when they appealed to God. It is hard to know how serious they were since those quotes about them appear to be taken out of context.

 

[Dan From Smithville]

I don't know what you are talking about.

At any rate I do believe that both apply. On a more serious note both the people that he later referred to were Christians that accepted the fact of evolution. And like Newton when they came across something that they did not understand fully that was when they appealed to God. It is hard to know how serious they were since those quotes about them appear to be taken out of context.

Either way a fallacy is being used, sums up what I am saying.

Out of context quotes being used to defend a anti-science position? Why that never happens. Well...almost never. Well...sometimes. Well...all the time.

 

[ratiocinator]

I say it's evidence for a loving creator, that's all.

That's just a baseless assertion.

An analogy:
if the road is wet... this counts as evidence for rain to have caused the wet road.
There is no logical error involved when I claim so. Even if the wet road might be wet due to other reasons...

You are simply wrong, both about logic and the nature of evidence. Affirming the consequent is formal logical fallacy. Evidentially, if the only evidence you have is consistent with many other hypotheses, then it's worthless.

 

[thomas t]

But you don't even believe that life can adapt to the environment, because
1. you are a creationist who doesn't accept evolution
and
2. your OP says variety in life is the result of your god creating things and not the result of blind biological processes.

I do believe that life can adapt to an environment.
With regard to #2: the one thing does not necessarily negate the other. Both can work in conjunction with each other.

Sure, rain is a likely candidate. But not the only plausible one.

Yeah, but that does not exclude it from being evidence. It's a likely candidate. And this is exactly how evidence works.

In law testimonials count as evidence, too.
Statements by witnesses made in court count as evidence.
Evidence, and not proof. The statements could also point to another direction theoretically.

I hope that your own example shows how a mere factoid of "things are how they are", is only evidence of how they are and NOT how they came to be such.

but I didn't just say that things are how they are.
I said there is a variety of landscapes and this is evidence for a variety loving creator, as I see it.
I talked about evidence.
In law, a statement by a witness is more than just evidence that a witness made a statement.
It's more than pointing out that a person just said something just to say something.
The court tries to establish HOW these statements came into being.
Even if other interpretations of one single statements are still possible... it counts as evidence.


The unicorns are not a good explanation because you need to many assumptions that would be involved in such an explanation. Unicorns are not parsimonious when you need to resort to them.

A variety loving God is parsimonious as an explanation for the variety on earth, I think.

 

[thomas t]

That's just a baseless assertion.

It's evidence, I think.

You are simply wrong, both about logic and the nature of evidence. Affirming the consequent is formal logical fallacy. Evidentially, if the only evidence you have is consistent with many other hypotheses, then it's worthless.

No, I'm not affirming the consequent.
Quoting your source....
Affirming the consequent is the action of taking a true statement (P leads to Q) and invalidly concluding its converse (Q leads to P).

and I'm not doing this. I'm not concluding here.
I say Q is evidence for P. That's all.

Even if P points to other hyptheses, it's not worthless, in my opinion.
It's like in court.
A statement done by a witness counts as evidence EVEN IF it may support other hypotheses, too. This is how I understand evidence.
If P poits to other directions, too, we need more information, that's all.

 

[ratiocinator]

Even if P points to other hyptheses, it's not worthless, in my opinion.
It's like in court.
A statement done by a witness counts as evidence EVEN IF it may support other hypotheses, too. This is how I understand evidence.
If P poits to other directions, too, we need more information, that's all.

The problem is that we have very good explanations for the variety we observe that don't involve a creator at all, and no evidence at all that there is a creator.

At best, we could say that if there is a creator that paid particular attention to what happened on earth, then we can conclude that it had some reason (it likes variety is not the only possibility) to create variety on earth (or, at least, what we regard as variety).

It's not evidence that a creator exists. Take away variety and there is no less reason to think there is a creator. The problem with the idea of a creator is that it can explain anything at all. In other words, it makes no testable predictions, which means that there cannot possibly be any evidence (in the scientific sense, at least) for or against it. You'd have to have a more detailed hypothesis that did make predictions (that we wouldn't otherwise expect) in order to have evidence that it exists.

 

[thomas t]

The problem is that we have very good explanations for the variety we observe that don't involve a creator at all, and no evidence at all that there is a creator.

in my opinion, these are not parsimonious.

The problem with the idea of a creator is that it can explain anything at all. In other words, it makes no testable predictions, which means that there cannot possibly be any evidence (in the scientific sense, at least) for or against it. You'd have to have a more detailed hypothesis that did make predictions (that we wouldn't otherwise expect) in order to have evidence that it exists.

I did not make a case for just a mere idea of a creator. I was precise in what I said.
I said a creator who loves his art.
the prediction being: the variety on earth, as I said.

 

[ratiocinator]

in my opinion, these are not parsimonious.

What exactly do you think is the problem?

I did not make a case for just a mere idea of a creator. I was precise in what I said.
I said a creator who loves his art.

If you haven't established that a creator exists, there's little point in trying to be exact about it. As I said in the part of my post you ignored: at best, we could say that if there is a creator that paid particular attention to what happened on earth, then we can conclude that it had some reason (it likes variety is not the only possibility) to create variety on earth (or, at least, what we regard as variety).

the prediction being: the variety on earth, as I said.

That's not a prediction. We already have that as a raw fact that is consistent with other explanations. The way evidence works is that your hypothesis has to tell us something about the world we haven't tested yet, or at least something that we could observe that would falsify it. If it's unfalsifiable, it's worthless daydreaming.

 

[Spirit of Light]

I have never met or heard of a person that is as or near the purity of God. As far as I know, all have sinned and come short of God.

Prophet's in the past made it, today it is very difficult to attained it yes

 

[HonestJoe]

In my opinion there exists great evidence for a Creator God who loves creating things:
the great variety of life and landscapes on earth.
Landscapes keep changing and life can be found in all its forms.

Why couldn't that be evidence for the magical Fairy Folk who love changing things? There are literally an infinite list of potential root causes we could come up for changing landscapes and the range of life on Earth. The existence of those things isn't be evidence for any one of those possible explanations alone.

Also, when you consider the scope of the universe as a whole, there appears to be an infinitesimally tiny amount of changing landscapes or life - the vast majority of the universe is essentially empty. I see that as evidence against the idea of anything that can and wants to create lots of different things.

 

[Kenny]

You just find it all incredible and difficult to imagine a reason other than what you believe and want to be the reason.

You mean you want me to conform to be a cookie cutter thinker?

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

That is fascinating, I will look it up further.

I would explain my viewpoint another way:

Solipsism is the most logical philosophical conclusion as to what I can say about reality:

"Solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one's mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind. "

This makes sense because everything that we perceive is recognized by our senses, and if our senses are deceived by illusion then we will still think the illusion is real. We experience this point when dreaming, as in the dream world our senses recognize everything to be true.

But one cannot operate in the real world under solipsism because it is something that is unprovable and unfalsifiable, therefore assuming that our world might or might not be an illusion is pointless and impractical. We need evidence to support the idea that the world is an illusion.

So what I do is operate in the world that my senses are detecting and operating under. I know what my senses are detecting and within that world I follow certain rules as to detecting what is true.

Even though solipsism makes philosophical sense, I have no empirical reason to believe that I am operating under a world that is an illusion, therefore I consider the world I operate in as real, that the people I encounter are real, and that we do actually have real knowledge of the world. But our knowledge adapts to new information that we receive and our logic adapts accordingly as well. This is because we are more ignorant than knowledgeable about the world as we don't have the means to examine everything in the universe and whatever is beyond that.

Okay, we have left metaphysics and entered epistemology.

We both accept that we in general take our experiences for granted. So what follows next, is as old as philosophy. Namely if there within taking our experiences for granted is one methodology, that works with correct outcomes for all experiences.
In other words in regards to evidence, if it has a limit?

And it does have that. It only works on objective experiences. https://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/0_0_0/whatisscience_12
Then we are left with if we can combine rationality with evidence and together get a methodology, that works with correct outcomes for all experiences.
And we can't. We hit Agrippa's Trilemma Münchhausen trilemma - Wikipedia
For pure logic as per the law of non-contradiction it also has a limit. It doesn't work on everything, it only works on something at a given time/space and in a given sense. I.e. if we both at different times/spaces can act in different senses, then it is not a contradiction. In terms of context, there is one truth for a given context, but 2 humans are 2 different contexts, if they can in practice act differently in regards to behavior.

That is what I have learned as a skeptic. Reason, logic, truth, proof, evidence and all those other methodology are all limited and only applies in a limited sense. Nobody have been able to totally avoid this:
"Of all things the measure is Man, of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not". Protagoras of Abdera.
It is limited because a part of everything is in practice objective, but only a part is objective. In short for the meaning of life, the universe and all the rest, 42 and any other measure work, because all measures of the meaning, what matters and so one are subjective.

Regards
Mikkel

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

With regard to #2: the one thing does not necessarily negate the other. Both can work in conjunction with each other.

How would that work?
How would one recognize such?

Yeah, but that does not exclude it from being evidence. It's a likely candidate. And this is exactly how evidence works.

Sure, but a piece of evidence that supports a great multitude of things, isn't exactly very helpful, now is it?

So what you want is the hypothesis to make predictions that other hypothesis don't.
That the road will be wet, is a prediction of literally everything that can make things wet.

In fact, the question is "why is the road wet?". That the road is wet, is a given.
It's the very thing you're trying to explain. So no, the road being wet is not evidence of how it got wet. Only that it got wet. To answer the how question, you need additional data.

In law testimonials count as evidence, too.

Which is more a flaw then a feature. However, a single peace of empirical evidence, will instantly overrule the mere word of 200 people.

Go take a look at the innocence project. They overturn cases with DNA evidence.
Literally every one of them, were all originally put in jail based on incorrect testimonials.
People make mistakes. People lie. People misremember. etc.
In short: people are wrong all the time.

In any case, we're talking about science here, not law. In science, "testimonials" are the lowest form of evidence. To the point of it not being evidence at all. You need to actually demonstrate your ideas, not invent them out of thin air and declare them correct.

but I didn't just say that things are how they are.

I was not talking about you, I was talking about the factoid of the road being wet only being evidence of the fact that the road is wet / get wet in some way.

It is, by itself, NOT evidence of how it got wet.
All it tells you is that it got wet in some way.

I said there is a variety of landscapes and this is evidence for a variety loving creator, as I see it.

In the same way, a wet road is evidence of extra-dimensional aliens peeing water on the road.

I talked about evidence.
In law, a statement by a witness is more than just evidence that a witness made a statement.

We're not talking about law. We're talking about science.
Testimony is not evidence in science.
"because I say so" is not a proper justification of your claims in science.

The unicorns are not a good explanation because you need to many assumptions that would be involved in such an explanation. Unicorns are not parsimonious when you need to resort to them.

Exactly.
The same goes for god(s).

See? You get it. At least, when it comes to any other topic then your god.
Now realize that the unicorns have the exact same evidence going for them as gods do.

A variety loving God is parsimonious as an explanation for the variety on earth, I think.

It really, really, really isn't.
Your "god" finds himself on the same shelve as extra-dimensional unicorns or any other mythical beast or ghost or spirit of poltergeist or what-have-you.

Any explanation involving undemonstrable, supernatural, magical, undefendable, unsupportable, unfalsifiable entities can by definition never by parsimonious.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

Two?

Ow ffs.......

And apparently "testimony" is valid evidence. Yikes!
I guess this means that Einstein was wrong then?

 

[Dan From Smithville]

You mean you want me to conform to be a cookie cutter thinker?

There is nothing for me to want. You already do that. I would recommend the application of critical thinking. You can do that and keep your faith.

 

[Dan From Smithville]

Prophet's in the past made it, today it is very difficult to attained it yes

I have no idea what spiritual state historical prophets achieved. Nothing that can be tested to support your claim.

 

[Dan From Smithville]

It's evidence, I think.

No, I'm not affirming the consequent.
Quoting your source....
Affirming the consequent is the action of taking a true statement (P leads to Q) and invalidly concluding its converse (Q leads to P).

and I'm not doing this. I'm not concluding here.
I say Q is evidence for P. That's all.

Even if P points to other hyptheses, it's not worthless, in my opinion.
It's like in court.
A statement done by a witness counts as evidence EVEN IF it may support other hypotheses, too. This is how I understand evidence.
If P poits to other directions, too, we need more information, that's all.

You do not seem to understand. If evidence can support numerous hypotheses, than it is worthless as evidence to support your favorite.

 

[Dan From Smithville]

It's evidence, I think.

No, I'm not affirming the consequent.
Quoting your source....
Affirming the consequent is the action of taking a true statement (P leads to Q) and invalidly concluding its converse (Q leads to P).

and I'm not doing this. I'm not concluding here.
I say Q is evidence for P. That's all.

Even if P points to other hyptheses, it's not worthless, in my opinion.
It's like in court.
A statement done by a witness counts as evidence EVEN IF it may support other hypotheses, too. This is how I understand evidence.
If P poits to other directions, too, we need more information, that's all.

If the witness says the crime was committed by a man, there are roughly 3.5 billion of those. You gonna arrest em all?