Kent Stevens

I think that it is false reasoning to go from saying that we are ignorant about certain things to saying that God must exist. This thread is in response to a discussion with others who take gaps in understanding as evidence for God.

Examples of things that we are ignorant about or gaps in our understanding are outlined below. We are ignorant about how exactly the universe came into existence. This becomes especially difficult if time is supposed to be created with everything else in the universe. Then there would be no things happening before the universe existed as we normally think, because there is no time. Also, we do not know exactly how evolution precisely happened. Why do we have certain traits and not others is not always predictable by the theory of biological evolution. We do not know exactly why we came into existence now and not say ten million years from now.

What I am saying here is though whatever gaps in understanding that exist, believing the existence of an infinite god does not follow at all logically. We are reasoning falsely if we think that god is likey to exist from our lack of complete understanding. That we are ignorant about certain things does not mean that God or the Easter Bunny must exist to explain those things that we are ignorant.

If we are trying to explain the physics of some event we do not normally say this was due to God. We usually expect something like the laws of nature to explain the creation of the earth and the sun. We do not use an omnipotent Easter Bunny to explain how the earth and sun was created. We alomost always expect a physical reason to explain physics.

Part of the problem with an omnipotent Easter Bunny forming us is who created this Easter Bunny? It is hard to fathom how something with these immense capabilities just pops into existence even more than the creation of the simpler universe. By saying the Easter Bunny did it we are just leaving massive gaps in our knowledge about how the Easter Bunny came into existence. Also, if we believe the Easter Bunny did it why not believe that omnipotent Santa Claus did it or that an omnipotent Tooth Fairy did it. For we have no precise evidence that this not the case.

Believing in our God just increases our inability to understand things. For we form massive gaps in knowledge about God. We are ignorant about what caused God or what precisely his nature is.

If it we think that an entity like God exists we have little evidence as to what their true nature was. We can not tell if God is an insect, beaver, or an alien. We do not know if God is a machine or not. We can not tell if events are due to Roman gods, Greek gods, Egyptian gods, or Allah.

Bilboe

Kent,

I agree that a gap in our knowledge does not lead to a logical entailment of the supernatural. However, unless we know that the supernatural does not exist, that gap could be a piece of the puzzle in coming to believe in the supernatural. I think whether it is such a piece has to be determined by how well it fits in with other things we know.

Malaclypse the Younger

Supernaturalism, by definition, cannot be an "explanation". An explanation must show not only why things are as they are, but why they are not as they are not. Supernaturalism, by its very nature and definition, cannot tell us why things are not as they are not.

Supernaturalism cannot, by its nature, be a "missing piece"; it is merely the observation that a piece is missing. The adoption of supernaturalism gives us nothing more than the mere admission of our ignorance. What's worse, the adoption of supernaturalism destroys the knowledge that we do have; under supernaturalism no conclusion, however well supported by sound evidence and argument, can be deemed more or less plausible than any alternative.

Supernaturalism denies that any pattern is meaningful; under supernaturalism the "explanation" that all events are singular and unconnected to any other event except by the arbitrary will of the deity is just as good as any sound scientific finding. And actually, this is really the only good "explanation" under supernaturalism; by definition, a supernatural deity is not bound by pattern, regularity, bound not even by our trivial and finite understanding of logic itself. Indeed, supernaturalism finds that all of our science, all of our knowledge, indeed rationality itself, is not only unreliable but trivially false.

To believe that any sort of pattern or regularity in the world "truely" exists is to embrace naturalism in its entirety. To believe that a supernatural deity is constrained even partially by regularity, pattern, or even by our understanding of logic itself is a contradiction in terms and fundamentally incoherent.

There is no middle ground between supernaturalism and naturalism. Our ability to understand the world in any way by our senses and our own reason, our belief that such understanding is in any way "true", is to fundamentally undermine and contradict supernaturalism.

The presuppositionalists are indeed correct on this count. One must indeed go "all the way", one way or another, for supernaturalism or naturalism. Halfway measures, a "god of the gaps", are fundamentally contradictory and incoherent. Either all our true knowledge is granted only by divine revelation (and merely happens, sometimes, to correspond with our senses and human reason), or we must assume that there is no such thing as supernaturalism, and that the knowledge of our senses and human reason is, by definition, true.

[ March 31, 2002: Message edited by: Malaclypse the Younger ]</p>

HRG

Excellent post, if I may say so (especially since it agrees with my own ideas ). I've stressed the point again and again that an explanation must be "negative" as well (i.e. include what we don't see).

"Supernaturalism cannot, by its nature, be a "missing piece"; it is merely the observation that a piece is missing."

You have a great way with words, and I'd like to ask permission to use your quote for a sig (with due attributions, of course).

Regards,
HRG.

Jayhawker Soule

<img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" /> I agree. That was exceptional! <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" />

Wyrdsmyth

I'll also chime in and say that was a fine post by Malaclypse, and I agree with everything he said except the ending part about presuppositionalism. Theistic presuppositionalism is not a rational position to retreat to from gap apologetics, because it too is incoherent and flawed. Theistic presuppositionalism is an elaborate semantic shuffle that makes use of some of the trappings of epistemology to give it a veneer of philosophical legitimacy.

The only thing we all presuppose, theists and atheists alike (barring certain extremes, like solipsists), is that we exist and an "objective world" exists, and that's it. Deity beliefs are additive, not presupposed. "Revelatory" knowledge is a total incoherence, and doesn't even make sense on its own terms.

Tercel

Malaclypse,
Why do you bother writing this sort of stuff? Apart from a few equally unthinking atheists who are happy to cheer-lead, anyone who reads that is going to be impressed by two things only: The complete utter ignorance of what supernaturalism is that you have demonstrated, and your impressive illogical thinking in your examination of the implications of supernaturalism.

I really have seen some bad arguments in my time: by both fundamentalists and atheists. But the posts I have seen by you and HRG in the last week on the subject of Naturalism and Supernaturalism probably deserve the silver for sheer wishful thinking and downright bad argument. (The gold goes to Acharya S, although you do cut her pretty close)

I've already explained why you're argument's as wrong as it gets, Bilboe's explained it, Meta's explained it on Carm. Sure, it wasn't actually worth refuting in the first place, but we gave you the benifit of the doubt that you were simply having a temporary moment of insanity.

Please drop it so we can get back to what passes for "intelligent" conversation around here.

HRG

Unilateral declaration of victory are a convenient way of winning a debate, aren't they ?

Neither Bilboe on II nor Meta on CARM understood the point (and I haven't seen your contribution): the argument dealt specifically with supernatural explanations. It does not address the ontology of the supernatural, but its use as an explanation, which I might call "methodological supernaturalism" .
Apparently, atheists on both groups understood the argument.

Let me repeat it for you: if a theist claims that a given set of perceptions (e.g. seeing and tasting) indicates a specific fact (e.g. water to wine) which requires a specific supernatural explanation (miracle by God X), he conveniently forgets that the inference from perception to fact depends on a multi-link chain of inferences, all of them assuming naturalism {b]at that link[/b]. Each of them is equivalent to exclusion of supernatural explanations for a particular link in the chain (e.g. photon absorption in retina).

There is a certain hypocrisy in claiming that the only rational explanation is a supernatural intervention at the beginning of this chain, while all other supernatural interventions are excluded a priori.

It seems to me that this topic points at a great dichotomy between theist and atheist thinking. A theist is perfectly at home with the explanation that his god changed water into wine - and thus looks only briefly and as a matter of form for alternative naturalistic or supernaturalistic explanations. To an atheists, gods who transform water into wine and gods who transform photons from water into photons which look like coming from wine are essentially equivalent: ad-hoc supernatural explanations for something which quite possibly is a measurement error - in the broadest sense of the world.

I cannot summarize it better than Malaclypse did:

"Supernaturalism cannot, by its nature, be a "missing piece"; it is merely the observation that a piece is missing."

So please address yourselves to the argument which was made, and not to the one you think was made.

Jayhawker Soule

Oh my!

Tercel

In general no. Any such declaration of victory normally makes the declarer look stupid if the readers feel the debate is still undecided.
However, in this case it's not a debate. I'm merely making the helpful point that you may wish to stop this idiocy before your readers fall off their chairs laughing at you.

Any failure by multiple persons to understand an argument suggests to me that either the argument was explained badly or that it was an illogical argument. I'll let you choose.

I'm not sure that this argument even begins on a sensible foundation. As a Theist and Supernaturalist, I'm perfectly happy to accept what I would call "methodological naturalism" for the vast majority of the time, save where the specific circumstances suggest to me that methodological naturalism is not specifically appropriate in the case.
Hence any case you present against what I understand as "methodological supernaturalism" in general is not going to apply to me, nor I believe any other Christians.

As Kenny commented when I passed on to him some of your comments on the subject (I thought he'd like a laugh):
"Fine; under that definition, I am a naturalist. In fact, I feel that my "naturalism" finds its justification in and is most at home in my theistic worldview. I see no reason to affirm any of the above aspects of "naturalism" if the Ultimate is nothing more than blind chance and brute necessity. And, while we're at it, most of the above principles of "naturalism" serve quite well as premises in arguments for theism, such as the cosmological argument. Thanks, atheists, for granting them. Now, can we get past this semantic game and discuss the real issues?"

So you're saying that a god miraculously changing water to wine isn't equally as miraculous as a god miraculously making me think that water is really wine? I see...

Not hypocrisy: But pragmaticy. As I pointed out above, an interference anywhere in the chain is still an interference - and disproves metaphysical naturalism just as much as the other. However for pragmatic reasons we always assume that our perception of reality fairly accurately models reality.

While I would disagree with your accusation that we only look "briefly" at alternative explanations, I would agree with your implication that theists accept the reality we perceive as true reality, however strange it might be.

In other words, the atheist refuses to accept the reality they perceive as true reality because it fails to meet with their preconceived ideas about how reality should be. Instead becuase their perceptions fail to agree with their presupposed ideas, they simply deny their perceptions and call them "measurement errors".

Well done, I think you've accurately highlighted for us the dichotomy between theist and atheist thinking here. <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" />

Tercel