Atheists Confuse Logic and Argument, with Science

these links are all specific to certain message board so I don't think they are any good anymore. They might work if you are signed up, I no longer am.

 
 Toulmin Argument Diagram


Many atheists don't know that arguments are constructed out of  lines of reason and that their function is to persuade us that there a particular conclusion that we should agree to. Many of them confuse logic with scientific experiment. they think an argument should start with evidence, then in an objective manner observe to see the facts rather than making petition for a particular view point. Of course in saying this they are not being open ended and unbiased as they would have us believe. They are destroying arguments that give us reason to believe in God and replacing them with their own biased view point int he fortress of facts.

Some examples of atheists doing this and saying these things can be seen on carm. Pseudoexpat can be seen on carm making a post on top down logic in response to Royce's post attacking a "special kind of top down logic" that he can't name or describe but it's found in God arguments. Here is Royce's original thread. My responding thread on "atheist double talk on top down reasoning," and "atheists privilege doubt."


by all this talk of "top down" they mean they don't like arguments with premises that necessitate conclusions. That is idiotic because that's how argument works.

In Pseudoexpat's thread and in response to his OP (which is an excellent refutation of Royce's original nonsense)Pixie says:


Originally Posted by Pseudoexpat

As Royce puts it, top-down reasoning's first and most important characteristic is that it will say anything in defence of a claim, no matter how crazy. Ok, if this is as far as it goes, then of course we should never do it. Saying anything in defence of a claim is transparent lunacy.

Pixie:

I think the point is that an argument should go from evidence to reasoning to conclusion. So-called top-down reasoning in contrast starts with a conclusion, then attempts to contrive the reasoning and evidence to support it. It is motivated reasoning because is is based on a motivation to prove the desired (and pre-determined) conclusion. I do not think you really address this properly.

He has an argument starting from evidence and preceding to conclusion as though it's observing the evidence to see what happens. He condemns reasoning that "is based on a motivation to prove the desired (and per-determined) conclusion." That's what arguemnt is. He's thinking of a scientific experiment that has to be open ended.Logical arguments are not open ended. Their function is to guide us to a specific point through showing the reasoning takes us there. The confusion with scinece is expressed in an even stronger fashion by an atheist who chimes in to agree with this guy:Fanghur. He says:

Right, and the premises of any argument should always be based on the empirical evidence we currently possess, not on blind speculation regarding things that are currently beyond our ability to test, and hence which we have zero basis to make any sort of probability estimation regarding.

Premises need not be based upon emprical evidence. The reason he thinks so is because he thinks it's like a scientific experiment. That's a bad understanding of science as well argument. The true nature of science is not to prove things but to disprove. Science does not work by observing what ahpepns objectivley then recording facts.Yes that is done to an extent but not in all cases. That's not the true aim. The true aim is to disprove bad bad hypothesis and from that to offer an adequate explanation, which by virtue of it's status as the only hypothesis still standing is accepted as default. At least that's according to Popper. [1] Compare this with a web definition of argument:

a reason or set of reasons given with the aim of persuading others that an action or idea is right or wrong.

"there is a strong argument for submitting a formal appeal"

synonyms:

reasoning, justification, explanation, rationalization; More[2]

The Toulmin model of argument presents the parts of an argument:

The Toulmin Model

1. Claim: the position or claim being argued for; the conclusion of the argument.
2. Grounds: reasons or supporting evidence that bolster the claim.
3. Warrant: the principle, provision or chain of reasoning that connects the grounds/reason to the claim. 
4. Backing: support, justification, reasons to back up the warrant.
5. Rebuttal/Reservation: exceptions to the claim; description and rebuttal of counter-examples and counter-arguments.
6. Qualification: specification of limits to claim, warrant and backing.  The degree of conditionality asserted. [3]

None of that is about observing nor is it open ended. It may or may not begin by presenting data, but that is a matter of impersonation not logic.


When Fanghur says that arguments should be based upon data and "not on blind speculation regarding things that are currently beyond our ability to test, and hence which we have zero basis to make any sort of probability estimation regarding," he is telling us that he thinks arguments are scientific experiments. He says it even more blatantly in a second post: "Pat, the point is that when one is trying to determine what the most logical explanation for something is, all presuppositions other than those that are logically inescapable should be set aside right from the get go; that is one of the defining necessities of scientific discovery and thinking, and something that Craig categorically does not do." He compares arguments to scinece, implies that their purpose is discovery, and asserts that arguments that argue for something are seen as "ciruclar reasoning." Never mind the fact that all atheist seem to start form the point that there can't be a God and any evidence for God is not evidence but must be wrong. That's not ciruclar, but it's circular if you are know what you are arguing for?

I suggest that science itself can't survive without "top down reasoning." they are confusing form of argument with the nature of logic. and the nature of logic with science. It's a truncated ideologically bound form of scinece that is calculated form the Atheist truth regime. Top down reasoning means that a top of the metaphysical hierarchy determines the bottom terms. So that a premise determines a conclusion is part of top down reasoning.

This whole discussion is predated upon the atheist assumption that there can't be anything but physical causes in reality. That physical causes are facts and have only to be observed to be understood clearly. They are totally in the dark as to the framed nature of any understanding of interpreted data. In other words is the no pure data objectively observed that is free from interpretation and frame work. They are privileging doubt about God. They can't beat the God arguments when logic is used fairly and in its classical sense, so they have to destroy logic as we know it and reduce it to quasi scientific experiment in order to get around the kind of logic that beats their arguments in defense of belief. No God argument that I use or that I know of begins with the assumption "God has to exist." The Kalam argument begins with the assumption that everything that is, and that exists contingently, has a cause that necessitates its existence. Then it assumes that anything coming into existence must have a cause. This is predicated upon the concepts of necessity and contingency. That is "top down" because it assumes that one term is at the top of the metaphysical order and it necessitates terms that are below it, or that dependent upon it for their existence. These are the assumptions they don't want us to make.

They read those as assumptions that there must be a God. They are not the assumptions of God, they are assumptions from which we can derive the conclusion that there must be  a God. That is fair and logical, provided we can pull it off in the nature of the argument. They object because it doesn't privilege their view. That's the only way know to do logic is to privileged their own view. The assumption that things need causes is not unfair nor is it illogical. It's mere the result of all of our experience. We have no counters to that experience. Even quantum particles don't coutner that experience because as David Albert showed in his brilliant review of Krauss's book (the Universe from Nothing) nothing is not really noting, it comes form prior conditions and prior particles which must still be expalined.[4] They are causes of more particles. thus everything we know is the product of a cause and thus it is not illogical that all things that are contingent need cause. Of course that doesn't mean God means a cause since God is not contingent. The rub is that this is in line with the atheist assumption that they can only buy logic that's based upon empirical assumptions. This is an empirical assumptions, it's i line with all our observations. Confronted with an empirical assumption they refuse to accept it and try to make it seem unfairly privileging belief in God.

That's because they can't stand the logical conclusion that flows from it, that there must be a God. Thus they rebel agaisnt logic itself.







Sources

[1] Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London, New York:Routledge Classics, original English publication 1959 by Hutchison and co. by Routldege 1992. On line copy URL: http://www.cosmopolitanuniversity.ac/library/LogicofScientificDiscoveryPopper1959.pdf digital copy by Cosmo oedu visited 2/6/2012, p4

[2] https://www.google.com/#q=what+is+an+argument

[3] Rohan, "The Toulmin model of Argument." Website by Sandiego State University: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~digger/305/toulmin_model.htm

[4] David Albert, “On the Origin of Everything ‘a Universe form Nothing’ by Lawrence Krauss,” New York Times Sunday Book Review (March 23, 2012). On line version URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/a-universe-from-nothing-by-lawrence-m-krauss.html visited June 20, 2012. David Albert also has a Ph.D. in theoretical phsyics.

see also my article form this blog on Albert's review of Krauss.  
Metacrock's Blog,"Review and Debnucking of Lawrence Krauss's A Unvierse From Nothing,"
 Thursday, January 10, 2013, URL: http://metacrock.blogspot.com/2013/01/review-and-debnucking-of-lawrence.html

The Ploy "there's no proof for your God..."

Atheist's mantra "there's no proof for your God" is based upon a double catch 22.

(1) Define out of existence any kind of evidence not in their favor by reducing all valid truth claims to empirical scientific data.

Science is the only from of knowledge, any thing else claiming to be knowledge is counterfeit. So reason, logic, experience, nothing else is evidence but empirical data. (bracket the problem that personal experience is closer to empirical data in the real sense than is scientific data).

(2) Impose a form of "Knowledge" not capable of apprehending God.

then they make a big deal out of "there's no proof for God."

that's like doing a poll that excludes Democrats then saying "our poll shows no one is voting democrat." Cause you excluded them.

This is how you prevent yourself from recognizing any evidence for God. You refuse to accept anything as evidence except that which is not capable of finding God because it's limited to the naturalistic domain.

Science is not capable of recognizing anything form beyond the material. So it can't accept that god is working in the natural it has to abhor that assumption because it's form outside the domain.

you create this false construct the "fortress of facts" that's constructed to screen out anything that would support belief in God. Then you claim "there's no evidence." That' because you screen it out.

We see this in the hermeneutics of miracle denial where the rejection of the evidence is based upon the assumptino of past denial.

Tegmark's New Discovery: Fundamentalist Atheists.

....I always find it hilarious when an atheist get's a little bitty taste of what we Christians get on every message board all the time where atheists and Chrsitains meet. The famous MIT Physicists, Max Tegmark, himself and atheist and he bright shinning new hope of atheism to overcome the cosmological argument, releases findings of a opinion survey he had conductive, and is confronted by Dawkamentalists.

Max Tegmark
Huffinton post blog
"Religion, Scinece, And 
the Attack of the Angry Athiests"

I'd been warned. A friend cautioned me that if we went ahead and posted our MIT Survey on Science, Religion and Origins, I'd get inundated with hate-mail from religious fundamentalists who believe our universe to be less than 10,000 years old. We posted it anyway, and the vitriolic responses poured in as predicted. But to my amazement, most of them didn't come from religious people, but from angry atheists! I found this particularly remarkable since I'm not religious myself. I have three criticisms of these angry atheists:

 ....Tegmark tells us that there were three major concerns in publishing the data. First to delineate the controversies: one such controversy is between atheists and religious people. Thee other is between religious group that 'attack science' and those that do not." At least he recognizes that there are those who are religious and accept evoltuion. His use of the term "attack science" is ideological. Scientist (the worship of scinece) has produced this term that anyone who dares critique or citizen atheist misuse of scinece is a "science denier," or is "attacking science." While I accept that term as a valid point about some fundamentalists who resist evolution to the point of actually  attacking science, I've seen atheists confuse it doing philosophy of scinece. This is the language of their movement. It would be like a black Panther calling a policeman "pig" or a feminist calling some idea she didn't like "sexist." Not to say that there aren't plenty of sexist ideas running around.
....He goes up against Gallup Orgnaization with his survy: "Although 46% of Americans believe that humans were created less than 10,000 years ago according to a Gallup poll, our survey showed that merely 11% of Americans belong to a religion openly rejecting evolution or Big Bang cosmology, so the mainstream religions representing the majority can be a powerful ally against the anti-scientific fundamentalists." Well will have to get the two surveys and compare. A lot depends upon how the question was asked.
....The second aspect dealt with is the point he makes that we as a species, "we" meaning physicists do not know everything about reality. There's a huge portion of it out there that's beyond our understanding.

 If I've learned anything as a physicist, it's how little we know with certainty. In terms of the ultimate nature of reality, we scientists are ontologically ignorant. For example, many respected physicists believe in the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, according to which a fundamentally random process called "wavefunction collapse" occurs whenever you observe something. This interpretation has been criticized both for being anthropocentric (quantum godfather Niels Bohr famously argued that there's no reality without observation) and for being vague (there's no equation specifying when the purported collapse is supposed to happen, and there's arguably no experimental evidence for it).

 Let's compare the ontological views of Niels Bohr to those of a moderate and tolerant religious person. At least one of them is incorrect, since Bohr was an atheist. Perhaps neither is correct. But who's to say that the former is clearly superior to the latter, which should be ridiculed and taunted? Personally, I'd bet good money against the Copenhagen Interpretation, but it would be absurd if I couldn't be friends with those believing its ontology and unite with them in the quest to make our planet a better place.

So his second point is tolerance.
....His third point is that atheists should be into pace and trying to make a better word, they would act like people who want to make a better world. These are good points they are well taken. He's right to emphasizes the points about tolerance and getting along in spite of disagreement. Yet he also gives indications of supporting the ideology that produces such conflict. Not only is he using the language of the atheist ideology but he's helping to build their propaganda. At the bottom of the page he includes a thing scientists and they all atheists. He doesn't include single famous scientist who is not an atheist, or if eh doesn't make it clear they are not. He does not include Alan Standard or Polkinghorn or Fritz Shaffer or any of those who are Chrsitians and have made names for themselves in scenic, and there have been many.


 from my page Doxa:

Fritz Shafer, nominated for Nobel Prize in Chemistry, University of Georgia, himself a Christian:	"it is very rare that a physical scientists is truly an atheist."
Martin Rees at Cambridge:	"The possibility of life as we know it depends upon a few basic values which are constants. And it is in some aspect remarkably sensitive to their heir numerical values. Nature does exhibit remarkable coincidences."
Arthur Schewhow, Nobel prize winner from Stanford, identifies himself as a Christian.	"We are fortunate to have the Bible which tells us so much about God in widely accessible terms."
Charlie Towns Nobel prize winner:	"The question of science seems to be unanswered if we explore from science alone. Thus I believe there is a need for some metaphysical or religious explanation. I believe in the concept of God an in his existence."
John Pokingham, theoretical physicist at Cambridge, left physics to become a minister.	"I believe that God exists and has made himself known in Jesus Christ."
Allan Sandage, The world's greatest observational cosmologist , Caregie observatories won a prize given by Swedish parliament equivalent to Nobel prize (there is no Nobel prize for cosmology) became a Christian after being a scientist,	"The nature of God is not found in any part of science, for that we must turn to the scriptures."

Was Paul Tillich Ant-Supernatural?

A certain group of atheists on CARM atheist board are trying to create the impression that I can't understand the things I read and that Paul Tillich is not only  not Christian but not positive toward the supernatural. The problem is mainly due to their lack of knowledge of the background that made up Tillich's thinking. They are reading Tillich as though he's an uninformed atheist cut off from the vast Knowledge that he had of theology coming out of European Lutheran background. I can't really blame them too much because if one is aware of the tradition of liberal European Christianity one might actually think the things he said are much different than he meant. The issue revolves around statements that he made to the effect hat he was anti-supernatural and didn't believe in miracles and didn't' believe in a God as a conscious being with a will. If the reader has read any of things I've written about Tillich over the years the reader will know that these allegations are more than half true,but not completely and not in the way they think.

skylurker:

"Look he in Tillich's own words.

"You approach something here that is fundamental to all my thinking — the antisupernaturalistic attitude" - Tillich (Ultimate concern - Tillich in Dialog).

I have diligently provided a series of Tillich's quotes and a series of assessments from scholars and you evade the topic and claim elsewhere to kick *** on this topic. That is your style to lose horribly and then come back and claim you wiped the floor.

He doesn't document it properly, the only real words of Tillich in that "quote" are  in quotation marks at the time. This makes laughable his claim to diligence.
.......My contention is that yes Tillich is opposed to something he calls "supernaturalism" but it's not the concept of the supernatural as it was originally introduced into Christianity by the thinker Tillich admired, Pseudo-Dionysus the areiopagite. It's the counterfeit notion of the supernatural that the enlightenment foisted upon the chruch as a straw man argument to disprove a way of thinking it didn't understand. Tillich does say radical things that are opposed to the modern evangelical Christianity, he was a liberal. He was a European nineteenth century German liberal with Hegelian influence who followed Schleiermacher. I've never denied that I've always known it. What I deny is that one can't take the major gist of Tillich view of God (being itself) and hold to it with a view that the ground of being is the origin of consciousness and that healing and other effects of supernatural (SN) are the result of God's working in the world. These are not contradictioanry positions even though they go further than Tillich back toward positons he didn't like. I do not have to the prophest of Tillich. I can disagree with him and I do disagree with him on certian things.
......In this essay  I stick to just the view of the supernatural and the working of miracles. Let's go to the source to the source where Skylurker bot this quote: a book called Ultimate Concern, Tillich in Dialogue by D.M. Brown.(1) Here is the original quotation in it's context:

Dr. Tillich: Now you touch on a problem which underlies everything, the problem of natural and supernatural. It has innumerable implications and is very difficult to simplify. In this special case, I do not deny the visionary experience and the whole scene, but if the inner voice Paul heard is called a "voice from Heaven," what does it mean? Did the earth stand in a certain relationship to the sun, in a particular position at that moment? Was the voice carried on a blinding ray? All these questions, if taken literally, are nonsense and have little to do with the meaning of the reality of that visionary experience. For the visionary experience was a certain reality. And I even speak of "breaking in," which has a supernatural sound but is not supernaturalism. You approach something here that is fundamental to all my thinking — the antisupernaturalistic attitude. If you would like to prepare yourself, I recommend the one section about reason and revelation in the first volume of my Systematic Theology, where I deal extensively with miracle, inspiration, ecstasy, and all these concepts, and try to interpret them in a nonsupernaturalistic — and that would mean also a nonsuperstitious — way.

 We see here the first indication that leads these bad readers astray. I call them bad readers because they don't do any study to find the background or the perspective he's coming to it from. They don't study theology they think they can just pick up one quote and know the world it comes out of without knowing anything about it. The last part there where he says he's going to do it in a "non-superstitious" way. So of course they assume O belief in God is superstition so that means he doesn't' believe in god. They further assume miracles is supernatural (is it?) and it's superstitious so he must mean he doesn't' believe it mean he doesn't believe in miracles becuase he does not believe  in the supernatural. That's all.In reality those three things, supernatural, miracle and superstition must be separated from each other. He does believe in supernatural, but in a certain reading of it, the original version not hte counterfeit. The counter is superstitious. His disbelief in miracles depends upon the understanding of miracles, because a certain kind of understanding is fine and other kind is what he's against. Not in this quote he says in speaking of Paul's voice from heaven that if it's literally from heaven "All these questions, if taken literally, are nonsense and have little to do with the meaning of the reality of that visionary experience" He says he values something he calls the visionary experience. He says the reality of it. It's real it's something he believes in. That's because the valid version of the SN is mystical experience. That's what Dionysus said. That was born out in the essay I did on Mathis Joseph Scheeben and the reading of him by Eugene R. Fairweather. That is very important to read because that lays out exactly what my view is. I don't have evidence that Tillich read Scheeben (2) but I see similar points he makes and similar phraseology he uses. For example the reference to "breaking in" above. Tillich says that "And I even speak of "breaking in," which has a supernatural sound but is not supernaturalism." That's exactly what Scheeben said, that supernatural is not "breaking into nature" but harmoniously working with nature. Read the essay please. It makes perfect sense for Tillich to say breaking in is not supernatrualism if one assumes he agrees with Scheeben, It makes no sense if he's some kind of sheep skin atheist because for the counterfeit version of SN that's what it is, it is breaking in and disrupting natural law. It appears to me then that this is what Tillich is really against, not the idea that the divine is causing some effect in the world but that that effect be understood in the right way. As I wrote the essay I link to above:

 Supernature is working in nature. It’s not breaking in unwelcome but is drawing the workings of nature to a higher level. Fairweather describes it as the “ground and end of nature.” In other words is the basis upon which nature comes to be and the goal toward which nature moves. Now it’s true that science removes the teleological from nature it doesn’t see it as moving toward a goal but that’s because it can’t consider anything beyond its own domain. Science is supposed to be empirical consideration of the natural realm and is supposed to keep its nose out of the business of commentary on metaphysics. Of course modern science does the opposite it become a form of metaphysics by infusing itself with philosophical assumptions and then declaring there is nothing beyond the natural/material realm.

 .......In the Dialogue book when the Moderator says he doesn't doesn't seem to believe in Christ's miracles Tillich get's into a dispute about the meaning of the term miracle.

Student: Well, in catechism in Sunday school, we learned that miracles imply a "suspension of the laws of nature." I suppose that is as good a definition as any.
Dr. Tillich: Where did you learn this? It is very interesting. Because this is precisely the idea which I fiercely combat in all my work, whenever I speak of these things. Was that really taught in your catechism, or by the Sunday-school teacher, who could not do better because she had learned it from another Sunday-school teacher who also could not do better?

 Note: he does not say "what I'm against is any idea of the SN." He says what he's against is what the student just said "suspension of the laws of nature." That is exactly what Scheeben and Fairweather are saying.SN is not opposing natural it's leading it and working with it. It makes perfect sense that Tillich would know that even if he didn't read Scheeben (I would bet he did) becuase he read Dionysus and the latter was a major influence upon him. It's any and all notions of the SN that he's oppossing but the phony version worked up in the enlightenment as a straw man against what they perceived as scholasticism.
......This leads to a very important moment in the dialogue where is sounds like Tillich is saying that he's oppossed to any idea that God would have an effect in the world, but he's not saying that at all:

Dr. Tillich: Now if you define a miracle like this, then I would simply say that this is a demonic distortion of the meaning of miracle in the New Testament. And it is distorted because it means that God has to destroy his creation in order to produce his salvation. And I call this demonic, because God is then split in himself and is unable to express himself through his creative power. In truth, of course, there are many things that are miraculous, literally "things to be astonished about," from mirari in Latin, to be astonished. And if you refrain from defining miracles in this distorted, actually demonic, way, we can begin to talk intelligently about them.

 .....The unwary might take that and say "O he's against anything to do with an effect of God in the world because  he calls it demonic. What he calls demonic is the idea that God must hang up the natural process of  cause and effect and natural law in order to have an effect. His whole idea of miracles hinges upon this concept. That God has to destroy creation to produce salvation is what he's calling the demonic idea. Not the idea that God has an effect in the world. We know form System 2 that what God has an effect upon in the world is "new creation" and that goes along with valuing the presence of God and the experience of God. So for Tillich salvation doesn't disrupt nature but completes it or makes it new, repairs it. That's the very concept of Scheeben is talking about. He could not have represented Scheeben better if he had read him (and I bet he did). I said in my essay:

Scheeben deals with the distinction between natural and supernatural faith. Throughout his writings we see this typified in terms of the tendency of the power of God to elevate humanity to a higher spiritual level. This means consciousness as well as habit. He speaks of “supernatural effects,” the effect that the pull of the supernatural has upon the natural. This is why it’s valid to think of the supernatural as an ontology, it’s a description of reality, or what is. Empirically that description tends toward the realization of human consciousness reaching to a higher level as a result of certain kinds of experiences. Scheeben expresses this in terms of “higher nature.” Super nature is the higher nature to which human nature is being elevated.

Not breaking in  or destroying nature but elevating it (in the form of the human nature) to a higher level. To Quote Fairweather:

If the lower nature is raised in all of these respects to the level of a higher nature, and especially if this nature modifies the lower nature so deeply and affects it so powerfully that the limits of possibility are reached; if God, purest light and mightiest fire, wishes through to permeate his creature with his energy, to flood it with brightness and warmth to transform it into his own splendor, to make the creature like the father of spirits and impart to it the fullness of his own divine life, if I say, the entire being of the soul is altered in the deepest recesses and in all its ramifications to the very last, not by annihilation, but by exaltation and transfiguration. Then we can affirm that a new higher nature has come to the lower nature, because it has been granted a participation in the essence of him to whom the higher nature properly belongs.(3)

.......One possible bridge bewteen Scheeben and  Tillich might be Frederich Schleiemacher. He is known as the "father of liberal theology." He was most famous for his concept of the feeling of utter dependence. Also known for his ethical theory. He was a big influence upon Tillich. Now Schleiermacher had an idea that was similar to those of Scheeben in certain ways, even though he was a protestant and Scheeben was a Catholic. In The History of Christian Thought in writing about Schleiermacher Tillich says that "I can tell you autobiographically that one of  my first scientific inquiries into theology... dealt with the concept of naturalism and super naturalism in the period before Schleiermacher. Out of this study I gained insight into the intricacies of the concept of nature in these discussions which has influenced my thinking."(4) That study almost certainly had to include Scheeben but if it did not then it did include Schleiermacher. This is almost a guarantee that he he at the works of the one of the two and that he thought in those terms. In his discretion the latter he refers to him as ant-supernaturlist. He says that Supernaturlsitic theology tried to save the tradition with the same tools which naturalism used in trying to destroy it. (5) What he's calling "supernaturalist theology" is not Dionysus although it may include Schebeen but it may not. He's talking about the counterfeit, or what i I call the counterfeit..  The tools naturalism used to destroy the tradition were reason, logic, scinece. The point is the tools he wants them to use he might call by different names but they amount to mystical experience, phenomenology and existentialism.Now he develops a crucial idea that of two concepts of nature: material and formal. Material is what we call "nature" rocks, trees, biology, formal is human nature. (6) 

.......Humanity belongs to both forms of nature, the material and the formal. He sees us has having a mind and a spirit. (7) He can't be totally against any verion of the SN if he believes in a spirit. Now here is the kicker that demonstrates he has this third way between naturism which rejects God and the phony superanturslim (although he never calls it "phony" but it's not the original version in Dionysus) which turns God into a big man in the sky and miracles into a destruction of the natural realm. The premise that must be granted and bracketed for now is that he is pro Schliemermacher and Pro Hegel. That wont be hard to prove if challenged. He says how can we have this realm that is above the human level of nature. "Does God interfere and if so in what sense?"(8) He says these are problems with which all theology has to deal. They were the problems of Hegel and Schleiermacher both of whom both of whom tried to develop a theology which transcended naturalism and supernatrualism."(9) He says modern theology has to deal with it too. Now if one reads this bit of the work  one will see him speaking of the Enlightenment concept of Harmony. Being a liberal he's fond of the enlightenment. He doesn't' see the enlightenment as a bad thing, neither do I. I speak of the "counterfeit SN" and Tillich speaks of that a "supernaturalism." He does not put all enlgithement thinknig in that category. For him as for Schleiermacher and Hegel the answer is a harmony between nature and Sueprnature and it's all harmonized in God who created the whole and is being itself. We are all harmoniously related to this eternal necessary aspect of being and deriving our being from it. As such it effects new creation, it repairs creation it doesn't suspend or destroy it.

......Any quotes the atheists quote by Tillich form the Dialogue book or any other has to be understood in this light. So he is not saying away with all concepts of the supernatural and God can never have any influence on the world. He makes that quite clear in the Dialogue book:

In truth, of course, there are many things that are miraculous, literally "things to be astonished about," from mirari in Latin, to be astonished. And if you refrain from defining miracles in this distorted, actually demonic, way, we can begin to talk intelligently about them....The first thing I want to state here is that only in a correlative relationship between the subjective and the objective sides of the experience can we speak of a miracle. This is the reason why Jesus declined when the Pharisees and the scribes asked him to perform a "show" miracle — the kind of magic trick we might watch at country fairs. They asked him to do this, and he refused. This expresses the fact that miracles, in the sense in which he was involved in them, are events which have a particular significance to the person who experiences them. That is the one fundamental statement. Miracles are subjective-objective, subject-object-oriented, always in correlation, and never comprehensible in any other way. Not merely subjective, they are not merely objective, either.(10)

He's clearly not denying miracles per se. He's denying a certain aspect of them or a view of them. Now I am not obligated to agree with Tillich on everything he says. I think we was working under limitations that kept him form seeing these things they way I do. For one thing the good Lourdes rules were only about 40 years old when he went to the conference with Einstein and that really shaped his thinking about scinece. For another thing he didn't have the charismatic movement or the M scale of W.T. Stace's theories (he may or may not have known about they were written i the 50s) but he never know of Ralph Hood's empirical work in confirming Stace. So we don't know what he would think about any of that.

......

(1)  Ultimate Concern, Tillich in Dialogue by D.M. Brown.
(2)  Matthias Joseph Scheeben, Nature and Grace, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2009 (paperback) originally unpublished  1856.
for Fairweather's article on Scheeben:  Eugene R. Fairweather, “Christianity and the Supernatural,” in New Theology no.1.  New York: Macmillian, Martin E. Marty and Dean G. Peerman ed. 1964. 235-256.
(3) Fairweather, quoting Scheeben, op cit. 30
(4) Paul Tillich, History of Christian Thought, 330.
(5) ibid
(6) ibid, 331
(7) ibid
(8) ibid, 332
(9) ibid 
(10) Brown  op cit.

Atheists are Slave thinkers

On CARM we have a thread about something from nothing. This guy rued why why not? the Universe just popped into existence out of nothing and that's just as good as anything. He has a huge post and actually uses a bunch of references which is quite rare.

 For time-dependent processes with H(t) ≡ H0 + V (t) the scattering operator ˆ S has the form ˆ S = C0 : ˆ S0 eS :
where C0 is a normalization constant, eS describes creation and annihilation of particle–antiparticle pairs and their
scattering, and the exceptional part ˆ S0 describes creation and annihilation of single particles.

.......That is a sample.All it really means is he's trying to claim vacuum flux as proof of something from nothing. Atheists have been arguing this since before the late 90s when I came on the internet apologetic scene.I think they are starting to take my chiding seriously that I always doucment and they don't. None of the stuff quotes really supply any rel proof becuase there is none. I point this out.  I post a longer essay which is found on this blog about the Krauss book The Universe form Nothing and how it was debunked by David Albert. He proves that when physicists say "nothing" they don't mean real actual nothing they mean vacuum flux. That's like syaing the particles come out of more particles. So it' snot really noting the prior particles still require explanation (how did they come to be?). So really it's not proving much of anything. Then guy who did the original post starts to argue that this is something physicists say so you have to believe it. He didn't say that but he might as well have.


Originally Posted by boneso

Says you Meta, how many physics doctorates do you have? How many physics papers have you published which have been well received by the scientific community?

 Meta

 

David Albert has one. He ahs a doctorate in theoretical physics.

whether or not physicists believe in it is not the issue. there are physicists who believe in God some of them won the noble prize.



Boneso:

Of course you know better than everyone, after all you know better than Hawking, one of the most intelligent people on earth, all christians know better than all of the high IQ scientists, its weird how that works isn't it!

Meta:He's been discredited on that point, other physicists just as renown as he is believed in God.When I say he's been discredited I mean his book the Grand Design didn't take off it was exposed immediately for the publishers hype that it was. Hawking tried to argue it all comes down to gravity so we don't need God that did  not go over becasue two things became apparently:


(1) he didnt' say it the publisher did


(2) who made the gravity? or how'd it get here?

no physicists has the authority to tell you weahter or not God exits. they are not philosophers. they are not theologians they don't know the ultimate truth. you are just seeking authority figure to hide behind.

that proves you are not a free thinker. you are a slave and minion.

 Wait, wait  for it, you ant seen nothing yet!

Boneso
 I appreciate your input but your views seem to be based on other peoples opinions on the matter, in this case David Albert. 

 Holy irony BATMAN! This is the guy who was just saying that I have to have physicists to back up my opinion[. which by the way I do. that's who is the 18 foot notes I use. so when I have the docs tthen I'm taking my opinion for other people. he on the other hand is original and an independent thinker even though he talks like we can't believe something if physicists don't give us permission. he also had a bunch of foot notes to the Op so the change that I take my views from others because I have 18 foot notes can be made against him too.

Boneso

I am struggling to take it seriously now as i am worried that you have taken what David Albert has published as factual information. The mans publications are extremely vague and worded particularly casually. He fails to go into any depth in the hope that his writings can be read and understood by the layman, exact details are not something he feels neseccary to include in his work. He has even been known to have contradicting viewpoints from one publication to the next. Im sorry but if you have obtained your knowledge on this subject from David Albert, i cannot take it seriously. Try Matt Strassler or Hamlet Karo Avetissian.

 Of course he doesn't document any of this drivel. I doubt taht he knows who David Albert is. He teaches philosophy at Columbia, has a Ph.D. in theoretical phsyics, and trashed Krausse's book and was hailed by bloggers across the net as the victor. more more than one  blogger said "Albert own Krauss."

Look up any writer you will find people trashing him. Anyone who publishes much as a lot of jealous trolls saying stupid things about him. This guy of cousre doesn't bother to document any of the accusations.  Typical of the atheist slander machine to reach for the slander when he's backed in a corner.

 The brain washed lackies of the hate group just dont' know how to think. they are seeking God figure to hide behind who will give them permission to hold their beliefs and make them feel safe but they can't use the real God because they set themselves against him. Just in case some readers are tempted to think "O but if Christianity was valid there would be some physicists who believe it" there are many. Here are statements by some major physicists.

Fritz Shafer, nominated for Nobel Prize in Chemistry, University of Georgia, himself a Christian:	"it is very rare that a physical scientists is truly an atheist."
Martin Rees at Cambridge:	"The possibility of life as we know it depends upon a few basic values which are constants. And it is in some aspect remarkably sensitive to their heir numerical values. Nature does exhibit remarkable coincidences."
Arthur Schewhow, Nobel prize winner from Stanford, identifies himself as a Christian.	"We are fortunate to have the Bible which tells us so much about God in widely accessible terms."
Charlie Towns Nobel prize winner:	"The question of science seems to be unanswered if we explore from science alone. Thus I believe there is a need for some metaphysical or religious explanation. I believe in the concept of God an in his existence."
John Pokingham, theoretical physicist at Cambridge, left physics to become a minister.	"I believe that God exists and has made himself known in Jesus Christ."
Allan Sandage, The world's greatest observational cosmologist , Caregie observatories won a prize given by Swedish parliament equivalent to Nobel prize (there is no Nobel prize for cosmology) became a Christian after being a scientist,	"The nature of God is not found in any part of science, for that we must turn to the scriptures."

Shameful Display of Athiest Emotional Blackmail and Fallacous Reasoning

 



Here's a great example from CARM of how the atheist ideology and brain washing function to produce seamless team work in using fallacious reasoning and emotional blackmail. Notice how the atheist arguemnt fit together they say the same stuff without having to explain to each other the nature of a battle plan. This is second naturer to them becuase they've learned to think this way thorugh those long windeed sessions of agreeing with mocking and rieicle.

The objective they are going for here is to further the stereotype that people who believe God will heal people are insane nut cases who always wind up hurting people. In order to make this point they are going to use one example, that's all they ever document. they will assert that it represents many cases and they will not actually say it but they strongly imply this is the logical conclusion that results from prayer.

A certain poster on CARM (DARKLADY) who every single day of the world comes out with some tear jerking horror story about how evil God is, how cruel the God fo the bible the Bible is a big pile of crap. I finally faced them down with liberal theology to stop the hysteria over the OT so she shifts to modern examples. The title is "So pray for the sick and this is what happens" as though it happens all the time. This is always the result. It's documented in NY "the Daily News.Thursday, September 20, 2012. A boy in Oregon died in agony because his parents didn't believe in modern medicine. The couple were part of a group called General Assembly and Church of the First Born, This group may be a Pentecostal offshoot it's clearly considered a cult. There are sites warning about it.. It's a little over 100 churches in 20 states. Yet Darklady wants us to think this is the typical result of belief in prayer. She quotes several passages from the NT claiming that God will answer prayer:

Mark 9:29 And he said to them, “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.”

Mark 11:24 Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.

John 14:13-14 Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it





 then adds petulantly:

"the bible lies"

The implication is clearly that if you bleieve the Bible this is what will happen to you. her atheist comrades don't mis a beat in taking up the call:

Mark UK:

My first question: did the family abandon their faith as a result of this? Or did they go with "god must have had a purpose, and he's in heaven now, anyway" and dig themselves even deeper?

They should be prosecuted - he's a minor, and they're idiots (which isn't illegal, I know, but it bloody well should be).

Boneso:

Disgusting, absolutely disgusting! Having a son myself i dont know how anyone in this day and age can see their own child in agony and not seek professional medical care.

If they have not abandoned their faith after this then they should not be allowed to have anymore children!

Those sentiments of reproach are to be expected, even seconded. Then they don't waste any time getting to the point:

Boneso:

Even more disturbing to me is what is also in the article:

"In Oregon, faith-based healing isn’t a defense against manslaughter charges. The District Attorney’s office is working with churches to explain the law."

This tells me that there are states or regions in America where faith-based healing IS a defense against manslaughter, WTF?

now Christians are all Criminals using faith healing to commit crimes.

MarkUK

I searched for "USA faith-healing defense" and came up with an article titled "Oregon Senate votes to end faith healing murder defense", and many more on that theme. That means the defence must have been valid at some point. Appalling. If it's not a valid defence for first degree murder (in cases of human sacrifice), why does the parents' stupidity and credulity get them off the hook?

 Wait for it they start implying that this happens a lot.


 MFFJM2

 It is in fact the theists, especially Christians like the boy's parents, who must take the position thhat God has a plan, and that the boy's death though unfortunate is according to God's plan. The problem from a humanitarian perspective, regardless of your faith or lack of it, is that children need to be protected from parents that would harm them, even if the harm caused is due to fringe religious beliefs.

by the end of the thread Darklady has it worked out to a little formulation:

 Originally Posted by darklady

faith in the bible / faith in god / faith in prayer = dead child

the bible lies

as though  it's not a rarity it happens every  time.

 Diest:

 These people take the bible literally. They really are the honest ones. We see the result of believing the bible. 99.9% of Christians don't really believe the bible, and as Howard Homes said (where is he) are liars. They don't believe the bible because they take their dying and sick to hospitals and hope that HUMANS will heal them. Then, they have the unmitigated gall to say God worked through the doctor to cure their loved one, while the guy in the bed next to them had a prayer vigil and died a young man. Sick, sick thinking and humans are infected with this mental virus that I want wiped off the planet. That's why I post here.

 my emphasis. That's quite an endorsement for his objectivity hu? But atheists aren't a movement or anything. they are not a hate group now. they just want to wipe Christianity off the planet becuase they equate it with disease. That's at least that one guy (he's not the sharpest tool they have I'll grant you that I'm sure he doesn't speak for them all).



Originally Posted by JRT

So hold true to your faith and pray but hedge your bets with the best medical care available. Perhaps that is the way God will work her miracle. Instead of probationthey should have been sentence to be hospital volunteers for a year or two. The jails are two crowded.

 Notice how he tries to work up cognitive dissonance. To produce a sense of shame. "why do you use medicine if you believe in prayer?" Why do they want us to stop praying? I Gee I wonder!


 Such shotty reasoning. First of all he has no evidence of any kind that 99% don't believe the Bible. he's assuming so becuase he makes the idiotic assumption that if they believed the bible they would avoid modern medicine. of cousre there is no passage that says don't use medicine. No indications that most Christians understand the bible that way. No indication Luke gave up being a physician.

Look how seamlessly they take up the innuendo and imply the guilt by association without having to say to each other "let's do it this way." they just know becuase it's the natural outgrowth of the ideology then have indoctrinated with.

 A ridiculous and shameful display of the ind of pandering and emotional blackmail and fallacious reasoning that I associate with the right wing and the kkk .

The argument that God will guide the surgeon's skill or help the medicine work is a valid concept. That is not a matter of doubting the bible.

all of this is the result of the atheist straw man. We see at work here the atheist straw man to insist upon the most extreme most absurd cultist understanding o the most strident undies as quintessential Christianity.

emotional blackmail
argument from sign
guilt by association
straw man arguments.

Appeal to Authority is not a Fallacy: Antoher example of Orwellian Atheism.

Atheists are monkeying with the meaning of logic in order to destroy God arguments.

I am so sick of this nonsense. Every time I quote an expert on soemthing atheist go "that's just appeal to authority." then they turn around and quote Dawkins. They really think exert testimony is appeal to authority but if they quote a scientist then that's fact! Of cousre when I quote the scientists who do the studies on religious experience those are just preachers who don't know anything! (they are actually psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, and so on).

Appeal to authority is not a fallacy. That's right. It is never a fallacy to quote an expert. think about it. why do you quote a dictionary? Why turn to a dictionary for proof of a word definition? That's an authority. That's what dictionaries are they are authorities in terms of defining words. If appeal to authority is wrong, appeal to dictionary is wrong. If appeal to authority is wrong then appealing to scinece is wrong becuase scinece is an authority.

The real name for the fallacy is "Appeal to false authority," or "appeal to unnecessary authority." it really applies to situations like quoting your high school principal for matters that don't involve school administration. Or "my uncle John says we almost lost WWII in the battle of the bulge and he was in army so he should know." While the battle of the bulge was serious and perhaps it might have contributed to a German victory had we lost that battle, uncle John is not an authority on that just because he was in the army. Being one's uncle might have him authority over children in the family to some extent it does not make him an authority on military strategy.

It's would be idiocy to say "this quote from the world's greatest authroity on WWII is just an appeal to authority." In other words "appeal to the guy who knows is wrong." That is lunacy. Here are some authorities on logic who explain what they fallacy is about:

Nizkor Project

"Also Known as: Fallacious Appeal to Authority, Misuse of Authority, Irrelevant Authority, Questionable Authority, Inappropriate Authority, Ad Verecundiam "

An Appeal to Authority is a fallacy with the following form:

1. Person A is (claimed to be) an authority on subject S.
2. Person A makes claim C about subject S.
3. Therefore, C is true.

This fallacy is committed when the person in question is not a legitimate authority on the subject. More formally, if person A is not qualified to make reliable claims in subject S, then the argument will be fallacious.

This sort of reasoning is fallacious when the person in question is not an expert. In such cases the reasoning is flawed because the fact that an unqualified person makes a claim does not provide any justification for the claim. The claim could be true, but the fact that an unqualified person made the claim does not provide any rational reason to accept the claim as true.

When a person falls prey to this fallacy, they are accepting a claim as true without there being adequate evidence to do so. More specifically, the person is accepting the claim because they erroneously believe that the person making the claim is a legitimate expert and hence that the claim is reasonable to accept. Since people have a tendency to believe authorities (and there are, in fact, good reasons to accept some claims made by authorities) this fallacy is a fairly common one.

Since this sort of reasoning is fallacious only when the person is not a legitimate authority in a particular context, it is necessary to provide some acceptable standards of assessment. The following standards are widely accepted:

1. The person has sufficient expertise in the subject matter in question.

   Claims made by a person who lacks the needed degree of expertise to make a reliable claim will, obviously, not be well supported. In contrast, claims made by a person with the needed degree of expertise will be supported by the person's reliability in the area.

   Determining whether or not a person has the needed degree of expertise can often be very difficult. In academic fields (such as philosophy, engineering, history, etc.), the person's formal education, academic performance, publications, membership in professional societies, papers presented, awards won and so forth can all be reliable indicators of expertise. Outside of academic fields, other standards will apply. For example, having sufficient expertise to make a reliable claim about how to tie a shoe lace only requires the ability to tie the shoe lace and impart that information to others. It should be noted that being an expert does not always require having a university degree. Many people have high degrees of expertise in sophisticated subjects without having ever attended a university. Further, it should not be simply assumed that a person with a degree is an expert.

   Of course, what is required to be an expert is often a matter of great debate. For example, some people have (and do) claim expertise in certain (even all) areas because of a divine inspiration or a special gift. The followers of such people accept such credentials as establishing the person's expertise while others often see these self-proclaimed experts as deluded or even as charlatans. In other situations, people debate over what sort of education and experience is needed to be an expert. Thus, what one person may take to be a fallacious appeal another person might take to be a well supported line of reasoning. Fortunately, many cases do not involve such debate.

2. The claim being made by the person is within her area(s) of expertise.

   If a person makes a claim about some subject outside of his area(s) of expertise, then the person is not an expert in that context. Hence, the claim in question is not backed by the required degree of expertise and is not reliable.

   It is very important to remember that because of the vast scope of human knowledge and skill it is simply not possible for one person to be an expert on everything. Hence, experts will only be true experts in respect to certain subject areas. In most other areas they will have little or no expertise. Thus, it is important to determine what subject area a claim falls under.

   It is also very important to note that expertise in one area does not automatically confer expertise in another. For example, being an expert physicist does not automatically make a person an expert on morality or politics. Unfortunately, this is often overlooked or intentionally ignored. In fact, a great deal of advertising rests on a violation of this condition. As anyone who watches television knows, it is extremely common to get famous actors and sports heroes to endorse products that they are not qualified to assess. For example, a person may be a great actor, but that does not automatically make him an expert on cars or shaving or underwear or diets or politics.

About.com: Grammar and Compostion

Definition:

A fallacy in which a rhetor seeks to persuade an audience not by giving evidence but by appealing to the respect people have for the famous.

"Not every appeal to authority commits this fallacy, but every appeal to an authority with respect to matters outside his special province commits the fallacy. 'These pills must be safe and effective for reducing. They have been endorsed by Miss X, star of stage, screen, and television.'"
(W.L. Reese, Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion. Humanities Press, 1980)

Philosophy lander.edu

Abstract: The argument from irrelevant appeal to authority is characterized and shown to be sometimes persuasive but normally fallacious.

I. Argumentum ad Verecundiam: (authority) the fallacy of appealing to the testimony of an authority outside his special field. Anyone can give opinions or advice; the fallacy only occurs when the reason for assenting to the conclusion is based on following the improper authority.
	A. Occasionally, this argument is called the "argument from prestige" and is based on the belief that prestigious people cannot be wrong. In these cases, the fallacy is best termed the "snob appeal" variety of the ad populum.
	B. Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between the ad verecundiam and the ad populum (q.v., ad populum) when the authority cited is a group with status.
		Consider this example from an popular logic text: "Those who say that astrology is not reliable are mistaken. The wisest men of history have all been interested in astrology, and kings and queens of all ages have guided the affairs of nations by it."
	C. The informal structure generally has the basic pattern:
		Authority on subject x, L says accept statement p. p is outside the scope of subject x. p is true.
	D. Many advertising campaigns are built on this fallacy. Popular sports figures, musicians, or actors endorse products and, in proper context, this fact is offered as a reason we should use those products.

Athiests re re-writing the rules:

here's how blog Advocatus Atheist changes the rule:

The appeal to authority may be the most widely relied upon informal fallacy there is. Of course the reason for this is most likely biological and psychological. From infancy we have no choice but to rely on the protection and safety of higher powers. These powers are usually represented by our parents and guardians, elders, leaders, and governments. It is also why many people, once fully actualized adults, still seek authority figures in their lives. Without a King, or President, or a functioning government--most people wouldn't have the structure they need in their lives--a structure which reflects their entire upbringing since the day they were born.

Indeed, society as a whole is largely structured with authority in mind. It is why armies need dictators, militaries rely on governments, the pious rely on the priests, and so on and so forth. It is no wonder then that we innately appeal to authority when we are trying to justify our desires, needs, as well as actions.

What I am concerned with here, however, is a specific form of authority used in academia. It is the argument from authority. Now, the appeal to authority is one means in gaining support to justify an argument, idea, or belief. Basically any position we take must be validated before it can become formally accepted. If you write a book on the history of George Washington, it helps to cite historians, and better yet, historians whose expertise is centered on the time and place of your topic. Another important factor is whether there is a consensus on the relevant information. Do the experts agree?

He sites Plantinga talking about the modal argument as the fallacy. Plantinga is probably one of the top experts on the modal arguemnt in the world today. Of course it's not a fallacy to use his expert opinion. But atheist hate this because he believes in God and he supports the Modal argument. So they change the rules to wipe out God supporters, but do they continue using Dawkins as an authority?

another example About.com

Definition:

Also known as argumentum ad verecundiam, an appeal to authority is an informal fallacy which involves arguing that we should accept a claim simply because of some personal feature of the individual who makes the claim.

Sometimes, such an appeal can be legitimate - but usually it is illegitimate. The appeal to authority is a mirror image of the ad hominem argumen

He just leaves out the bit about the unnecessary stuff. This gives the impression that quotes experts is a fallacy, then contradicts itself by tossing in "this can be legitimate" but not saying how or when.

Debuncking Atheist Fortress of Facts part 2

Karl Popper

Notice how in the comment section in part 1 and atheist asserts "it's a fact there are no Gods." If it is a fact it's not gleaned from science. So it must be made known through that old no good Philosophy that CARM atheists are always running down. If so I'd like to see their argument. Where do you suppose it is? I think it's with the rest of the imaginary fortress of facts, which is actually a house of cards.

footnote numbers taken over from part 1.

Not Facts but Verisimilitude:

Karl Popper (1902-1994) is one of the most renewed and highly respected figures in the philosophy of science. Popper was from Vienna, of Jewish origin, maintained a youthful flirtation with Marxism, and left his native land due to the rise of Nazism in the late thirties. He is considered to be among the ranks of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. Popper is highly respected by scientists in a way that most philosophers of science are not.[15]

He was also a social and political philosopher of considerable stature, a self-professed ‘critical-rationalist’, a dedicated opponent of all forms of scepticism, conventionalism, and relativism in science and in human affairs generally, a committed advocate and staunch defender of the ‘Open Society’, and an implacable critic of totalitarianism in all of its forms. One of the many remarkable features of Popper's thought is the scope of his intellectual influence. In the modern technological and highly-specialised world scientists are rarely aware of the work of philosophers; it is virtually unprecedented to find them queuing up, as they have done in Popper's case, to testify to the enormously practical beneficial impact which that philosophical work has had upon their own. But notwithstanding the fact that he wrote on even the most technical matters with consummate clarity, the scope of Popper's work is such that it is commonplace by now to find that commentators tend to deal with the epistemological, scientific and social elements of his thought as if they were quite disparate and unconnected, and thus the fundamental unity of his philosophical vision and method has to a large degree been dissipated.[16]

Unfortunately for our purposes we will only be able to skim the surface of Popper’s thoughts on the most crucial aspect of this theory of science, that science is not about proving things but about falsifying them.

Above we see that Dawkins, Stenger and company place their faith in the probability engineered by scientific facts. The problem is probability is not the basis upon which one chooses one theory over another, at least according to Popper. This insight forms the basis of this notion that science can give us verisimilitude not “facts.” Popper never uses the phrase “fortress of facts,” we could add that, science is not a fortress of facts. Science is not giving us “truth,” its’ giving something in place of truth, “verisimilitude.” The term verisimilar means “having the appearance of truth, or probable.” Or it can also mean “depicting realism” as in art or literature.”[17] According to Popper in choosing between two theories one more probable than the other, if one is interested I the informative content of the theory, one should choose the less probable. This is paradoxical but the reason is that probability and informative content very inversely. The higher informative content of a theory is more predictive since the more information contained in a statement the greater the number of ways the statement will turn out to fail or be proved wrong. At that rate mystical experience should be the most scientific view point. If this dictum were applied to a choice between Stenger’s atheism and belief in God mystical God belief would be more predictive and have less likelihood of being wrong because it’s based upon not speaking much about what one experiences as truth. We will see latter that this is actually the case in terms of certain kinds of religious experiences. I am not really suggesting that the two can be compared. They are two different kinds of knowledge. Even though mystical experience per se can be falsified (which will be seen in subsequent chapters) belief in God over all can’t be. The real point is that arguing that God is less probable is not a scientifically valid approach.

Thus the statements which are of special interest to the scientist are those with a high informative content and (consequentially) a low probability, which nevertheless come close to the truth. Informative content, which is in inverse proportion to probability, is in direct proportion to testability. Consequently the severity of the test to which a theory can be subjected, and by means of which it is falsified or corroborated, is all-important.[18]

Scientific criticism of theories must be piecemeal. We can’t question every aspect of a theory at once. For this reason one must accept a certain amount of background knowledge. We can’t have absolute certainty. Science is not about absolute certainty, thus rather than speak of “truth” we speak of “verisimilitude.” No single observation can be taken to falsify a theory. There is always the possibility that the observation is mistaken, or that the assumed background knowledge is faulty.[19] Uneasy with speaking of “true” theories or ideas, or that a corroborated theory is “true,” Popper asserted that a falsified theory is known to be false. He was impressed by Tarski’s 1963 reformulation of the corresponded theory of truth. That is when Popper reformulated his way of speaking to frame the concept of “truth-likeness” or “verisimilitude,” according to Thronton.[20] I wont go into all the ramifications of verisimilitude, but Popper has an extensive theory to cover the notion. Popper’s notions of verisimilitude were critixized by thinkers in the 70’s such as Miller, Tichy’(grave over the y) and Grunbaum (umlaut over the first u) brought out problems with the concept. In an attempt to repair the theory Popper backed off claims to being able to access the numerical levels of verisimilitude between two theories.[21] The resolution of this problem has not diminished the admiration for Popper or his acceptance in the world of philosophy of science. Nor is the solution settled in the direction of acceptance for the fortress of facts. Science is not closer to the fact making business just because there are problems with verisimilitude.

Science doesn’t prove but Falsifies

The aspect of Popper’s theory for which he is best known is probably the idea of falsification. In 1959 He published the Logic of Scientific Discovery in which he rigorously and painstakingly demonstrated why science can’t prove but can only disprove, or falsify. Popper begins by observing that science uses inductive methods and thus is thought to be marked and defined by this approach. By the use of the inductive approach science moves from “particular statements,” such as the result of an experiment, to universal statements such as an hypothesis or theories. Yet, Popper observes, the fallacy of this kind of reasoning has always been known. Regardless of how many times we observe white swans “this does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white.”[22] He points out this is the problem of universal statements, which can’t be grounded in experience because experience is not universal, at least not human experience. One might observe this is also a problem of empirical observation. Some argue that we can know universal statements to be true by experience; this is only true if the experiences are universal as well. Such experience can only be a singular statement. This puts it in the same category with the original problem so it can’t do any better.[23] The only way to resolve the problem of induction, Popper argues, is to establish a principle of induction. Such a principle would be a statement by which we could put inductive inferences into logically acceptable form. He tells us that upholders of the need for such a principle would say that without science can’t provide truth or falsehood of its theories.[24]

The principle can’t be a purely logical statement such as tautology or a prori reasoning, if it could there would be no problem of induction. This means it must be a synthetic statement, empirically derived. Then he asked “how can we justify statement on rational grounds?” [25] After all he’s just demonstrated that an empirical statement can’t be the basis of a universal principle. Then to conclude that there must be a universal principle of logic that justifies induction knowing that it ahs to be an empirical statement, just opens up the problem again. He points out that Reichenbach[26] would point that such the principle of induction is accepted by all of science.[27] Against Reinchenback he sties Hume.[28] Popper glosses over Kant’s attempt at a prori justification of syetnic a priori statements.[29] In the end Popper disparages finding a solution and determines that induction is not the hallmark of science. Popper argues that truth alludes science since it’s only real ability is to produce probability. Probability and not truth is what science can produce. “…but scientific statements can only attain continuous degrees of probability whose unattainable upper and lower limits are truth and falsity’.”[30] He goes on to argue against probability as a measure of inductive logic.[31] Then he’s going to argue for an approach he calls “deductive method of testing.. In this case he argues that an hypothesis can only be empirically tested and only after it has been advanced. [32]

What has been established so far is enough to destroy the fortress of facts of idea. The defeat of a principle of induction as a means of understanding truth is primary defeat for the idea that science is going about establishing a big pile of facts. What all of this is driving at of course is the idea that science is not so much the process of fact discovery as it is the process of elimination of bad idea taken as fact. Science doesn’t prove facts it disproves hypotheses.. Falsifying theories is the real business of science. It’s the comparison to theory in terms of what is left after falsification has been done that makes for a seeming ‘truth-likeness,’ or verisimilitude. Falsification is a branch of what Popper calls “Demarcation.” This issue refers to the domain or the territory of the scientists work. Induction does not mark out the proper demarcation. The criticism he is answering in discussing demarcation is that removing induction removes for science it’s most important distinction from metaphysical speculation. He states that this is precisely his reason for rejecting induction because “it does not provide a suitable distinguishing mark of the empirical non metaphysical character of a theoretical system,”[33] this is what he calls “demarcation.”

Popper writes with reference to positivistic philosophers as the sort of umpires of scientific mythology. He was a philosopher and the project of the positivists was to “clear away the clutter” (in the words of A.J. Ayer) for science so it could get on with it’s work. Positivistic philosophers were the janitors of science. Positivists had developed the credo that “meaningful statements” (statements of empirical science) must be statements that are “fully decided.” That is to say, they had to be both falsifiable and verifiable. The requirement for verifiable is really a requirement similar to the notion of proving facts, or truth. Verifiability is not the same thing as facticiy or proof it’s easy to see how psychologically it reinforces th sense that science is about proving things. He quotes several positivists in reinforcing this idea: Thus Schlick says: “. . . a genuine statement must be capable of conclusive verification” Waismann says, “If there is no possible way to determine whether a statement is true then that statement has no meaning whatsoever. For the meaning of a statement is the method of its verification.”[34] Yet Popper disagrees with them. He writes that there is no such thing as induction. He discusses particular statements which are verified by experience just opens up the same issues he launched in the beginning one cannot derive universal statements from experience. “Therefore, theories are never theories are never empirically verifiable. He argues that the only way to deal with the demarcation problem is to admit statements that are not empirically verified.[35]

But I shall certainly admit a system as empirical or scientific only if it

is capable of being tested by experience. These considerations suggest

that not the verifiability but the falsifiability of a system is to be taken as a

criterion of demarcation. In other words: I shall not require of a

Scientific system that it shall be capable of being singled out, once and

for all, in a positive sense; but I shall require that its logical form shall

be such that it can be singled out, by means of empirical tests, in a

negative sense: it must be possible for an empirical scientific system to be refuted by experience.[36]

What this means in relation to the “fortress of facts” idea is that it transgresses upon the domain of science. Compiling a fortress of facts is beyond the scope of science and also denudes science of it’s domain.

He deals with the objection that science is supposed to give us positive knowledge and to reduce it to a system of falsification only negates its major purpose. He deals with this by saying this criticism carries little weight since the amount of positive information is greater the more likely it is to clash. The reason being laws of nature get more done the more they act as a limit on possibility, in other words, he puts it, “not for nothing do we call the laws of nature laws. They more they prohibit the more they say.”[37]

sources

[15] Steven Thornton, “Karl Popper,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Winter 2011 edition Edward N. Zalta Editor, URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2011/entries/popper/ vested 2/6/2012

[16] ibid

[17] Miriam-Webster. M-W.com On line version of Webster’s dictionary. URL: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/verisimilar?show=0&t=1328626983 visited 2/7/2012

[18] Thornton, ibid.

[19] ibid

[20] ibid

[21] ibid

[22] Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London, New York:Routledge Classics, original English publication 1959 by Hutchison and co. by Routldege 1992. On line copy URL: http://www.cosmopolitanuniversity.ac/library/LogicofScientificDiscoveryPopper1959.pdf digital copy by Cosmo oedu visited 2/6/2012, p4

[23] ibid

[24] ibid

[25] ibid, 5

[26] Hans Reinchenbach (1891-1953) German philosopher, attended Einstein’s lectures and contributed to work on Quantum Mechanics. He fled Germany to escape Hitler wound up teaching at UCLA.

[27] Popper, ibid, referece to , H. Reichenbach, Erkenntnis 1, 1930, p. 186 (cf. also pp. 64 f.). Cf. the penultimate paragraph of Russell’s chapter xii, on Hume, in his History of Western Philosophy, 1946,

p. 699.

[28] ibid, Popper, 5

[29] ibid, 6

[30] ibid 6

[31] ibid, 7

[32] ibid

[33] ibid 11

[34] ibid, 17, references to Schlick, Naturwissenschaften 19, 1931, p. 150. and Waismann, Erkenntnis 1, 1903, p. 229.

[35] Ibid 18

[36] ibid

[37] ibid, 19 the quotation about laws is found on p 19 but the over all argument is developed over sections 31-46 spanning pages 95-133.