bd-from-kg

theophilus:

But as has been pointed out earlier, Sagan’s statements are clearly meant to apply to claims about the real world. It’s a statement about necessary conditions for rational belief in any world, and as such makes no claims about which of the myriad of possible worlds we actually live in. Hence it is not self-referential.

Speak for yourself. A great many Christians, including many respected theologians, consider God’s hiddenness (i.e., his undetectability) to be a mystery in need of an explanation. Saying that “He is everywhere present with his creation and works regularly to accomplish his purpose according to his own will” doesn’t really help. If you say that the “God hypothesis” can be tested, you need to propose an actual operational test. If you say that He can be detected, you need to explain in detail how to detect Him. I don’t say that this cannot be done; I merely observe that you haven’t done it. (And neither has any other theist.)

This is the gist of Sagan’s complaint. It seems that Christians are unwilling or unable to suggest any such operational test, and any time a non-Christian suggests a possible test, the answer always seems to be “No, that won’t work. The results would be indistinguishable from the ones that would be expected if God did not exist. God has chosen to remain hidden.” But that’s what it means to say that God “defies detection”, or that the “God hypothesis” cannot be tested.

But my main interest is in your claim that:

This is not only false, it’s ridiculous. To see this one need only watch my two-year-old grandson – call him Jimmy. He’s playing with a simple toy mailbox. He puts “letters” (colored pieces of paper) into the slot at the top, which of course causes them to disappear. After a while he opens the bottom, and behold! The pieces of paper are still there, inside the mailbox. This is all very fascinating – so fascinating that Jimmy repeats the experiment again and again.

Jimmy is learning about what’s called the permanence of objects. By now he’s formed the hypothesis that the pieces of paper he puts into the top of the mailbox don’t really cease to exist, even though they can no longer be seen; that they’re still “really” there, inside the box, out of sight. Every time he opens the mailbox and finds pieces that match the ones he put in, and no others, the hypothesis is confirmed.

Jimmy might be said to be “using empiricism to ‘interrogate’ the world”, but I’m pretty sure that he did not start off with any assumptions about its metaphysical nature. He didn’t start off with an opinion as to whether the pieces of paper were “material, some combination of material and immaterial, or purely immaterial”. In fact, he didn’t even have these concepts initially. They were formed in the course of his long, complex project of making sense of his experiences. “Material objects”, to Jimmy, are simply things that don’t disappear permanently when you lose sight of them, and which other people see too. Immaterial objects are things (like rainbows and monsters under the bed) that don’t have these properties. Jimmy is learning that the pieces of paper fall into the “material objects” category. But as to what the metaphysical nature of material objects is, the question hasn’t even occurred to him, and won’t for a long time yet.

Jimmy is not using some metaphysical system to arrive at his conclusions (tentative or otherwise). He’s not “assuming materialism a priori”; he’s just doing what you did yourself at his age; he’s figuring out how things work by doing stuff and seeing what happens. This is what any rational creature does; it’s the essence of rationality itself.

Eventually Jimmy will learn that there are natural laws that govern a great deal of what happens, and that there is no evidence that anything that happens is not governed by them. At this point he may come to believe that they govern the whole of what happens, which seems to be what you mean by “materialism”. Whether you think that this opinion is justified or not, it was not a starting point for his investigation of the nature of things, but will be a conclusion formed at a very advanced stage of that investigation, based on its results.

Of course, he might come instead to some other belief – perhaps a belief in Christianity. If so, this will also not have been a starting point (a “presupposition” if you will) for his investigations, but a very late conclusion.

Thus neither materialism nor Christianity is a “presupposition” or a priori assumption. At some point a materialist arrives at a belief in materialism based on his experiences, and a Christian arrives at a belief in Christianity based on his experiences. And it is meaningful to ask whether one or the other, or both, or neither, arrived at his belief rationally. It’s absurd to pretend that this question is meaningless because the two had entirely different “starting points”.

lpetrich

theophilus:
It's really a shame that you guys are so easily impressed that you latch onto anything that seems to bolster your unbelief.

Bull doo-doo.

If it is true that "claims that cannot be tested, etc." then this claim is clearly included, for it cannot be tested or disproven by any "scientific" means. Therefore, it defeats itself.

I think that this is related to the the question of the legitimacy of logical induction, so I would not dismiss it outright.

As to the invisible, non-corporeal, heatless fire-spiting dragon, this is so full of holes it's silly.

Carl Sagan must have cut very close to the bone to provoke such a response. He was giving a good example of an unfalsifiable hypothesis.

First, invisibility implies materiality, i.e., something is "there" but cannot be seen. God is not invisible because he is not localized, i.e., he is not extended in space.

That is such a load of bull feces that I don't know where to begin. An entity that exists independent of the material context of our Universe, and does not interact with it, would be invisible, since being seen requires such interaction.

Also, abstract qualities are generally not visible. Has anyone ever seen a house's houseness?

And where can I see this alleged "god speck"?

Second, Christians do not believe in a God who defies all detection. He is everywhere present with his creation and works regularly to accomplish his purpose according to his own will.

Seems like Sagan's invisible dragon -- one who likes to seem like some unnecessary hypothesis, one who never reveals Itself unambiguously to all people. I don't hear a voice coming out of the sky taking credit for everything that happens, and I don't see "YHWH" being written on everything.

Third, God was revealed in Jesus, i.e., he took the form of a man.

Except that god is supposed to be visible everywhere, right?

Fourth, God is not said to do things which are meaningless (spitting heatless fire is self-contradictory).

Heatless fire as in the fire of the burning bush in Exodus?

Theophilus, I challenge you to find fault with the Bible on that account.

This entire exercise in nonsense, while it might impress the children, is a gross case of confusing categories, i.e., apples and oranges.

???

For a different perspective on Sagan, go here http://www.trinityfoundation.org/rev...p?ID=068b.html (if you dare)

I did, and it spent a lot of time dismissing Carl Sagan as some sort of high priest of science.

keyser_soze

Someone seems to be spending a lot of time in ad hominem for Mr. Sagan don't they? That's right, dismiss the analogy that steps on your toes, try to impugn the author! Distract! Is this how you live your life? It must be a scared way of living, in total fear that your personal convictions might be wrong, and resisting the evidence so that you don't get too close to them...


Well, I have what I needed. I wanted to see theists reaction to the analogy, and I have definately seen it. And seen it for what it truly is, as has everyone who reads here. Audience, this is your brain on god!


Remember, it's not murder if you do it for a god.

Normal

Occam's Razor selects from two proven solutions the simplest one. When you claim "I can fly by flapping my arms", I assume you are a human, and myself, being a human, can preform the test from the comfort of my own home. The fact that I can't fly will lead me to believe that you can't fly either, and then I'll have proof (or at least support) that you cannot fly.

Any supernatural claim would also fall to Occam's Razor (ie. Santa Claus, tooth fairy, dragon) unless an ounce of support of it's existence was found, and could not be explained in the same terms with a simpler (or physical) solution.

Normal

I've never stated either way. You can assume whatever you want, but just realize your preconceived notions of what I believe have no baring on actual reality.

Normal

I still don't see how " Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veriditically worthless" can itself be tested, and how it is itself not "immune to disproof".

Philosoft

Show us a claim that cannot be tested, an assertion immune to disproof, that has veridical worth. A single counterexample will do.

Normal

I think therefore I am.

Philosoft

Good. Now, what is the veridical worth of this claim?

bd-from-kg

Normal:
You're right; it can't be tested; it's immune to disproof. But the point is that it's clearly not intended to apply to statements like itself. It's a statement about claims about the real world, or more precisely ontological claims.

A simple test for whether a statement makes an ontological claim is "Are there possible worlds in which this statement if false?" Let's apply this to the statement "Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veriditically worthless". Are there possible worlds in which this statement is false? No, there are not. Therefore any evidence (i.e., any facts that distinguish this world from other possible worlds) is irrelevant; no evidence can conceivably have any bearing on whether it's true.

So if it's not a statement about the real world, what is it? It's a statement about rational belief, or more generally, about the nature of rationality. What it says, in essence, is that it's irrational to believe something (about reality) without evidence. This is self-evidently true, and it doesn't become false because it's rational to believe it without evidence.