Thanks for this reasoned, open minded, and maybe mind-opening post, Kathy.
Though I think many people just have no interest in or patience with this aspect of human experience. That is also their prerogative, and applies to almost everyone, in one way or another, as we all have limits to our interests. Personally, I can appreciate that sort of position: "It just makes no sense to me, there is more than enough for me to be excited about in science", better than a position in which people seem to assert the *superiority* of their own naturally limited interests, with their naturally impoverished views into that which does not much interest them.
I take this to apply to ontological engineering, in many ways. For example: the view that only what a computer can do has a place in ontological engineering seems to me to be similarly viewpoint-restricted.
“The
secret of success lies in the ability to see things from the other fellow’s angle
as well as from your own.” – Henry Ford
Wm
On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 8:43 AM, Kathryn Blackmond Laskey <klaskey@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Pat,
1. I never said parsimony wasn't useful. As a heuristic, it is extremely useful. I said parsimony does not constitute scientific disproof.
2. As William Frank pointed out earlier in this thread, there are many people, including highly respected theologians, who do not conceive of "God" as a "being" of any kind, supreme or otherwise.
3. "enough of a stretch for me..." You are perfectly entitled to apply Occam's razor and rule out the hypothesis of a God who created the universe. But ruling it out by Occam does not constitute scientific disproof, and others are entitled to disagree.
4. That said, I agree that arguments for or against God don't belong as part of science. To be scientific, one would need to (1) define clearly what one meant by God, (2) develop testable predictions of the empirical consequences of both God and not-God, (3) find a measurable difference in those observable consequences, and (4) assess which hypothesis better matched observed outcomes. Attempts to do this tend to posit impoverished straw-man definitions which, when they are easily shot down, satisfy only those whose concept of God is limited to the impoverished straw-man. Boxing God into a testable scientific hypothesis is specious.
5. Regarding your "universe is vast" comment, the act of contemplating the vastness of the universe, to one so inclined, counts as communion with God. A rabbi once told me that if one stands on a mountaintop awestruck by the wonder of a beautiful sunset, that constitutes prayer. The same rabbi refused to give any definition of God at all, saying that definitions of God are antithetical to Jewish philosophy and that each person has to arrive at his or her own meaning.
6. If you wish to define "God" as "supreme being," use Occam to rule out the hypothesis that this supreme being created the universe, regard this as disproof of God, and decline to use the label "prayer" for contemplation of the vastness of the universe, that is certainly your prerogative. Your impoverished straw-man can join the plethora of impoverished straw-men in the public discourse. But that doesn't mean those who make a different choice are wrong or unscientific.
Kathy
On May 1, 2013, at 2:16 AM, Pat Hayes wrote:
>
> On Apr 30, 2013, at 9:29 PM, Kathryn Blackmond Laskey wrote:
>
>> 1. Quoting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor, "In the scientific method, parsimony is an epistemological, metaphysical or heuristic preference, not an irrefutable principle of logic or a scientific result."
>>
>> It is certainly metaphysically justifiable to prefer a theory that explains the observed evidence without making use of a supreme deity. However, parsimony does not constitute scientific proof.
>
> Hi Kathryn
>
> Your position is often claimed by philosphers of science, but in fact parsimony is used constantly throughout scientific explanations in practice, and indeed I would argue (and will, if you wish to :-) that science simply would not be possible unless it were, since no empirical tests could refute non-parsimonious explanations. The LHC found the Higgs boson, but if hadn't, then a nonparimonious explanation could easily have explained that: perhaps the Higgs events were shielded by a hitherto unknown effect which just happens to block HIggs-revealing events from being detected. Whats wrong with that kind of thinking?
>
>>
>> 2. Your argument presupposes that "God" means "supreme being who makes supernatural things happen."
>
> Just "supreme being" will do.
>
>> While this is (at least in part) what some people mean by God, it is by no means a universal view. I know many people -- some of them clergy -- who believe in God, but do not believe miracles happen.
>
> The ones I have the closest familiarity with do believe in miracels and indeed believe that to not believe in miracles is heresy. But miracles are not necessary in order to apply Occamist thinking. Just the idea of a creator of the universe is enough of a stretch for me, given the size and complexity of the universe, which so far exceeds the conception held during the entire history of theology that it is hard to even comprehend the necessary scales. At the beginning of the 20th century astronomers thought that the milky way was the entire universe, an estimate that was, we now know, out by at least 28 orders of magnitude.
>
> It is quite hard to even get one's head around how big the universe is. A "being" made all this? How? And even if it did, why would such an incredibly large and powerful creature be particularly concerned with us, who occupy a film of fluid smeared on the surface of a small rock orbiting a nondescript star, one of about 300 billion stars in a galaxy which is one among perhaps 200 billion galaxies, and who have existed as a species for only perhaps the last 0.2 million years of the universe's 14 billion year history? There are events going on throughout the universe which, if they happened anywhere near to our star, would annihilate all of us in milliseconds, without the rest of the universe even noticing our absence.
>
> Apparently this creator had a rather long time to wait until we showed up to worship Him, and He must have a very keen eye to find us on this tiny rock, in all this space and energetic turmoil that He created. Rather wasteful with energy and matter, this God, and plenty of time on His hands.
>
> Pat
>
>>
>>
>> On Apr 25, 2013, at 12:39 AM, Pat Hayes wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> On Apr 24, 2013, at 10:11 PM, John F Sowa wrote:
>>>
>>>> I'm willing to grant that all arguments for the existence of God
>>>> are unscientific. But I also believe that all arguments *against*
>>>> the existence of God are equally unscientific. It's actually harder
>>>> to develop a solid proof that something does *not* exist.
>>>
>>>
>>> The basic scientific argument against the existence of God is that there is absolutely no observational evidence for the existence of a God, nor any reason to hypothesise such an entity in order to explain anything that is observable. A very straightforward application of Occam's principle then suffices. Of course this is not a *proof*, but it is a sound *scientific* argument. Proofs are irrelevant here. There is no proof that the flying spaghetti monster does not exist, but that does not shake the faith of the true Pastafarian.
>>
>>
>>
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