This video from David Wood seems to be pertinent to almost every discussion that takes place here. Perhaps it should be required viewing to any who would participate in this forum.
What do you think?
check it out.
https://youtu.be/YrGVeB_SPJg
peace
791 thoughts on “Scooby-Doo and the Case of the Silly Skeptic”
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I don’t see any ID books on his shelf.
I miss my Scooby snacks.
Who needs evidence for “nature just does it”?
Problem solved.
And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for you meddling theists!
Scooby was one of the best children’s shows ever.
Indeed. It’s interesting to note that every single episode ended up with a natural explanation for the mystery. Never once was there an actual supernatural monster.
It’s too bad the IDCists didn’t learn from that.
I think the first 9 minutes or so is very good and, indeed, would be nice for everybody here to watch. Then it descends into him pushing his own view, as if he weren’t playing burden tennis himself. He does a nice job in the debate, because, (if I may say so, ahem) those with philosophical (or legal) training tend to be a bit better on issues of epistemic warrant than those without it. But nothing good for the theist actually follows from the fact that his adversary is better at science than philosophy. Why? Because science is more important than philosophy on these matters, and if you doubt it, just ask philosophers, who will mostly disagree with Wood’s religious inferences and agree with the scientist. They aren’t unaware of the psychological influences on belief.
So, Wood doesn’t really have science OR philosophy with him, just his love of religion.
Maybe Wood has just done some skillful editing but it seems that a scooby movie that came our in the 90’s did involve the supernatural.
I think a better illustration of these points would be “The X-Files” Scully was supposed to be the skeptical rational one, and Mulder the one who “wanted to believe” but it was actually the opposite. Every week the pair would encounter various strong evidence for aliens, secret gov’t projects, the devil, immortal people who eat human livers, or human fat. etc etc…and then the next week would start off with Scully being ‘skeptical’ despite evidence for the paranormal. This was nuts. In the X-Files universe the paranormal is normal and Scully’s skepticism was as wildly irrational as the most hardcore fundamentalist in our universe
Did either of you two actually watch the vid?
Obviously, you didn’t watch this video. Just opining with no basis, as usual.
The movie is not canon!
The entire foundation for Wood’s criticism of Shermer in this video is faulty.
He says that because Shermer says that any evidence for God would also be evidence for superintelligent aliens there can be no evidence for God. He later goes a step further and says there can be no “proof” of God. This is obviously wrong. In most cases I’d just say the person needs to think about what they’re claiming a bit longer ( before they post on Youtube) but Wood is a professional philosopher, so I’m inclined to think he’s intentionally misrepresenting Shermer.
That’s all discussed in the video. You should consider actually watching it.
Totally disagree. Repetitive, boring, terrible animation, awful voices, never funny, stupid in every way. Basically no redeeming characteristics whatever, IMO. My kids hated it as much as I did.
Different strokes, I guess.
What he actually says is (first) “I’d find $10 million in my name in a Swiss bank account.” And then, more seriously, something like “Something that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.” Wood claims that Shermer’s position (including his last law) is tantamount to making evidence for God impossible. I’m guessing Shermer would deny that, but you’re right that he probably hadn’t thought it through very carefully.
If Wood cared to explain what level of skepticism is acceptable and tried to apply that to all claims equally he may have a point. He’s not interested in doing that for obvious reasons: double standards of skepticism are perfectly fine if you’re a theist
BTW, I never liked Scooby growing up. 100% with walto on this one. Same repetitive structure in every single episode and cheese as fuck, even for a kid’s show
Exactly. The opening to this is quite good, I think. But then he seems to think he’s above the fray, himself.
Science can’t be more important than philosophy, because science is grounded in and guided by philosophy.
I think his point is clear, and he does make a case for what “level of skepticism” is acceptable. If your model of evidence provides a reasonable means by which your skepticism can be overruled by evidence, then you have reasonable skepticism. As he points out, Shermer has a model of evidence which disallows the existence of any reasonable evidence for god, because Shermer’s model basically says that if a vague alien superintelligence might also do it, then that disqualifies the evidence as being evidence for god.
This is faulty reasoning in that first, it disallows virtually any evidence for god, and second, it irrationally implies that evidence for an alien superintelligence cannot also be evidence for god.
When your system of evidence provides no rational, reasonable avenue for disproving your belief, it is what I call “hyper-skepticism”.
We learned that God is not a monster. 🙂
Wood doesn’t seem to be good at anything, from philosophy to science. The way that he tries to insist that there just has to be a way to distinguish God from aliens or what-not is the very worst in thought, since it’s the very lack of meaningful entailments for God that makes even beginning to look for evidence for God so difficult. Of course we can think of things that might point to a mysterious cause, but what that cause would be is one of the severe problems we’d have for saying that it’s this or that god, or aliens, or maybe even powerful magicians who found real magic.
I do think it’s annoying to see anyone say that there could be no evidence for God. Shermer at least seems to go there in the video. But really, aliens could do anything? That seems like a faith statement. I think we’d be inclined to believe that God the Omnipotent and Omniscient as advertised by believers could cure amputees with a word (or less), while aliens would probably require some sort of technology done behind closed doors (if they don’t want us to see what does it), if they could do it at all. That said, while I wouldn’t expect aliens to do anything and everything with the facility of God, how would I know that powerful magic could not exist absent God? Or would the wielder of such magic automatically count as God?
It’s Wood’s problem that he doesn’t, and apparently can’t, come up with some entailed observations for God. His flimsy “arguments” about the Matrix and brains in vats are more evidence that he really doesn’t philosophize well. Of course these are issues in some ultimate sense, but clearly the question of “evidence for God” is meant by honest skeptics to be evidence that one would accept for evolution, a UFO, or what-not. We’d need the epistemologically-sound entailments for God (rather than for just any mysterious highly powerful cause), then sufficient observational evidence to indicate that God exists, and only then can we begin to sort out whether this precludes potential difficulties like brains in vats or the Matrix. Until that time, brains in vats have to be at least a bare specific possibility (although untestable if done exceedingly well), while it’s hard to see how God is more than a general possibility, one is too non-specific even to come up with a conceivable test for it.
Wood starts with a cartoon and ends with cartoonish philosophizing. It’s all about attacking the “skeptic” (yes there are idiots, hence the splits in organized atheism) as if he will accept nothing as evidence (based on a sample of one, plus his email trolling), while he seems oblivious to the very real problems of anyone coming up with good evidence to found an amorphous and often-changing concept. If he doesn’t like what skeptics would or would not accept as evidence for God, it’s time that he comes up with rigorous and specific entailments from this God that we might be capable of discovering. He does anything else.
Evidence eventually convinces everyone in the Scooby-doo movie that ghosts exist, because certain versions of ghosts do have specific entailments (even then one might be skeptical about whether ghosts are what people claim, but at least you have something resembling certain proclaimed ghosts in the movie). What could convince the skeptical person (not the one in denial, of course) that God exists? There are spectacles and the like that could convince any real skeptic of powerful unknown forces, but all we’d know then is that we’d like to investigate said forces to find out what they are. And there is no certainty that we could find out what they are, what it is, we’d just have to keep open minds and try.
Glen Davidson
Its Wood who hasn’t thought it through. Shermer’s position is completely reasonable.
Lets say you’re in the interior of a large building where no one else speaks English. You want to know if its raining outside. Someone walks in whose soaking wet. Is that evidence that its raining? Of course it is! You haven’t ruled out the possibility that the person got wet from a sprinkler but that doesnt mean what you’ve learned so far is useless or that there’s some fundamental flaw with using that as evidence.
If, as Shermer posits, every amputee on earth grew a limb, that might not distinguish between God and aliens. But now we’d know that either God or superintelligent aliens exist! Thats pretty big news. And of course we’d continue to gather evidence to distinguish between the two. I think this is all pretty obvious so Wood’s argument is downright dishonest
Only that Wood doesn’t follow that rule himself
That’s not really a problem with any “model of evidence” whatever that means. The actual problem is that some descriptions of God make it empirically undetectable by definition. Wood equivocates the term evidence here: he wants his theistic arguments to pass for evidence and put that in the same category as empirical evidence, then force that down the skeptic’s throat.
If Wood’s definition of God is empirically verifiable (must resist the temptation to draw parallelisms between the Scooby Doo episode about Zombies and Jesus) then he should have no problem providing the evidence. He doesn’t have that, so either way, he’s in no position to question the skeptics
The video isn’t about making a case that god exists, so I don’t know what you’re talking about. The video is about skepticism.
Again, Wood isn’t making a case that god exists in this video, so your statements where are entirely irrelevant. This video was entirely about pointing out the flaw in Shermer’s “alien superintelligence” argument. He succeeded in showing that argument to be flawed and in showing how that particular position is a case of hyper-skepticism.
Wood is hyper-skeptic with regards to evolution
Let me try again then. Can this supernatural God suspend the laws of nature or not? If it’s the former, then it would be conceivably detectable empirically. If it’s the latter, it would be a completely undetectable being. Now if the skeptic’s criteria to accept the claim that this God exists is “skepticism can be overruled by evidence”, then the undetectable God is out of reach of empirical evidence, and therefore there’s no reason to believe we should deem our skepticism overruled. No need to be hyper-skeptic when the evidence can’t be found by definition. This is the God of the classical theists, not something Shermer or any other skeptic pulled out of their rear end.
If OTOH there can be empirical evidence for God’s existence, to the same standards acceptable in science, it’s also reasonable to be skeptic of that in absence of such evidence.
In short, there’s no need to invoke hyper-skepticism to reject the claims about God existence, no matter how you choose to define it.
What laws of nature? Who was the Lawgiver?
derp
Is all science empirical? Math comes to mind…
Demanding empirical evidence for God gets God wrong by the standard definition. If you demand empirical evidence, you are indeed talking about a space alien, and you accept only space aliens.
I’d need to see a stamp saying Intelligently Designed by Space Aliens.
The problem is that Shermer wasn’t able (at least at that time) to give any criteria for what would be distinguishing evidence. His main principle, in fact was at least along the lines of “There can’t be any such evidence.”
Not really. Philosophy might be required to make ontological inferences from or interpretations of this or that scientific finding, but most scientists get along just fine without any kibitzing from that corner (thank you very much). Both of my brothers are pretty distinguished scientists and the more famous of the two doesn’t know the first thing about philosophy. Never cared about it, and neither did any awards committees when they looked at his work.
Anyhow, most philosophers would likely disagree with you about this, so, like Wood, you’ve got neither science nor philosophy on your side here.
Interesting. I was completely unaware that there was such a thing as a standard definition of “God”. What is it? And how does demanding evidence get it wrong?
When you don’t know what you are looking for, then you don’t know what kind of evidence you are looking for either. Simple enough?
Contemplate this question: What would be empirical evidence for mathematical zero or infinity?
What are you looking for when you don’t know what you’re looking for?
Something on a crisp Ritz cracker!
In production almost continuously since 1969. thats over 45 years. Your esthetic judgement is personal and irrelevant to my point. Scooby taught something important and useful about how the world works.
For whatever it’s worth, I haven’t watched more than a few episodes, even when my kids were watching cartoons.
In Scooby-doo (the TV show) there’s always a perfectly reasonable explanation for what seemed mysterious.
Well, except for the talking dog.
OK, one can suspend one’s disbelief in that area. Still, it always seemed a tad ironic.
Glen Davidson
If your point was that the (awful) show was successful or long-running, maybe that’s what you should have written. What you said was that it was one of the best, so my own judgement (that it’s absolutely horrible in every way) is (whether right or not) hardly “irrelevant” to your claim. You just disagree with it is all.
Not simple enough, apparently, as it doesn’t at all answer either of my questions. Could you try? You’re claiming there’s a standard definition of god; it should then be easy for you to state it.
Since neither of those things exists other than in the imagination, perhaps you shouldn’t use them as examples, unless you want to imply that god doesn’t exist either.
Isn’t that supposed to be just the sort of problem that genetic algorithms solve best?
So, math doesn’t exist.
Here ends the discussion.
How does that follow from what John said? Please spell it out using valid deductive logic.
Here in fact does the discussion end.
I asked: What would be empirical evidence for mathematical zero or infinity?
He said they don’t exist.
Does his answer answer my question? If yes, then it also answer yours, if you take time to see over the discussion again. If not, then we must be talking so past each other that there’s no reason to bother.
Of course it doesn’t follow. It’s like saying that if unicorns don’t really exist then imaginations don’t exist.
Erik is just being Erik.
And atheists are just being atheists. They think it’s perfectly admissible to ridicule something they have no clue about, self-admittedly so.
God is immaterial. All mathematical concepts are too. All of them. No exception. That’s the analogy. If you say any of the mathematical concepts don’t exist, then you have no idea what math is, and we will never get to discussing the analogy. Which means the discussion is over.
Anyway, an introductory video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gbGvyJNELU
Perhaps the point is that no one is above the fray.
In fact we can’t be in such a position. Some of us know that is the case and and others don’t
That is how I saw it anyway.
peace
Exactly, I think the most important take away is the idea that if your methodology is not able to discover if the thing you are skeptical about is true then you have a jacked up methodology
peace
Empirically undetectable is not remotely the same thing as not falsifiable.
peace
Why does this one always come up? Here is a definition that I like,
quote:
The Lord our God is but one God, whose subsistence is in Himself; whose essence cannot be comprehended by any but himself, who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light, which no man can approach unto; who is in Himself most holy, every way infinite, in greatness, wisdom, power, love, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth; who giveth being, moving, and preservation to all creatures.
In this divine and infinite Being there is the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit; each having the whole divine Essence, yet the Essence undivided; all infinite without any beginning, therefore but one God; who is not to be divided in nature, and being, but distinguished by several peculiar relative properties.
end quote: 1644 LBCF
It’s the standard definition in as much as it corresponds to God’s own self revelation. Glad we cleared that up once again
peace