When is the YEC God no longer the YEC God? That question came up in my recent thread on methodological naturalism and accommodationism. In that thread I argued that science falsifies the YEC God, because it shows definitively that the earth is about a million times older than the YECs believe. If the earth is old, then the YEC God doesn’t exist. There might still be a God, but not the YEC God, because the YEC God necessarily created the earth a short time ago. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be “the YEC God” at all!
Robin and Petrushka objected because they didn’t see “the YEC God” as being essentially YEC. In other words, they saw “the YEC God” as referring to a God who would still be the same God even if it turned out that he hadn’t created the universe several thousand years ago.
In short, I saw “the YEC God” as equivalent to “a God having YEC characteristics”, and they saw it as equivalent to “the God of the YECs, who might or might not have YEC characteristics”.
Of course, neither interpretation is correct in an absolute sense. Language is a convention, and “the YEC God” can plausibly be interpreted either way. However, I argued that in the context of the thread, it was clear how “the YEC God” was being used:
…I thought that readers would notice that I used the unusual phrase “the YEC God” instead of “God” or “the Christian God” or “Yahweh”. Since I took the trouble of adding the qualifier “YEC”, they would infer that there must be some significance to it. There was; I added it to indicate that my argument was confined to YEC Gods. What is the characteristic of a YEC God that distinguishes him from an OEC God or other Gods? The clue is in the qualifier “YEC”. He must have created the earth a (relatively) short time ago.
This leads to a counterintuitive realization: the entity we refer to as “the YEC God” is not necessarily the same as the entity that YECs refer to as “God”!
How can we resolve this apparent paradox? I think the key is to recognize that within our minds, “the YEC God” doesn’t really refer to a single possible entity. It refers to an entire set of possible entities, any of which would qualify as “the YEC God”. Likewise with “God”.
The set of possible entities encompassed by the word “God”, when spoken by a YEC, is larger than the set encompassed by the phrase “the YEC God” as used in the other thread. The latter is a subset of the former. Since they are not coextensive, they don’t mean the same thing.
There’s much more to be said about this, particularly about how God’s status as a fictional (or at best unknown) entity affects all of this, but I’ll leave that to the comments.
Science can only address the real attributes of invented entities like Ganesh or Sagan’s invisible dragon. Russell’s teapot is the classic. Why do we need to disprove stuff that does not impinge on reality?
petrushka,
Then please quote the portion of your argument that I have failed to adequately address, and explain why you are dissatisfied.
I have posted dozens of clarifications. See if you can paraphrase my concern.
Aye, and she’s an optimistic lass.
In my experience, when that point is reached with intelligent design creationists, the real difference is “The Bible says it and that settles it.”
Petrushka posted an apology for that. I linked to it. You didn’t notice it, apparently.
link
We could do with a dose of her optimism!
That’s part of my problem. While not logically rigorous, I think it is self evident that keiths has not defined the YEC god in a way that that would satisfy actual YECs. I say self-evident, because YECs continue to be YECs, despite keiths’ argument. So they must not accept one or more of his premises.
What seems to be left is a hollow argument. i called it a straw man, because I don’t think it targets the actual belief system of actual YECs. It only targets a hollow YEC god that is — by definition — ruled out by old earth evidence.
I accept that trying to find common ground with YECs is tedious and perhaps futile. In which case, those who lack the stomach for tedium and futility might find more rewarding things to do.
I personally agree that the scientific debate is over.
I think it is impossible to prove the non-existence of any non-trivial entity. One can define an entity in such a way that its existence would lead to logical contradiction, but that doesn’t seem productive to me. It’s not like YECs are unaware of the problem and have not found ways to squirm around it.
It can be useful to reach that point. It means you can’t prove anything by evidence and reason.
keiths, to petrushka:
Alan:
I noticed it, and I accept petrushka’s apology.
None of that changes the fact that it is very odd for petrushka to cry “bully”, considering the countervailing asymmetry in behavior.
Useful, but sad. That leaves no option other than force (often government force) for settling disputes.
I said bullying because rather early on in the discussion I said I accepted your logic.
Rather than switch gears and try to find out what I am thinking, you began a campaign to get me to confess to being wrong.
I said my objection to your argument was orthogonal to it’s logic, and you continued to demand that I admit to being wrong.
I have repeatedly confessed to being ineffective in conveying my thoughts, and you continue to demand that I admit to being wrong.
This is not seeking common ground.
Useful, but sad.That leaves no option other than force (often government force) for settling disputes.
Life is an extended arranged marriage with no provision for divorce.
keiths:
petrushka:
I have already responded to your ‘clarifications’.
This is your claim:
Since that is your claim, please quote the portion of your argument that I have failed to adequately address, and explain why you are dissatisfied.
If all of this sounds familiar, it should. The last time we went through this, you couldn’t come up with a single point that I hadn’t already addressed.
If that is your strategy, then I ask you to take my posts line by line and respond line by line.
I think that would be silly, but the sensible alternative I have offered is for you to paraphrase my thoughts. I’ve asked for this several times now.
If you were trying to be me, how would you express my arguments in a way that i would recognize and agree to?
petrushka,
You’ve made a lot of different statements in these two threads. Some of them have been contradictory, as when you claimed that we had never disagreed on the logic, then later admitted that we had disagreed and that your logic was incorrect.
Rather than trying to summarize all of your many (and sometimes contradictory) points, I think it would be better if you would identify the point that you think I have failed to address.
It’s your claim, after all:
petrushka,
We went over this a week ago, petrushka:
Alan:
keiths:
Alan:
Your comments are comprehensible and straightforward, but I disagree with them.
Sure it is, although in this case there is some justification for the assumption based on what we know about relativity and the constant speed of light.
You can (and should) be extremely skeptical of supernatural hypotheses, given that none of them have ever been validated, but that is no excuse for assuming that they are necessarily false.
The problem is that you are declaring up front that supernatural phenomena are imaginary, and that “science can only study reality”. The latter is not true, and the former should be a conclusion, not an assumption.
Phlogiston was a hypothetical entity, just like the Higgs boson. Like the Higgs boson, it had entailments. Science tested both hypotheses and rejected one of them.
You are limiting scientific inquiry when you claim that science cannot test imaginary entities. If that were true, we’d have to establish the reality of an entity like the Higgs boson before we could study it using science!
I think this is the crux of your misunderstanding of what I am trying to explain. It is not a declaration of truth, merely the definition I offer. You are looking down the wrong end of the telescope. We are free to study whatever we are able to study. I define “the supernatural” as whatever is immune or invisible (undetectable – however indirectly) to scientific study. I am not saying where we mustn’t go – I am saying where we are unable to go. The refutation would be to suggest a scientific experiment that could test any “supernatural” claim. And be careful; I am not talking about the testable element of a supposed real effect resulting from a “supernatural” claim like the bumping and banging of poltergeists. Such effects should be eminently detectable, were they to occur. So far, no luck. But what you need to do is suggest what “supernatural” event we can examine by science, not just look for its proposed real entailment.
For example say a claim was “God acts when people pray and grants the wish by causing X to happen”. Science can check whether X happens and it can do more. It can check for the possibility of a “supernatural” event by checking for a discontinuity (a violation of the law of conservation of matter and energy -something from nothing). But what it can’t do is link the discontinuity to “God”. It merely fails in disproving the “God” claim.
And I am not proposing a rigid boundary for reality that prevents us from finding out new stuff. Shared human knowledge has always expanded and I’ve no reason to expect the expansion to stop any time soon.
Edited to remove extraneous text in quote
ETA “undetectable”
That is so not what I am saying it seems almost peverse in it’s misunderstanding! 🙂 At this point I think I shall just agree to disagree, though I still think you are disagreeing with something I am not saying.
One more try!
Can science address the hypothesis “God is real!”? How?
ETA Anyone can answer!!!
Mike Gene on the Jerry Coyne/P Z Myers discussion on proof of the supernatural.
Jerry Coyne’s article in New Republic
By the same token, you must think I am against SETI. In fact, I think it is exciting and worth the investment. Peter Higgs wasn’t imagining the Higgs boson, he was predicting its existence from his hypothesis. And establishing reality is another way of saying what I mean. Science establishes the reality of proposed phenomena by experiment and hypothesis testing.
A point of clarification: proposed entities like the Higgs boson (and many others from the history of science) aren’t “imagined” — they are posited. The posit is incorporated into a model which depicts the causal relations between the posited entity and observable entities. That’s precisely what makes them testable.
Unicorns aren’t posited because there’s no model which precisely determines how the causal powers of unicorns would affect observation-conditions if the unicorns did exist, but wouldn’t affect observation-conditions if the unicorns didn’t exist. Whereas the model of Higgs boson is precisely like that, because the mathematics tells us that we should expect to see specific effects at specific energies.
So whether or not science can confirm or disconfirm any supernatural claims depends entirely on whether the model of the putatively supernatural entities depicts with sufficient precision the causal relations between those entities and what is observable. In some cases (e.g. studies on the effectiveness of prayer) the model is worked out with sufficient precision that we can test the claim. But usually the claims about supernatural entities aren’t made with the requisite detail and care necessary to submit them to empirical testing at all, one way or the other.
Indeed. I like that word “posit”!
Yes, the onus is on those who claim to know of the existence of “supernatural” phenomena to explain either how they can know of such phenomena if they have no real entailments – no manifestation in the real world; or they can tell us what the real entailments are so we can test them.
Me too.
In thinking on this discussion, I personally adhere to methodological naturalism because I cannot come up with a way to design a test for things like the “supernatural”. I see dropping MN as opening the door to “logic” based arguments for imagined entities rather than posited concepts.
I’ve never been entirely clear on the advantages of “methodological naturalism” over “empiricism”. There was a period during the mid-20th century when certain assumptions of classical and logical empiricism came under fire by Quine, Goodman, Sellars, and others. But this basic idea seems eminently correct:
I see this as putting the correct emphasis on the connection between causation and evidence. We can imagine all sorts of possibilities, fictions, fantasies, and so on — any of which can be made internally consistent if you work enough at it! — but which ones are real depends on what evidence we have, and that in turn depends not just on what is observed, but also on the causal relations between the posited and the observed.
Abandoning the still-beating heart of empiricism would mean that anyone can insist that whatever they posit is real, based on logic alone. Logic can get you to the posit — Peirce’s famed “abductive leap” — but since there are any number of posits that explain the same data, abduction alone cannot tell you which of those posits is the best one. (Ockham’s Razor also doesn’t tell you which one is correct — it only tells you which you should test first!)
I stopped commenting at Uncommon Descent when these seemingly bland and trivially obvious remarks about scientific methodology were met with deaf ears — because they have an ideological commitment to the proposition that design theory is already a scientific theory entirely by virtue of having taken the abductive leap (“the design inference”). Whereas they satisfy the criterion of testability by giving a ‘spin’ to the empirical results collected by real scientists.
A side-point about “abstract objects”: abstract objects has been a problem for empiricists from Ockham through Hume to Carnap and Sellars. But one thing we can say, I think, is empiricism is a problem for souls and gods — and yet not for sets or classes — just because it is not part of our theory of sets that we have a causal relation with them. Whereas any theory of souls good enough to warrant our attention would have to solve the mind-body interaction problem, and that means that the causal relation does have to be modeled.
This does mean that the deity conceived of by young-earth creationists is perfectly susceptible to empirical testing — because it is part of the model there to stipulate the causal powers that the deity must have in order to generate the observable effects that are explained by the deity. We can do the science and say, “if the young-earth creationists are right, then the laws of physics are variable and contingent in ways that we are unable to comprehend.” That’s why creationism is a science-stopper.
ID, by contrast, isn’t a science-stopper, but a science-non-starter. Creationism is wrong; ID isn’t even wrong, because it’s not yet been put in a testable form. Of course there’s nothing wrong with saying, “this might be crazy, but here’s an idea — now, how can we test it?” — but there is something wrong with saying, “here’s an idea, and it counts as scientific even though it hasn’t been tested!”
Patrick,
True. The scientific evidence does, however, disprove the existence of a non-deceitful YEC god.
In my opinion deceit is the least of the problems the literal God of the Bible faces but if was a YEC I might answer that God is not bound by scientific assumptions in His creation since He is not bound by the natural processes science requires.Just because you make the wrong assumption does not make God a liar. Who are you going to believe,the Bible or your lying eyes?
Indeed, this is precisely the stance taken by Answers in Genesis when they distinguish between “Man’s word” and “God’s word”. What they seemingly fail to realize is that their shift away from evidentiary apologetics to presuppositional apologetics is precisely the same as conceding utter defeat with regard to empirical science.
kn,
they seemingly fail to realize is that their shift away from evidentiary apologetics to presuppositional apologetics is precisely the same as conceding utter defeat with regard to empirical science.
I think they realize it, they just want it both ways
If they realized it, they’d also realize that they can’t have it both ways!
God, apparently, is not bound by any rules. Not moral rules — which He makes — or the rules of logic — which He also makes.
But AIG seems to say the evidence is not important, because God can change the laws of nature in whatever way is required to fit the evidence to the TRVTH, which is the Bible.
Making the definition of YEC somewhat problematic. YEC is a bit of a wavicle.
Be careful. If you keep thinking like that your brain is going to stick that way!
petrushka,
But AIG seems to say the evidence is not important, because God can change the laws of nature in whatever way is required to fit the evidence to the TRVTH, which is the Bible.
That is not exactly true ,I think. Only evidence which is contrary to their interpretation of the Bible is unimportant.
Alan,
Earlier in the thread, you agreed that science had falsified the YEC God as I had specified him. Together with your definition of “supernatural”, that implies that the YEC God is a natural being, not a supernatural one!
That’s just silly. The YEC God, like the other versions of the Christian God, is clearly a supernatural being.
Alan,
Scientific testing never absolutely validates the hypotheses being tested, but that’s true for both natural and supernatural hypotheses.
Early tests of Newtonian physics failed to falsify it, but that didn’t mean that it was true — and we now know that it isn’t. It’s a good approximation under everyday conditions, but it’s not true.
The hypotheses that survive our repeated attempts at falsification gain credence, but they are always provisional and subject to refutation by new evidence.
I don’t know if this is a new development for AiG or not, but if you look carefully at their current approach, they’re pretty clear in their view that human reason has been so corrupted by the Fall that, in the absence of Revelation, we cannot arrive at true knowledge. (In contrast to less extreme doctrines of the Fall, which say that reason itself was unaffected, but that we are prone to not use it correctly or be led astray by the pleasures of the flesh, etc.)
In other words, AIG is saying, we must begin with a literal reading of Scripture, from Genesis 1:1 all the way through to the very end, and everything that we observe is rendered intelligible in light of that framework. It’s completely a priori and the very opposite of scientific methodology.
KN,
I used the word “imaginary” to echo Alan’s usage, but either way the point is the same. Science can test the existence of hypothesized entities, whether natural or supernatural, provided that they are testable. They may turn out to be unreal or “imaginary”, like phlogiston and the ether, but they are still susceptible to scientific investigation.
If that were true, then the question of unicorns’ existence would still be unresolved. It isn’t. Scientists are in agreement that unicorns don’t exist.
Yes, and in the case of the YEC God (as I specified him), the claim has been falsified by science.
Yes, which is why testability is rightly emphasized in these discussions. Testability is what matters, not whether the hypothesis is natural or supernatural.
Robin,
You don’t think that “God created the universe 6,000 years ago” is a testable supernatural hypothesis?
No, because testability is still a scientific requirement even if MN is dropped.
velikovskys,
I would argue that science doesn’t require natural processes. All it requires is testability.
In my Ganesh example, we can test for the existence of the 100 rupee note even if the process by which it appears is supernatural.
petrushka,
The folks at AIG don’t believe that God changes the laws of nature to fit the evidence to the Bible. They think that the Bible, taken literally, is an accurate account of what actually happened.
P.S. I’m still interested in learning what statement(s) of yours you were referring to when you wrote this:
Exactly!
Which demonstrates the absurdity of trying to prove that something that doesn’t exist for all practical purposes except in people’s imagination – well – doesn’t exist.
I think my agreement (I’m such a pushover!) was qualified. Is this what you are referring to?
I don’t follow how anything I have said can be interpreted as “the YEC God is real not imaginary” or can be extrapolated by logic to imply this. Please explain my error and I will correct any mis-statement. It’s certainly not what I think.
I think there is a much more important point. Your rupee note miracle makes it for me. Say this note, perfect in every detail, poofs into existence and we record the event and the second law of thermodynamics is violated. How on Earth are we empowered to attribute this discontuity in the fabric of space-time to Ganesh?
Jut to add why I think the inability to attribute any miracle to any particular god is important.
It’s the final step in any argument that attempts to justify a god’s existence.
For example how does Craig’s argument for God get to his God?
No, I don’t see that as a “supernatural” hypothesis at all. It’s not specifying anything about the God or how the God created; the hypothesis is solely focused upon the age of the universe, a quite natural phenomenon.
Try this instead:
“And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.”
Genesis 7:12
But what are the parameters for this “testability” if MN is discarded? Why can’t I make a test of the reading of Genesis 7:12 and see if my “peers” agree that it says that God made it rain for 40 days and 40 nights? Without MN, what dictates the methodology of the testing? Why should I test things like whether it’s possible for rain to fall for 40 days and nights straight?
Keiths:
1. How is the YEC who qualifies for your proof different from a “True Scotsman”? Are there no museums built by YECs who are aware of the scientific evidence for an old earth?
2.Can a Last Thursdayist be a YEC?
3. Is it possible to steal from a house without leaving images on security cameras. (Hint: it was done at my office.)
keiths,
I would argue that science doesn’t require natural processes. All it requires is testability.
Ok, I’m game. What test eliminates the supernatural as a cause?Does the existence of a natural cause preclude a supernatural cause? We have some idea how natural processes cause rocks to form, how does the YEC God cause rocks to form?
In my Ganesh example, we can test for the existence of the 100 rupee note even if the process by which it appears is supernatural.
You contend that the appearance of the note doesn’t prove truth of the existence of the Ganesh, yet you contend that the lack of its appearance proves the truth of the nonexistence of Ganesh. Or am I mistaken?
Alan:
I addressed that already:
Your complaint is puzzling, because you’ve already agreed that science falsifies the YEC God.
keiths,
Did I?
Alan:
Yes. I wrote:
You responded: