Imagine yourself starting from zilch, faced with the world before your eyes and equipped with the brain you have today. It seems that given two ideas that you may come up with to account for yourself and the place you find yourself in, that the one that posits that some entity has made you and all of this wins hands down over the one that it all fell together by chance. This idea is surely an example of inductive reasoning (well - put like this anyway); you gather the evidence of order before your eyes, and you induce (Intuit?) that something must be responsible for that order. You then test this by further examination of this order, going deeper and deeper, getting more and more complex - and each successive revelation is taken of yet further evidence of the original Ordering Principal (the Prime Mover if you like). But suddenly you change tack; you decide that your accruing evidence, rather than pointing toward the existence of your intuited Ordering Principal, instead points away from it. And further, that the OP must always be relegated to the bottom of the pile in any explanatory framework you care to construct. Now you have achieved (the) enlightenment.wayfriend wrote:Peter, wouldn't you agree that a theory that "aliens did it" or "god did it" should, at minimum, be pursued by scientists with the same rigor and integrity as any other theory? If so, then would you not say that, if there is no evidence of any kind implicating such culprits, then they are not a suitable hypothesis?
The problem with Aliens and Gods is, you can always claim they are a possibility with no evidence at all to suggest it. Because they are always capable of all things. You can never NOT rule it out. Like you can never rule out Magic. That's why they call these theories "magical thinking" - because they require no evidence of actuality to be posited.
Aliens and Gods can always be a theory, but theories need supporting evidence to be valid, and if you hold out for theories with no supporting evidence, you're not being a scientist. Just as you would not be a scientist if there was actual evidence and you discounted it because it leads to aliens or God.
What changed; Certainly not the (existent or otherwise) Ordering Principal.