Zarathustra wrote:I don't have time for every point here , but to get started off the top of my head:
Mongnihilo wrote:
I wrote:The Jesus myth does not include the possibility that he alone had access to alien technology. It's a story about the Son of God. We can reject this conjecture on the basis of its alleged supernatural elements alone, just as we would reject any myth containing supernatural elements ... such a rejection is based on methodological naturalism, not appeal to credulity.
Absence of evidence does not equal evidence of absence. You cannot disprove the existence of a phenomenon simply because you are unable to rationalize it or propose a method whereby it can be accomplished that satisfies your sensibilities. As said before, all you can do is consider the matter inductively which introduces a probability calculus, albeit one with uncertain veracity.
I'm not trying to prove or disprove anything. I'm describing criteria by which we can (or should) treat hypothetical entities, treatment which can include anything from dismissal, to consideration, to acceptance. I don't think you have to disprove something to dismiss it, nor do you have to prove something to accept it. Rational explanations can be formulated (with the assumption of falliblism, not proof), and their acceptance depends on whether they are
good explanations, not "proven existence of phenomenon X."
No supernatural explanation can ever be a good explanation. The reason? Because literally anything can happen once you introduce them. There are no limits. As explanations, they are utterly ambiguous, because there's no way to distinguish the idea of Athena causing phenomenon X or magical Elves causing phenomenon X. The introduction of, "... and then a miracle happened," can never be part of a good explanation, because it explains nothing. It's logically the same as saying, "... and then something inexplicable happened."
Therefore, since supernatural explanations explain nothing, account for nothing, and this situation can never be improved, it is entirely reasonable to dismiss supernatural phenomena solely on the basis of their explanatory power (or lack thereof), without even consulting the evidence (or lack thereof). It's not an empirical argument. To speak of the supernatural is to speak of nothing in the world, nothing that explains anything in the world, and nothing that features in any explanation of things in the world. It can't even be stated with any specificity. It's gibberish. What *is* a deity? The concept has no positive content, aside from its vague anthropomorphisms.
Whether or not Christ’s miracles were in fact miraculous has nothing to do with whether they occurred as a phenomenon. You are conjoining several issues, one of which is the existence of the phenomenon, another is the reporting and interpretation of said phenomenon, and this conjoined pair is used as support for your final, eschatological proposition that religion is a destructive evil force that serves no useful purpose and must be stopped.
The existence of the phenomenon of Christ’s miracles can neither be proved nor disproved. The account of them can be questioned and criticized, but it has no bearing on the phenomenon. Simply because the account is fantastical doesn’t make the phenomenon unreal. Consider for instance the plagues of Egypt, as a sort of thought experiment. Most people would probably assume that while the supernatural origin of the plagues is dubious, the account most likely has some basis in fact. This is because we know that the ancients did not understand germ theory and so God-free events might be interpreted as the willful acts of a wrathful deity.
In what way does Schrodinger’s Cat, the double slit experiment, and Gödel’s theorem suggest to you that the universe is fundamentally explicable.
Gödel's theorem deals with invented formal systems, not anything in the real world. Schrodinger's Cat can be explained with the multiple worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (for which physicist David Deutch claims there is overwhelming evidence).
Actually it deals with axiomatic systems, which could include an hypothetical set of natural laws whereby the entirety of creation is logically explained as a continuum of cause-and-effect. You can try to hide it but your metaphysical determinist slip still shows.
The mere fact of phenomenon does not prove that said phenomenon can also be successfully rationalized. And that is what you are really talking about when you use the word “explicable.” Rationalized means assembled into a coherent narrative (causality, continuity, time) that appeals to the human intellect. Yes, certain phenomena can be rationalized within certain bounds, provided that a set of phenomena can be assembled into models with explanatory and predictive power. Yet even there, some of the most comprehensively predictive models are some of the least explanatory – and it really shouldn’t be necessary to refer to quantum mechanics at this point. There is a model that defies all attempts to rationalize it.
Again, you speak of proof. I can't stress enough that I'm not talking about proof. The assumption that any given physical phenomenon can be explained is justified in several ways. First of all, the success of science itself makes a compelling case for the universe being fundamentally explicable. Science didn't have to work at all. For instance, there is nothing intuitively obvious in the idea that the force of gravity falls off at the square of the distance between objects. It could have fallen off at completely random rates. The same goes for every other force. Or every phenomenon we encounter. A genetic mechanism that spells out our biological "blueprint?" A way to measure the chemical composition of distant stars? Who could have imagined these things 1000 years ago? That fact that it took so long to discover science shows that we're not merely forcing our inborn prejudices upon the world. Evolution didn't shape us to
prefer these kinds of explanations. We had to "drag them" out of reality "kicking and screaming." And once we did, we realized they worked in millions of other contexts, for millions of other phenomenon, that we never expected.
Once we learned to think this way, we began to see that there's not a single area of physical reality which resists a rational explanation, i.e. science. And conversely, every previous supernatural explanation was shown to have a natural counterpart that explained the phenomenon much better. There's not a single supernatural explanation that survives the Enlightenment, except perhaps Creation itself (though quantum cosmology will likely put that to rest, too).
But in addition to the success of rational explanation as an empirical, historical fact, there is also the rational argument: the insistence upon entities which can't be explained is itself an inexplicable assumption. On what basis can one be insistent in this matter? How could you know, for instance, that a given phenomenon is beyond explanation in principle, rather than merely in practice? Given the overwhelming failure of every single supernatural explanation of the past, the expectation for one to succeed in the present (or future) can only be based on wishful thinking that runs 180 degrees counter to hundreds of years of evidence. It's irrational to suppose that the world is in any way irrational. The hypothesis itself has no rational justification.
What about things like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which introduce limits to our knowledge? Well, there is a difference between a particular value being known and a phenomenon being explained. The introduction of a limit to our knowledge doesn't mean that which lies on the other side of this limit is irrational or inexplicable. Momentum doesn't become supernatural or magical just because you've measured position and hence reduced certainty of the other variable in this conjugate pair.
Z., thank you for sharing your cosmogony of ‘scientific’ metaphysical determinism. A phenomenon is not an entity, obviously, the entity lies in the mind – being the idea of a thing that is based upon certain essentially unverifiable assumptions or heuristics.
Truly, I don’t think it’s worth continuing this conversation at present, although I may do so at a later time. But I think if you consider the fervent, dualistic, and eschatological bent of much of your thinking here, you will have to admit that more than the merely reasonable is occurring. Feel free to indulge in it, though.
