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Tom
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 10/5/2009 8:20 AM (GMT -6) |   | | | |
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Starkman
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Date Joined Oct 2001
Total Posts : 1747
| Posted 10/8/2009 3:37 PM (GMT -6) | | Similtude said...
Testability cuts both ways. Suppose I start with the assumption that I'm not designed to apprehend. How could I test that I in fact am apprehending when I'm having conscious experience? As Lewis said, you can't prove there are proofs, and you can't prove there are not proofs. Thus, epistemology can never be the study of WHETHER we apprehend, but HOW we apprehend. But to say we apprehend in the ways we think we do is bald assertion if everything has to be tested to be believed. I can't test whether properties inhere in beings, but I can't quit thinking that way. I can't test whether events are caused, but I can't quit thinking that way. Similarly, I can't test whether there are ends, but I can't quit thinking that way. And neither can Flew.
I ain't no philosopher, and heavens knows I am horrible with logic, but a few things strike me about your statements.
Just because you start with the assumption that you are not designed to apprehend is a) not necessarily a true assumption; and b) requires apprehension to conclude that you aren't designed to apprehend.
Next, To test if you are apprehending, read something, like a simple math formula (or even this post I'm writing!), and see if you understand it. (If you don't, you've at least apprehended that you didn't apprehend it, and I'll do my best to screw your thinking up even more as I try to explain just what the hek I mean!)
If Epistemology is the study of HOW, and not WHETHER, we apprehend, that itself requires that we FIRST apprehend; which is to say that we do apprehend.
Finally, if seems clear that if you can't quit thinking in a certain way, then you are only demonstrating that that particuarl way of thinking is possible and, in fact, taking place at the time you can't quit thinking of, or by means of, it.
Now maybe you can't prove that the way you think is the way everyone else thinks, but that's irrelevant in regard to the matter of YOU apprehending and YOU thinking.
Again, I'm not philosopher and I can't logic my way too well beyond common sense, so go easy on me!
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Similitude
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Date Joined Apr 2004
Total Posts : 4968
| Posted 10/9/2009 6:18 AM (GMT -6) | | |
Starkman, I'm not sure what you're addressing. The issue was "testability." The problem for the a-teleologist, which FLew once was, is that they have to posit that their apprehensive capacities came about not by design but by chance or without cause. Plantinga has shown that what follows from such accounts is that much of what we believe could be false and we wouldn't and couldn't know it. We would be like Neo, IOW--thinking we were apprehending, but not necessarily actually apprehending. And our ability to account for that fact by the same relations we normally trust renders the argument valid. No one to my knowledge has refuted Plantinga's argument. It has the form of a mathematical proof by contradiction, I think. In that sense, it's an explicit fleshing out of the full implications of Lewis's argument in Miracles, etc.
Thus, atheists have as big a problem with "testing" as any theist does. So Flew's argument about testing has no relevance to the debate over the existence of God. In particular, any argument for the A-teleological evolution of a human, including the human thinking apparatus/capacities, is self-defeating for the very reasons Plantinga gives.
Post Edited (Similtude) : 10/9/2009 6:25:49 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 10/9/2009 7:26 AM (GMT -6) | | | | |
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Similitude
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Date Joined Apr 2004
Total Posts : 4968
| Posted 10/10/2009 12:41 PM (GMT -6) | | The basic problem with the view that the mind is not designed to apprehend is that it requires blind faith for virtually all beliefs relevant to science. And yet it is scientists embracing scientism that claim the mind (even the brain) is not designed to apprehend. Lewis made the very same argument that Plantinga does in the generic form. Plantinga takes specific naturalistic theories and shows how they do not escape the conclusions of Lewis. But that is to be expected. Because the a-teleological view of macroevolution is completely a-plausible in the first place, even ASSUMING we are designed to apprehend.
At least in Darwin's day, before we knew anything about DNA and genetics, variation occurred, but no one knew how. Thus, analogical reasoning applied to the known microevolution of his time was merely a form of extreme extrapolation. This was problematic enough, because people already thought their own mind was designed to apprehend. Thus, it was plausible for them to assume that their eyes were for seeing since seeing is related to apprehension, as we understand apprehension. Thus, it was also perfectly consistent with analogical reasoning to assume that the eyes of dinosaurs were for seeing, as well. But if that was the case, then final causes were involved in the origin of dinosaur eyes just as they were with human eyes. So there were too kinds of analogically-grounded hypotheses in competition with one another.
But in Darwin's day, one could at least argue that the final cause(s) involved in biological origins, if there were any, conceivably could have preceded all events prior to the origin of some original life form, from which everything else naturalistically descended. But how were we to test that? It turned out that the morphological/anatomical gaps in the fossil record were never filled. So that test failed. It turned out that ubiquitous amounts of convergent evolution had to be posited to salvage the hypothesis, thereby rendering purely circumstantial the claim that similarity indicated common ancestry/descent. So the only conceivable tests failed, leaving the involvement of final causes in the origins of particular critters a viable, competing hypothesis.
Then we learned about DNA and genetics. Almost no modern macroevolutionists claims that the genetic mechanisms that cause the observed, day-to-day microevolution of critters are responsible for macroevolutionary transformations. The big, hypothetical transformations are believed to be caused by random mutations acting upon duplicated DNA over millions of years. Thus, per macroevolutionists, the kind of variation we observe is not caused by the same mechanisms that cause the variation that is inferred. But, then, there goes the analogical grounding of the hypothesis. Moreover, no one has any reason to believe that such random mutations can produce the hypothetical intermediates. much less produce the kinds of reproductive variation in the posited time frame with any realistic probability (cause when we're applying probability to permutations and combinations in DNA space, the numbers are astronomically huge). Thus, we lost the analogical-grounding and we're left with just a-plausible claims.
So molecular biologists came up with the molecular clock hypothesis to see if would could find a strong correlation between mutation rates and supposed biological origin timings. The biological origin timings were based on first known fossil occurrences of various critters. It turned out that the molecular clocks gave contradictory results for different proteins. Moreover, the clocks were calibrated against certain fossil-based biological origin times, only to contradict other biological origin timings based on other fossils. Thus, that approach has not succeeded as a test either.
What is wierd is the fossil record, itself. Stratigraphic ranges have increased continually (sometimes by huge orders of magnitude), rendering the notion that we know anything about biological origin timings from fossils alone less and less credible. We have no strong analogical arguments that help us deduce why the temporal gaps in the fossil record are what they are on taphonomic and sedimentary grounds. Thus, the fossil record is not only problematic as a source of inference to biological origin timings currently, but for all we know, as stratigraphic ranges continue to increase, it may become more and more problematic. That will render the fossil record virtually irrelevant as evidence for any view of biological origins at all--even the successive creation view, which, for now, doesn't have to explain the non-contemporaneity of most critters in the fossil record or the absence of millions of hypothetical transitional critters. All the data is not in, IOW, and many hypothetical, geneaological trees have been wrecked from the stratigraphic range increases we have already discovered.
In summary, it is not surprising that Flew has finally abandoned his over-simplified views about testing and theism. When you read folks like Lewis, Plantinga, Porter, etc, and then also assess how very little we know that could render an a-teleological approach to macroevolution plausible, there is nothing about that view that is testable or plausible in the first place. Indeed, there is a an atheist legal scholar (I think his name is Lawrence Tribe) who finds both a-teleological macroevolution and theism so implausible (a-plausible?) that he believes neither!!
I think a lot of the problem has to do with a category mistake we tend to make. Even Plantinga says that naturalistic abiogenesis seems extremely implausible but then says "Of course God could have done it that way if He chose to." But that makes no sense. For "that way" MEANS naturalistically except for some earlier, primordial final cause. IOW, to say that God could have produced life naturalistically, with the only final causes involved being entailed in the very first moment(s) of some "big bang" billions of years earlier, is equivalent to saying that that view is logically possible. But the only way we can know that such a process is logically possible is by knowing there is some conceivable set of laws and some conceivable set of beings such that those laws (plus any additional probabilistically-constrained indeterminancy at the subatomic level), given the posited time, will result in abiogenesis. But that would require a mind-boggling amount of knowledge no human has. Thus, NO HUMAN knows, apart from divine revelation, that it is logically possible for that to occur. Thus, NO HUMAN, apart from divine revelation, could know that "God could have done it that way." Thus, even that claim is a bald, a-plausible claim apart from divine revelation.
So the bottom line is, there is nothing that scientists know that even comes close to being problematic for theism that is not problematic for human apprehension in the first place. There is exactly one concern for those who believe in benevolent theism, and that's the problem of "natural evil." That one has the possibility of rendering certain theistic claims incoherent. But if we find that to be the case, we just go back to the drawing board and re-synthesize a theistic view that is coherent. If it's not as "feel good" as we like, we have to live with that. If it involves a-plausible claims, that, per se, is not problematic. Coherence is crucial, though.
Post Edited (Similtude) : 10/10/2009 2:00:13 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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