127 Comments

1. #1 Leo says:
   28 Feb 2012, 8:04 am  

   Peter, in my opinion you write too much about the essays you are going to write, instead of going directly to the point and just write them. Too much prelude for the real thing, I hope you change that and make them briefer.

2. #2 Peter Hurford (author) says:
   28 Feb 2012, 11:15 am  

   That criticism is fair enough, I’ve edited down the intro a bit and I’ll work on being a little less rambly in the future. Hopefully you found the essay useful otherwise, or will find it useful when it is more complete. Thank you for your feedback!

3. #3 Tom Mitchell says:
   28 Feb 2012, 12:45 pm  

   I disagree.

   The more you try to manifest your ideas in writing the more they evolve. Fine if you do not want to read all the legwork; you don’t have to, but it benefits the ideas.

   The more I think about it, the more I respect the practice of full-disclosure of intentionality. Too often indviduals or organizations present a polished product while hiding the dirt and grime of the process that created it. Personally, I find just as much to learn from the process of Peter’s thought as I do the content.

4. #4 Tom Mitchell says:
   28 Feb 2012, 8:44 pm  

   A statement partially made against the deception of finished products being covertly polished and represent<- Irony

5. #5 Peter Hurford (author) says:
   28 Feb 2012, 8:50 pm  

   @Tom:

   Hah, yeah. My longstanding policy for when people mess up their comment (leaving their name off or meaning to combine the two or saying “edit this for me”) is, if no comments have come after them, edit them as necessary. Hope you don’t mind, but I see the irony!

6. #6 Tom Mitchell says:
   28 Feb 2012, 8:56 pm  

   I don’t. I left a mistake or two in the last post to see if you would fix it…. hahah or I was just typing too fast.

7. #7 Peter Hurford (author) says:
   28 Feb 2012, 8:59 pm  

   I don’t edit for grammar or spelling, I only edit if someone splits their comment by accident or deliberately says they messed up their previous comment in a specific way.

8. #8 Tom Mitchell says:
   28 Feb 2012, 9:02 pm  

   So some animals are not more equal than others in the great play eh? =

9. #9 Peter Hurford (author) says:
   28 Feb 2012, 9:06 pm  

   Nah, I just don’t want to lean too hard into what other people write. You’ll notice that when I quote people to respond to what they say, I usually clean up spelling and grammar, though.

10. #10 Stephen R. Diamond says:
    28 Feb 2012, 11:52 pm  

    You might be interested in a theologian’s recent empirical study regarding which arguments theists, atheists, and agnostics each find compelling, both pro and con. (http://tinyurl.com/7hlp895/.) Among the results: the cosmological argument was regarded as by far the strogest pro argument among all factions; with a minor exception, the existence of evil was regarded as the strogest con argument.

    For myself, I don’t find incoherence and absence of evidence far more compelling anti than the POE. But the cosmological argument does seem the strongest pro argument, although I think actual infinities not only exist but that their existence is provable. What makes the cosmological argument relatively strong, nevertheless, is the counter-intuitive nature of actual infinities.

11. #11 Patrick says:
    29 Feb 2012, 1:25 am  

    As for objections to the cosmological argument, one should make sure that one doesn’t address a straw man version of it:

    http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/07/so-you-think-you-understand.html

12. #12 Stephen R. Diamond says:
    29 Feb 2012, 2:25 am  

    From the Feser link, I learn that there’s not one but many—or at least a couple—cosmological arguments. They’re not properly described as variants of any single argument, as they’re premises are entirely distinct. Fesser performs a bit of academic mischief by exploiting the inability of theists to settle on a single argument by implying that any critic is cheating if he doesn’t refute all (or at least both) arguments.

    Why Feser refers to these two arguments with a single term is hard to fathom, assuming he isn’t setting a trap for unwary critics, an impression I’m forced to consider, since he contends that the only authoritative philosophers on these questions are “philosopher’s of religion,” who are, of course, overwhelmingly theist. What nonbeliever would make a profession out of studying religion?

    Anyway, I was, I now realize, referring to the kalam argument, which does indeed rest on the (logically disprovable) metaphysical impossibility of actual infinities.

13. #13 cl says:
    29 Feb 2012, 12:50 pm  

    One of the best reasons to be an atheist is that there is no reason to think that God exists.

    You’re really a fan of the argument from ignorance, aren’t you Peter?

14. #14 cl says:
    29 Feb 2012, 12:54 pm  

    Besides, this is supposed to be about epistemic warrant, no? To hell with the logical disprovability of actual infinities. We already have decent evidence suggesting the universe is not infinite but finite, not eternal but temporal (cf. entropy, KOBE). Peter hasn’t even put a dent in the KCA. Consider:

    Though this is still tenuous and unconfirmed, it is far less tenuous than a god.

    LOL! Why? Because Peter Hurford–some atheist–says so? Why is it “less tenuous,” Peter? Surely you don’t just expect us to take your word for it, right? Surely you have the evidence to back up your claim, right?

15. #15 Tom Mitchell says:
    29 Feb 2012, 3:10 pm  

    LOL! Why? Because Peter Hurford–some atheist–says so? Why is it “less tenuous,” Peter? Surely you don’t just expect us to take your word for it, right? Surely you have the evidence to back up your claim, right?

    @ Cl

    With all due respect I think you are mistaking what it means to be a good essayist with what it means to be a good advocate. A good essayist organizes their ideas in a coherent fashion so that they may be logically followed by the reader. It is not the essayist’s job to unpack everything they say. That is the job of a good reader. Some background reading might be required.

    A good advocate says what is needed to be said to convince someone that they are right. Peter is not trying to convince you, he is trying to present you with a string of ideas that will (given the proper amount of effort) allow you the power to convince yourself.

    However, today is your lucky day! Being an advocate of friendship, I will go ahead and unpack what Peter is saying so you do not have to do the work yourself to be convinced.

    Though this is still tenuous and unconfirmed, it is far less tenuous than a god.

    Your question is what evidence is there that a cyclical model of cosmology is more coherent than a God model of cosmology. Proper background knowledge on these terms and the systems of thought they are related to is the evidence.

    The cyclical model is part of the scientific paradigm of knowledge; the scientific paradigm continually rectifies the structure of its beliefs through empirical experience. It is a system of knowledge that is defined by self-regulation of beliefs. Therefore while it looks like the cyclical model is true it is constantly doubted and tested to look even truer.
    On the other hand, religious systems of knowledge have no such criteria. To the contrary, the religious paradigm is a body of knowledge defined by faith, a type of systemic loyalty. To question the structure of religion is to no longer be religious, just as to not question the structure of scientific knowledge is to no longer be scientific. I am not saying this makes the religious paradigm lacks elements of doubt; nothing could be further from the truth. But religious doubt is not targeted at systemic change, while scientific knowledge exists as a process of continuous systemic change.
    To not admit that a scientific theory is less tenuous than a religious model is to either suggest that science is religious, not scientific; or that religion is scientific not religious.
    No offense, but the former is a sociological argument that I do not think you are making, and the latter is self-defeating to your position. So we should just assume that the scientific model is scientific and that the religious one is religious, meaning that the scientific theory is always going to be less tenuous.

16. #16 Stephen R. Diamond says:
    29 Feb 2012, 3:47 pm  

    One of the best reasons to be an atheist is that there is no reason to think that God exists.

    You’re really a fan of the argument from ignorance, aren’t you Peter?

    Few philosophers besides theologians have reason to allege “argument from ignorance,” and the concept seems to have become a theist bugbear, since other philosophers have had no occasion to concern themselves with the “fallacy.” The absence of evidence, according to the study I cited, is the most popular atheist argument, so you can see why theologians might make a career of alleging this “fallacy.”

    How does the fallacy status of the argument from lack of evidence comport with the maxim that the asserter has the burden of proof? Unfortunately, that principle isn’t a model of clarity, either, as what counts as an assertion isn’t always self-evident.

    I think neither the fallacy nor the maxim survive a Bayesian understanding of evidence. But for present purposes, I need go no further than the obvious. If you have no good reason to believe in God, its rational to disbelieve in God. “God” is a hyper-strong hypothesis, which one would reject summarily in the complete absence of reason to believe. Like Bertrand Russell said, if someone claims there’s a teapot revolving around the earth, you don’t need disconfirming evidence to disbelieve it.

    To hell with the logical disprovability of actual infinities.

    Now there’s an intellectually honest argument for a proponent of the kalam argument! The impossibility of actual infinities was the crux of the argument, long before modern cosmology. Yet you slough off the fact the “self-evident” assumption, the key assumption, was wrong. Should make you think some of your other metaphysical dogmas are equally misguided and false.

    We already have decent evidence suggesting the universe is not infinite but finite, not eternal but temporal

    Stick to philosophy rather than physics; philosophy provides greater berth for your subjectivity. The weight of the evidence is that the universe is infinite. (http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_shape.html/.)

    Though this is still tenuous and unconfirmed, it is far less tenuous than a god.

    LOL! Why? Because Peter Hurford–some atheist–says so? Why is it “less tenuous,” Peter? Surely you don’t just expect us to take your word for it, right? Surely you have the evidence to back up your claim, right?

    Because most everyone realizes that hypothesizing gods, in and of itself, is a very tenuous move that requires a great deal of support. Perhaps you don’t share that assessment; perhaps you deny that belief requires faith (even if supported by reason) just because the assumptions are so inherently implausible. But that doesn’t mean Peter is making an illicit assertion. No one can argue every assumption every time. It’s no excuse for you, every time you see an appeal to assumptions you don’t share, to LOL like some cheerleader and pretend the author is begging the question.

17. #17 cl says:
    29 Feb 2012, 4:02 pm  

    Stephen R. Diamond,

    The absence of evidence, according to the study I cited, is the most popular atheist argument, so you can see why theologians might make a career of alleging this “fallacy.”

    1) This so-called “absence of evidence” is a purely subjective assertion. I say there is *MUCH* evidence for God. Now what?

    2) It’s not my fault atheists are prone to fallacious reasoning.

    If you have no good reason to believe in God, its rational to disbelieve in God.

    See? You do it, too. By “it” I mean making the mistake of confusing subjective opinion with factual truth. Besides, who’s the “you” in your statement? Obviously not me, because *I* have good reason to believe in God, which would make it irrational for me to disbelieve in God. Honesty would require you to be consistent and grant me that, now wouldn’t it, Mr. Diamond?

    Yet you slough off the fact the “self-evident” assumption, the key assumption, was wrong.

    Oh please. Peter’s assertions do not make it so. Neither do yours. Demonstrate your claim.

    The weight of the evidence is that the universe is infinite.

    Nice broken link!

    Because most everyone realizes that hypothesizing gods, in and of itself, is a very tenuous move that requires a great deal of support.

    Ah, yes… the age-old appeal to “most everyone realizes.” Classic. Just, classic. Great argument! “Most everyone realizes.” I’m really taken aback by the profundity! Newsflash Stephen: there was a time when most everyone realized the Earth was flat and that geocentrism was, too. What’s your point?

    LOL! [cl shakes pom-poms]

18. #18 Peter Hurford (author) says:
    29 Feb 2012, 4:06 pm  

    Delete the slash and go to http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_shape.html

    Pretty easy.

    I’ll weigh in on the rest of this at a later time.

    (Edit: This is the 1000th Greatplay.net comment. Go me!)

19. #19 Stephen R. Diamond says:
    29 Feb 2012, 4:32 pm  

    See? You do it, too. By “it” I mean making the mistake of confusing subjective opinion with factual truth. Besides, who’s the “you” in your statement? Obviously not me, because *I* have good reason to believe in God, which would make it irrational for me to disbelieve in God. Honesty would require you to be consistent and grant me that, now wouldn’t it, Mr. Diamond?

    I don’t understand where the confusion is supposed to be.

    My statement was

    If you have no good reason to believe in God, its rational to disbelieve in God.

    You respond “*I* have good reason to believe in God, which would make it irrational for me to disbelieve in God. Honesty would require you to be consistent and grant me that, now wouldn’t it, Mr. Diamond?”

    But that’s the whole question: do you have good reason? Are any of the arguments you proffer sound? You seem to be taking “reason to believe” out of context. We’re talking about Peter’s comment implying that the failure of all the arguments for existence would justify disbelief in existence.

    On the other point, I wasn’t making an argument. I was explaining that you couldn’t argue everything. You interpret statements not intended to contest on a point assumed as arguing those points without reasonable warrant. It’s a cheap way to score points. You can wail away about some fallacy or another by taking the comment out of context. Perhaps it isn’t as obfuscationist as I presume, as it’s possible that’s just the way you think: a little bit Pavlovian.

20. #20 cl says:
    29 Feb 2012, 4:53 pm  

    We’re talking about Peter’s comment implying that the failure of all the arguments for existence would justify disbelief in existence.

    Say it’s 1,000 years ago. Would the failure of all the arguments for the existence of asteroids justify disbelief in their non-existence?

    If yes, so what? They existed despite your approval of the claim, which means you have a metric that functions more like a psychological safety net than a tool in the search for truth.

    If no, why should this be any different?

21. #21 cl says:
    29 Feb 2012, 4:54 pm  

    Oops. That should read, “…justify disbelief in their existence,” and “despite your disapproval of the claim.”

    I’ve gotten spoiled with preview.

22. #22 cl says:
    29 Feb 2012, 9:17 pm  

    Since you’re making an issue about it in the other thread…

    A good advocate says what is needed to be said to convince someone that they are right.

    That’s what I call a politician. I’m more interested in accuracy, honesty, and conservatively stated claims.

    On the other hand, religious systems of knowledge have no such criteria.

    That’s false. There is most certainly an internal system of checks and balances that can be used to parse coherent religious claims from incoherent ones.

    To question the structure of religion is to no longer be religious, just as to not question the structure of scientific knowledge is to no longer be scientific.

    Nice play on words, but again, ultimately untrue (the first part at least). Paul commended the Bereans precisely because of their questioning.

    Besides, none of what you wrote really addressed my point except for your first paragraph. My point is simple: the matter of “what’s more tenuous” is largely subjective. Here’s reality: though it appears to have been falsified, Peter thinks a cyclical, eternal universe is “less tenuous” than God. Well, so what? That’s Peter’s opinion.

23. #23 Tom Mitchell says:
    29 Feb 2012, 9:33 pm  

    @ Cl

    No it is less tenuous. There is a difference between promoting analytic interpretation and structural interpretation.

    That’s false. There is most certainly an internal system of checks and balances that can be used to parse coherent religious claims from incoherent ones.

    Yes, there is an internal system. It is part of the system. It is used to evaluate claims made from within the system, but that is VERY different from a an internal system that promotes systemic change. Do you see the difference?

    Here, perhaps this analogy would make it clearer.

    Religion as a system of producing knowledge is like a set of lincoln logs. There are a myriad of things that can be built, but all must ultimately originate from the same basic pieces. The basic blocks cannot be changed, and they are incompatible with other units of building (like legos). The questioning promoted in religion and your internal system of checks and balances is like if someone wrote a manual about efficient lincoln log building. It exists within the system.

    Science on the other hand is a system where the basic parts (the building blocks) are constantly being reengineered. There is no brand, or trademark block that is paramount to the entire system of engineering. The criteria instead is what pieces create the most structurally sound works. It is more like computer software programs that are constantly being scraped and reborn.

    In religion the unit of building is sacred and cannot be altered. In science the efficiency of the structure is sacred and is constantly being developed upon.

24. #24 cl says:
    29 Feb 2012, 9:57 pm  

    Your analogy is irrelevant. Belaboring the differences between science and religion has no bearing on this discussion.

    No it is less tenuous.

    Wrong. Empirical evidence combined with a solid understanding of entropy makes the claim of a cyclical universe much more tenuous than claims that God exists (assuming by “cyclical” Peter means something like the oscillating universe theories of old).

25. #25 Tom Mitchell says:
    29 Feb 2012, 10:43 pm  

    Do you not think there is a difference between science and religion? The difference between them is essential to understanding your and Peter’s impasse. Both science and religion are dialectics of knowledge. Since you do a lot of assuming rather than researching as to what things mean I am going to go ahead and explain it rather than run into a misunderstanding later.

    A dialectic is a filter for determining whether information is truth or not. It is a cognitive rule for the creation of knowledge. Knowledge being a body of beliefs and facts that are viewed as true. The dialectic of science is consistency with empirical reality. The dialectic of christianity is the bible.

    A scientific belief is constantly evaluated against the total body of empirical experience collective by the scientific community. Because scientific beliefs are constantly re-evaluated and assessed in light of new experiences over time, science as a system changes over time. What was considered science in the 1700s would be horrid science today, more akin to what we would call parlor tricks. A large body of what defined science in the 1800s is no longer considered scientific today. Science as a body of knowledge is self-adjusting, continuously moving closer and closer to matching empirical reality.

    A christian belief is not evaluated against consistency with empirical reality, it is evaluated against consistency with the bible. There are no revisions being made to the bible. It is static. You talk of empirical evidence that a cyclical universe is a poor model of the universe. What evidence is there that the Bible is an accurate measure of truth? This by the way is the double standard I was talking about. If you are too evaluate opposing theories using empirical evidence and logic, then it follows that your own axioms should be held to the same standard. How do you know

    1.) The bible is really the word of God
    2.) If the bible is indeed the word of God that English Translations of the bible accurately represent its original content.
    3.) If the bible is indeed the word or God, and translations are accurate, that the word of God accurately represents reality?

    Are you, or any theists making any attempt to prove these things? Or are these three suppositions taken axiomatically. The fact that there is evidence against a cyclical model of the universe is the very reason why it is less tenuous.

26. #26 Thinking Emotions says:
    29 Feb 2012, 11:48 pm  

    The fact that there is evidence against a cyclical model of the universe is the very reason why it is less tenuous.

    Don’t have much time to contribute anything of value, but just thought I’d highlight this. I believe this is referred to as Popperian falsifiability, and the reason why it’s so important in epistemic claims is that an argument or belief which can be falsified is actually stronger than one that cannot be falsified. The Bible is hard to falsify when it is open to interpretation in many passages and typically reeks of hindsight injections (i.e., seeing new knowledge in vague descriptions or prophecies, sort of like the writings of Nostradamus).

    Don’t get me wrong… if there’s something that’s pretty unequivocal or salient, I’d be willing to give it some points. I’m not going to pull the typical atheist bullshit of, “Oh, that’s just a coincidence.” It very well could be, but when certain things are specific and in context, then it’s irresponsible to brush them off as coincidental.

27. #27 cl says:
    1 Mar 2012, 2:04 pm  

    Tom Mitchell,

    Thanks for all the unnecessary lecturing about “dialectics” and all. I like how you assume you need to explain that which doesn’t need explaining. It really shows charity on your behalf. Do you think I’m one of those people whose thinking needs fixing, that you allude to on your blog? Might I ask, in what ways could your thinking benefit from fixing? Fascinating questions, methinks.

    Do you not think there is a difference between science and religion?

    Did you not read where I just acknowledged the differences?

    The dialectic of christianity is the bible.

    Wrong. There is but one dialectic: correspondence with actuality. Like gravity, the dialectic of Christianity is its degree of correspondence with actuality. It is real, or it is not. The only difference is that you can’t run a laboratory test on every claim, but that holds for a massive subset of claims scientific, religious or otherwise, perhaps even the majority.

    A scientific belief is constantly evaluated against the total body of empirical experience collective by the scientific community. Because scientific beliefs are constantly re-evaluated and assessed in light of new experiences over time, science as a system changes over time.

    Gee thanks! After all, I *AM* just an ignorant theist who never took the time to consider these things!

    A large body of what defined science in the 1800s is no longer considered scientific today.

    Correct, and so it follows that a large body of what defines science now will no longer be considered scientific in 200 years. So then, how do you know we’re getting closer to the truth now? How do you know we weren’t actually closer to some truths back then? Know ye nothing of the story of the cosmological constant?

    The fact that there is evidence against a cyclical model of the universe is the very reason why it is less tenuous.

    Then you have an odd definition of “tenuous.” By “tenuous,” I mean “having weak or scant evidential support.” As far as I know, the oscillating universe theory doesn’t even have that. It actually has evidence that falsifies it (acceleration of expansion). To contrast, God has several lines of evidence supporting the hypothesis of existence. Sure, atheists like Peter don’t acknowledge any of them, but so what?

    Now, you could take TE’s tack and say that God’s unfalsifiability makes the oscillating universe less tenuous, but to that I’ll simply laugh. No offense to you either, TE, I’m just dubious of the insinuation that falsifiability is the arbiter of a claim’s “strength.”

    So Tom, if you really want answers to your questions 1-3, I have a blog where I’d be more than happy to answer, but since they aren’t relevant to the question of tenuousness, I’ll leave them for now. If you have a persuasive argument or demonstration of why I should believe a provisionally debunked cosmological theory is “less tenuous” than God, I’m all ears.

    If not, I’ll see ya around.

28. #28 Tom Mitchell says:
    1 Mar 2012, 4:11 pm  

    @ Cl
    How did you get the impression that you need to be fixed O_O? This is a discussion not a spading. I don’t know what type of talks you have had in the past, but I hope it was nothing too traumatic. Anyways, on to the main course.

    Before when I assumed you did know the meaning of what I was talking about you told me I was assuming too much, and that it was a problem that I was not being clear in how I was “loading my words.” Now when I go out of my way to specifically load my words so you understand how I am using them, you tell me I am assuming that you know too little. It seems kind of like I lose either way…

    Because the dialectic is an incredibly complex and offend misunderstood concept; and because the last time you did not understand what I meant you simply assumed you did. I felt that it would be more productive to be as clear as possible with the term. I apologize if I offended you, though I do not see why you would be offended. I was doing the very thing you jumped down Peter’s throat for not doing earlier in this thread, explaining what my words meant. Furthermore, from reading your post I am forced to believe that your understanding of the dialectic is lacking.

    >Wrong. There is but one dialectic: correspondence with actuality.

    This is wrong. There are multiple dialectics, both historically in the interpretation of the term, but also within the concept a-historically. A dialectic is a correspondence with actuality, but actuality is a desired state of knowledge. As humans we must choose a filter with which to measure actuality. Maybe we should switch to talking solely about this idea. Because without grasping it you cannot see the point I am trying to make, and thus will not understand why the cyclical model is less tenuous than your religion.

    >Correct, and so it follows that a large body of what defines science now will no longer be considered scientific in 200 years. So then, how do you know we’re getting closer to the truth now? How do you know we weren’t actually closer to some truths back then? Know ye nothing of the story of the cosmological constant?

    First, no I do not know about the cosmological constant. I would love to learn though. Second, just because a large amount is discounted does not meant what is kept should be discounted. Each new system of science begins with more refined truth than its previous model, thus slowly but surely the truth amasses.

    Lastly, you say

    >So Tom, if you really want answers to your questions 1-3, I have a blog where I’d be more than happy to answer, but since they aren’t relevant to the question of tenuousness, I’ll leave them for now. If you have a persuasive argument or demonstration of why I should believe a provisionally debunked cosmological theory is “less tenuous” than God, I’m all ears.

    I would be glad to help. You define tenuous as “having weak or scant evidential support.” For something to be supported or abandoned it must be thought about; for something to be thought about it must be questioned. If there are sacred axioms of christianity that are not to be questioned, then it is not truly being thought about; if christianity is not truly being thought about, then how could it be supported or abandoned. What is scant is serious consideration of fallacy. Thinking Emotions was making my argument.

29. #29 Peter Hurford (author) says:
    1 Mar 2012, 4:37 pm  

    Just so everyone knows, I’ll respond to everything that’s been said here within ten hours or so. I don’t want anyone thinking I’m being intentionally silent, I’m just a bit busy. Give me a bit of time.

    I appreciate all the dialogue that’s been going on here in my absence, though.

30. #30 Thinking Emotions says:
    1 Mar 2012, 4:49 pm  

    Now, you could take TE’s tack and say that God’s unfalsifiability makes the oscillating universe less tenuous, but to that I’ll simply laugh. No offense to you either, TE, I’m just dubious of the insinuation that falsifiability is the arbiter of a claim’s “strength.”

    Not if it’s been falsified, of course. I just used Tom’s example of an oscillating universe as my own. I know nothing of what that theory is. For example, let’s say I assert that all swans are white. One non-white swan debunks my claim. Is it logically possible for there to exist a non-white swan? Yes. Does there exist empirical support for non-white swans? Yes. Therefore, not all swans are white.

    Now, let’s say I want to argue that holy spirits are the source of pleasant dreams and evil spirits are the source of nightmares. Could one ever falsify that proposition, let us call it P, outside of saying ~P? That is, there are some assertions or arguments, right and wrong, which cannot be refuted outside of mere denial. Even if we could physically demonstrate what happens in the brain when one is having a good or bad dreams, those who claim P could still say this does not exclude P.

    An argument that eschews falsifiability is actually weaker than an argument that can be falsified. It may seem counter-intuitive, but it’s a good epistemic principle. If an argument or belief cannot be falsified in some way, then how does one adopt it as truth in the first place? I guess this applies to both atheists and theists, but it does not apply to strong agnostics (and probably not weak agnostics). I relate more to agnostics than I do atheists, I think.

31. #31 Stephen R. Diamond says:
    1 Mar 2012, 10:05 pm  

    If an argument or belief cannot be falsified in some way, then how does one adopt it as truth in the first place? I guess this applies to both atheists and theists, but it does not apply to strong agnostics (and probably not weak agnostics).

    There’s a blog I recently ran across, called Evolving Thoughts, by an agnostic, John Wilkins, who takes that stance: God has neither been proven nor disproven. But, what I find strange is that he doesn’t conclude that we have no justified beliefs on the subject, as he thinks the existence of God is overwhelmingly implausible.

    This “atheism-in-practice,” a label Wilkins accepts, is based on a qualitative distinction between something that’s proof and something that’s evidence against. If you accept a Bayesian account of evidence, there is no such distinction, and what Popper mislabeled “falsification” doesn’t really occur. It’s always a matter of adjusting subjective probabilities within an interval greater than 0 and less than 1.

    In that case, atheism can’t mean what Wilkins contends, since nobody really or properly assigns a probability of 0 to any proposition.

    [But one problem--it's not clear to me how a Bayesian analysis would handle incoherence as opposed to empirical evidence. I suppose if one followed Wilkins's definitions, the only true atheists might be deemed to be those who think the concept of an omnipotent deity is incoherent. But there are analytic complications I don't know how to resolve, in that even I am not so arrogant as to say the probability that I made a purely logical error is 0.]

32. #32 cl says:
    1 Mar 2012, 10:26 pm  

    An argument that eschews falsifiability is actually weaker than an argument that can be falsified.

    Why? I read your comment and I still don’t see. Why should a claim automatically be considered “weaker” just because we can’t falsify it? What do you mean by “weaker,” anyways?

33. #33 joseph says:
    2 Mar 2012, 12:42 am  

    @Stephen R Diamond

    If a hypothesis is stated as:

    “A Sapphire is never made of pure carbon.”

    If we find a carbon Sapphire the above hypothesis can be assigned a zero probability of being true.

    In practice a hypothesis is produced from a model and is falsified or not, but the model itself may not be entirely rejected if it produces good enough answers to other questions, it is often modified before rejection. So a scientific hypothesis should meet the criterion of falsifiabilify, though the model itself may be somewhat more flexible.

    You could say, for example, that geocentrism as a model has not been falsified, only rejected by Ockham’s razor.

    On the other hand Newton’s Theory of Gravity was falsified when Gravitonic (or somesuch adjectivisation of the word “Gravity”) Lensing was demonstrated to be stronger than the theory would predict. I suppose you could just keep saying “the measurements were wrong”, as hilariously Conservapedia does, and so avoid a 0 probability that way…

34. #34 Peter Hurford (author) says:
    2 Mar 2012, 1:04 am  

    I definitely have a lot I want to say in response to many things said in this thread, but alas I’ve been a bit too busy responding to things relevant to the Cl-Peter debate and doing some work, and now I’m heading to bed.

    So sadly I’m going to handwave this away for a bit, but I have full intent to get responding sometime tomorrow. Thanks again!

35. #35 Stephen R. Diamond says:
    2 Mar 2012, 3:50 am  

    “A Sapphire is never made of pure carbon.”

    If we find a carbon Sapphire the above hypothesis can be assigned a zero probability of being true.

    If a carbon sapphire exists, then the universal statement is false by pure logic. Popper thought he could build scientific method on the framework.

    The problem is that empirically, we are never confronted with absolute proof that what we found is a carbon sapphire. We run tests, and there’s some probability some assumption of the test is false or that we didn’t do the test correctly. So the existential statement must receive a probability of less than 1; the universal statement a probability greater than 0.

36. #36 joseph says:
    2 Mar 2012, 4:42 am  

    I now think I see your point, measurements (as in the Conservapedia example) are/can be a source of doubt.

    So I think you could adopt an approach which said something like:

    This is currently falsifiable, with a certainty of x, using currently available techniques.

    Or, perhaps, an example more familiar to me from biology:

    There is a probability of less than 0.05% that the null hypothesis explains these results.

37. #37 joseph says:
    2 Mar 2012, 4:46 am  

    Surely there is still a difference between an idea that is falsifiable in principle (though pragmatically not), and an idea that is neither pragmatically nor in principle falsifiable?

38. #38 Stephen R. Diamond says:
    3 Mar 2012, 3:02 pm  

    Surely there is still a difference between an idea that is falsifiable in principle (though pragmatically not), and an idea that is neither pragmatically nor in principle falsifiable?

    What seems clear is that Wilkins’s move of saying evidence overwhelmingly supports the plausibility of claims God doesn’t exist, yet there’s no “proof” one way or the other. The distinction between “evidence against” and “proof” doesn’t hold up except as a matter of degree, where all proof is probabilistic. Strong plausibility is the best it gets.

    Are there any synthetic propositions unfalsifiable in principle? I’m not sure that falsifiability isn’t always a matter of degree.

    We can look at what conclusions are possible from the fact that a proposition is relatively unfalsifiable.

39. #39 joseph says:
    3 Mar 2012, 8:58 pm  

    Surely Russell’s invisible teacup, Sagan’s garage dwelling dragon, Solipsimsm, Materialism are all unfalsifiable..

40. #40 Stephen R. Diamond says:
    5 Mar 2012, 8:22 pm  

    I think they’re only relatively unfalsifiable, and I think part of the reason they’re often said to be unfalsifiable is based on drawing an unjustifiable line between falsification and failure to verify. From the standpoint of a Bayesian analysis of the nature of evidence, failure to verify provides some evidence of falsity. The “likelihood ratio,” which determines evidential force, is a comparison of the probability that verification will fail if the teacup doesn’t exist to the probability verification will fail if the teacup exists. Although the probability is almost one either way, it is slightly less probable that verification will fail when the teacup doesn’t exist. The fact that we lack evidence for the teacup is evidence against it.

    The evidence regarding the teacup is, of course, very weak, but it exists–the situation doesn’t seem different _in kind_ from a normal scientific hypothesis.

41. #41 joseph says:
    5 Mar 2012, 10:58 pm  

    How do you establish a prior probability for any of those things, witgout being accused of bias, either way?

42. #42 Stephen R. Diamond says:
    8 Mar 2012, 1:42 am  

    How do you establish a prior probability for any of those things, witgout being accused of bias, either way?

    For an empirical proposition, you have no alternative but to base prior probabilities on background knowledge. For the teacup and solipsism, practically no one would assign anything but a very low prior probability. That these probabilities are low is part of our background knowledge. Fortunately, it isn’t hard to find a consensus on patent absurdities.

    Certain exceptions are striking, e.g., God, free will, morality. How does a nonbeliever, who assigns a low prior to God’s existence, debate someone like cl, who assigns a high prior to it. I think that for the most part these instances where a well-considered proposition seems highly probable to one person and highly improbable to another are misleading. (Not always. In politics there seem to be real differences behind the differences in priors–but that’s because politics is really about conflicting interests) But in metaphysics, enormous differences in priors usually, in my opinion, mask issues really centered on coherence. The God concept can seem empirically compelling only because its internal contradiction is unrecognized.

    Different persons’ priors may sometimes show untoward divergence for another reason: sometimes a measure of intellectual honesty must be summoned. Does any educated person in the West today truly believe that humanity inhabited paradise and fell because Eve took a forbidden bite? If one professes to such a view, he may create a distinct niche and arouse the curiosity of others, who wonder how he manages to maintain so odd a belief. But one can say one thinks something, even tell oneself the same, without actually believing it; belief can’t be willed.

43. #43 joseph says:
    8 Mar 2012, 3:26 am  

    Stephen R Diamond,
    You’re a remarkable chap, intelligent, eloquent, an engaging writer. You’ve convinced me before, and shifted my opinions (your arguments against an objective morality on CSA were, very sadly, compelling) against my bias.

    So it is with great reluctance that I must say:

    “For the teacup and solipsism, practically no one would assign anything but a very low prior probability. That these probabilities are low is part of our background knowledge. Fortunately, it isn’t hard to find a consensus on patent absurdities.”

    Is not a logically compelling argument. It appeals to my gut, my herd instinct, but my head says in the past the consensus has proven an unreliable guide to the truth.

44. #44 Stephen R. Diamond says:
    10 Mar 2012, 10:14 pm  

    in the past the consensus has proven an unreliable guide to the truth

    Let’s try looking at a simple epistemic problem. There’s a big glass container with tens of thousands of marbles within. Your task is to estimate the number, and you’re one of ten persons assembled for this task. Each of you is informed of how many marbles are contained in one cubic foot. How do you proceed. The only way I see is to try to visualize how many cubic feet are contained in the big glass container. Now, counting would be much better, but the rules preclude it. So, you rely on your powers of visualization, and while that method is far from perfectly reliable, it’s better than nothing.

    But if you agree that you have some ability to figure out, by mental means alone, how many cubic feet are in the container, you should consider that the other 9 persons also have this ability. You will probably do better if you average the estimates of the 9 others with your own, unless you have some basis for concluding that you’re better at that sort of thing than the others.

    So, it seems that if you can rely on your own intuition to make certain factual appraisals–and what else ultimately is there to rely on in assessing facts–then you should rely on the consensual estimate, provided the others are as able and honest as you. It may not be a reliable method, but it is usually a demonstrably more reliable method than relying solely on your own estimate, and there seems to be no third alternative.

45. #45 joseph says:
    11 Mar 2012, 12:54 am  

    One problem, for an atheist, would be that if you took a consensus on things like God/s, the supernatural, an afterlife etc. The consensus would be they existed.
    This is a version of the argument I have heard so often, that there must be some kind of a conscious creator because it is a feature in so many mythologies.
    The only way out I can see is a “no true scotsman” defense, where you might tell me that those people, poor them, have not been trained adequately in rational thinking. This would be analogous to saying the crowd I’m with, judging the marbles in the jar, lack numeracy, but luckily for you, and me, we understand volumes, multiplication and division.

46. #46 joseph says:
    11 Mar 2012, 1:04 am  

    I could be more of an idiot than usual (which may surprise you) and say:

    “Why yes, there is a consensus that Psolipsism is absurd, because I decided you imaginery folk would all be imaginarily happier that way”

    Ouch, I just cut myself on my imaginery wit.

47. #47 Stephen R. Diamond says:
    11 Mar 2012, 6:21 pm  

    This would be analogous to saying the crowd I’m with, judging the marbles in the jar, lack numeracy, but luckily for you, and me, we understand volumes, multiplication and division.

    The way I think of it, each person is to be treated like a measuring instrument. Say we’re measuring time and I have an atomic clock, whereas everyone else has a sundial. I would decline to average their calculations with mine, no matter how many of them there were to my one. I have a series on this here: http://juridicalcoherence.blogspot.com/search/label/belief

48. #48 joseph says:
    13 Mar 2012, 4:07 am  

    In that case our Solipsism argument becomes:

    Solipsism can be disproven (reduced to an acceptably low probability) by consensus, but that consensus can be ignored if a suitably rational person thinks otherwise.

    I will stick to my guns and say Solpsism is unfalsifiable.

49. #49 Peter Hurford (author) says:
    13 Mar 2012, 4:39 am  

    Geez, a lot has been said here, and I’ve sure let this get out of hand. In this first comment, I’ll get the one-shot comments out of the way, then I’ll take some time to answer the meaty stuff.

    Stephen R. Diamond: You might be interested in a theologian’s recent empirical study regarding which arguments theists, atheists, and agnostics each find compelling, both pro and con. (http://tinyurl.com/7hlp895/.) Among the results: the cosmological argument was regarded as by far the strogest pro argument among all factions; with a minor exception, the existence of evil was regarded as the strogest con argument.

    That’s pretty interesting. It’s odd because the Problem of Evil isn’t even an argument for atheism, because it says nothing about the nonexistence of evil gods.

    I agree with you: I think the arguments from lack of evidence and arguments from incoherence are the most powerful. In fact, there the only actual arguments for atheism even provided.

    In fact, a lot of these arguments are technically subsets of arguments from incoherence: the Problem of Evil states an incoherence between benevolence and suffering, Poor Design an incoherence between omnipotence and poor design, etc.

    As for theistic arguments, I’d go in the following order: cosmological argument, argument from design, ontological argument. All the other arguments I don’t even think are worth taking seriously. (I find pragmatic arguments worth taking seriously, but they don’t establish the existence of God, only a sociological need for religion.)

    ~

    Patrick: As for objections to the cosmological argument, one should make sure that one doesn’t address a straw man version of it:

    http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/07/so-you-think-you-understand.html

    That’s a well written essay. It probably means that I should address the Kalam argument separately from Aquinas’s argument. But I agree with Stephen R. Diamond that lumping these two arguments under the same name and accusing atheists of only attacking one is a bit unfair.

    ~

    joseph: I will stick to my guns and say Solpsism is unfalsifiable.

    I agree with you for reasons I mentioned in “The End of Cartesian Demons”. Solipsism entails no difference in the world that is testable, even in principle, and thus is meaningless.

    ~

    The more substantive responses come tomorrow after I go to sleep and wake up.

50. #50 Stephen R. Diamond says:
    13 Mar 2012, 10:31 pm  

    Joseph,

    Care to elaborate? I don’t think you’re saying, like Peter, that it meaningless. In fact, I’m quite sure you’re not saying that, since you say it can be reduced to a low probability.

51. #51 joseph says:
    14 Mar 2012, 12:28 am  

    Sure,
    Yes I’m not sure if I’d saying meaningless, as I think/speculate there’s a basic truth in it, that essentially my perception of the universe is all modelled in my brain and that’s the nearest I’ll come to knowing it. The same as Creator myths often have themes of chaos becoming order that seem to be preserved whether we our theists, agnostic or atheists.

    I’d say it’s not really worth bothering a lot about, in the case of Solipsism, or Deism, or Pantheism, as it doesn’t change anything.

    I said:
    “In that case our argument has become: Solipsism can be disproven (reduced to an acceptably low probability) by consensus”

    I apologise for any confusion, but I didn’t accept this.

    I was surprised by the thought, or truth, that nothing can ever by falsified if we keep denying the results. I have to digest that one.

52. #52 Peter Hurford (author) says:
    14 Mar 2012, 5:07 am  

    Weak Atheism vs. Strong Atheism vs. Theism vs. Asteroids

    Me: One of the best reasons to be an atheist is that there is no reason to think that God exists.

    Cl: You’re really a fan of the argument from ignorance, aren’t you Peter?

    There’s a difference between the weak atheism position that belief in god is unjustified and the strong atheism position that no gods exist. This alone would be an argument from ignorance to strong atheism, but it is not an argument from ignorance to weak atheism.

    The failure of all positive cases for God is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for strong atheism. The failure of all positive cases, however, is all that’s needed to make theism untenable. I guess I should have been more clear on what I was setting out to do.

    ~

    Cl: Say it’s 1,000 years ago. Would the failure of all the arguments for the existence of asteroids justify disbelief in their existence?

    Yes, and again this is the difference between the epistemic situation (weak atheism) and the physical situation (strong atheism). Even if asteroids exist, it could be the case that there was no reason to believe in asteroids.

    ~

    If yes, so what? They existed despite your disapproval of the claim, which means you have a metric that functions more like a psychological safety net than a tool in the search for truth.

    Sure, the asteroids existed despite the failure of arguments once upon a time. But we didn’t know that until we were able to establish a successful argument for asteroids.

    Likewise, this isn’t analogous. Anything could exist despite us having no reason to believe so. It could be the case that Obama is a reptilian, that aliens helped build the pyramids, that there is a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, or that God exists. Some of these positions are more reasonable than others, but all of them are currently unjustified.

    Without any way of knowing which, if any, of these claims are true, we’re stuck with the best we’ve got. And we can’t play the “possibly, therefore I can believe it” game with gods just because we were wrong with asteroids.

53. #53 Peter Hurford (author) says:
    14 Mar 2012, 5:30 am  

    Solipsism

    essentially my perception of the universe is all modelled in my brain and that’s the nearest I’ll come to knowing it.

    But that’s correct, all your perception is indeed modelled in your brain, and there’s no way you can get any closer to what’s outside your brain. It’s impossible to experience reality perfectly “as it is”, because you have to model it on something.

    But this does not entail solipsism, because other people have their models too, and you can interact meaningfully with these other models. And we can confirm that empirically, so the rest melts away meaninglessly kind of like P-Zombies.

    Solipsism isn’t the kind of thing that’s capable of being false, and it’s also not the kind of thing that can be intelligibly labeled “unfalsifiable” either, for that entails we would be able to recognize whether or not it has consequences on our world. Solipsism is just plain incoherent.

54. #54 joseph says:
    14 Mar 2012, 7:30 am  

    All of the first paragraph I can agree with, Peter Hurford.
    The second part:

    “Solipsism isn’t the kind of thing that’s capable of being false, and it’s also not the kind of thing that can be intelligibly labeled “unfalsifiable” ”

    I admit not to understanding. It seems to perfect example of unfalsifiability. Every bit of evidence that could be used to falsify it can be twisted into evidence to verify it.

    Also why incoherent? It seems I could come up with a suitably weird, but coherent piece of reasoning to explain why I, or you, or anyone, is the only conscious being…

55. #55 joseph says:
    14 Mar 2012, 7:53 am  

    “But that’s correct…”
    If you prefer it said this way; “essentially my perception of the universe is all modelled in my brain and that’s the nearest I’ll come to knowing it”, is the closest Solipsism comes to being true.

56. #56 Stephen R. Diamond says:
    14 Mar 2012, 3:23 pm  

    Weak versus strong? I wonder what the distinction really amounts to: how does it cash out in Bayesian terms? The “fallacies” are in desperate need of a Bayesian re-analysis. Kaj Sojala makes an interesting start here:

    http://lesswrong.com/lw/aq2/fallacies_as_weak_bayesian_evidence/

57. #57 joseph says:
    14 Mar 2012, 10:00 pm  

    For things like medical tests I see Bayesian analysis that looks like this:
    http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~szepesva/ICML2008Health/Ferreira.pdf

    http://nexus.som.yale.edu/design-project-m/?q=node/114

    At Less Wrong, as much as I agree with the majority, I tend just to see “NEEDS MORE BAYES!” repeated, as a happy mantra, then everybody wandering off, without establishing messy things like priors, and assuming that all their work has been done.

58. #58 joseph says:
    14 Mar 2012, 10:02 pm  

    By “happy mantra”, I mean applause lights!

59. #59 Peter Hurford (author) says:
    15 Mar 2012, 2:28 am  

    Bayes, Incoherence, and The Need for Falsifiability

    Thinking Emotions: An argument that eschews falsifiability is actually weaker than an argument that can be falsified.

    Cl: Why? I read your comment and I still don’t see. Why should a claim automatically be considered “weaker” just because we can’t falsify it? What do you mean by “weaker,” anyways?

    If an argument cannot be falsified, that indicates that it makes no predictions that are testable even in principle, and thus tells me that it’s incoherent, not false. And this isn’t incoherent in the “supernaturalism makes no sense” angle or the “God is an impossible entity” angle, but the “there might be no difference between atheism and theism angle”.

    Think about what it actually means to assert there is no way to falsify theism — it means that the atheist and theist world are utterly indistinguishable from each other! This would mean there’s no way to actually know if anything is God or not, which runs theism into the ground.

    However, the assumption is that theism actually is testable, at least in principle. For example, if Christianity is true, we’ll find out at the absolute worst when we wake up in an afterlife. And we would expect Christianity to make far more testable predictions — such as in the realm of prayer.

    This reminds me of Adam Lee’s “The Theist’s Guide to Converting Atheists”, which makes the observation that often theists have no idea what would convince them that they’re mistaken. Cl has an in-my-opinion very revealing response to this essay.

    Someday I’ll write more about why falsifiability is so important, but this seems good enough for now, no?

    ~

    Stephen: If an argument or belief cannot be falsified in some way, then how does one adopt it as truth in the first place? I guess this applies to both atheists and theists, but it does not apply to strong agnostics (and probably not weak agnostics).

    Stephen: This “atheism-in-practice,” a label Wilkins accepts, is based on a qualitative distinction between something that’s proof and something that’s evidence against. If you accept a Bayesian account of evidence, there is no such distinction [...] In that case, atheism can’t mean what Wilkins contends, since nobody really or properly assigns a probability of 0 to any proposition.

    I agree. For me, atheism is not about assigning absolute 0% to the chance of God’s existence, and I think it’s really silly to think otherwise. Instead, I’ll just say that gods are either outright impossible or very unlikely, kind of like unicorns.

    ~

    Joseph: If a hypothesis is stated as: “A Sapphire is never made of pure carbon.” If we find a carbon Sapphire the above hypothesis can be assigned a zero probability of being true.

    Yes, but as Stephen R. Diamond said, that would require absolute knowledge that we indeed found a carbon sapphire, which I don’t think we could ever have. Instead, our confidence in the hypothesis will just be inversely proportional to our confidence that we found a carbon sapphire.

    I’m also really wary of absolute knowledge that isn’t just true by definition, since from a Bayesian standpoint it would forever preclude you from ever changing your mind about that again. And the idea that I’ll never ever be able to change my mind about something makes me nervous.

    ~

    You could say, for example, that geocentrism as a model has not been falsified, only rejected by Ockham’s razor.

    I think I see what you’re getting at considering that geocentric models have been formulated that explain the orbits of the stars in the sky just as well as heliocentric models could, but now that we can fly into space and actually observe the Earth not being the center of the universe, I think this is pretty moot and we can be obscenely confident that geocentrism is formally false, and therefore falsified.

60. #60 joseph says:
    15 Mar 2012, 2:58 am  

    I really wish I still had some notes, sadly it’s over a decade ago and I’ve thrown them away. I remember a physics teacher, great guy, demonstrating that you can unite gravity and magnetism in a way that explains the way the axis of oscillation of a pendulum rotates at the true north pole. This was a geocentric model, and was simpler as such. His point was not that geocentrism was true, but that mathematical models, in isolation, have limited scope for telling you “the truth”. I’d imagine in his model the Spaceship USS Geocentric would itself be orbiting the earth in a way that produced the impression the Earth was orbiting the sun.

    Yes, I did produce a definitional example, didn’t I? I thought of adjusting it to Black Swans…but decided this suffered similar limitations.

61. #61 Peter Hurford (author) says:
    15 Mar 2012, 3:23 am  

    Bayes, Continued: Incoherence and Priors

    But one problem–it’s not clear to me how a Bayesian analysis would handle incoherence as opposed to empirical evidence.

    I don’t think you can apply Bayesian analysis to incoherent theories that aim to get a probability estimate of existence, but I do think you could apply the analysis to get a probability estimate of how likely the theory is actually incoherent. However, like most things in Bayesland, it would be tricky.

    ~

    I think they’re only relatively unfalsifiable, and I think part of the reason they’re often said to be unfalsifiable is based on drawing an unjustifiable line between falsification and failure to verify. From the standpoint of a Bayesian analysis of the nature of evidence, failure to verify provides some evidence of falsity.

    This is actually where we can get some Bayesian commentary on the “argument from ignorance fallacy”: in certain situations, a failure to verify constitutes strong evidence for falsity, and in other situations it doesn’t. P(Theory | Failure to verify & Background) is much lower on some theories than others.

    But I think the line can be drawn based on whether the theory is falsifiable in principle or not. It could be that P(Failure to Verify | Theory & Background) = ~0, and if so, I think we have a very odd theory indeed.

    ~

    Stephen: The evidence regarding the teacup is, of course, very weak, but it exists–the situation doesn’t seem different _in kind_ from a normal scientific hypothesis.

    Perhaps Russel’s teacup is not the kind of theory where P(Failure to Verify | Theory & Background) = ~0, but a absolutely-undetectable-teacup would be such a theory. What’s the difference between an absolutely-undetectable-teacup and no teacup at all?

    What I do think Russel did well was debunk the “You can’t disprove it!” retort. In fact, some atheists have even made this a sport with the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Cthulu, and the Invisible Pink Unicorn. And don’t forget my personal, lesser-known favorites of Wonko and Hank’s Ass.

    Cthulu even has a powerful argument for his existence via the Bloop!

    ~

    Joseph: How do you establish a prior probability for any of those things, witgout being accused of bias, either way?

    Recall our conversation in “Bayes Theorem is Best Theorem”. There are two methods: (1) formally defining the prior with Kolmogorov complexity and (2) choosing an upper bound prior and reasoning from there.

    For example, via Kolmogorov complexity, I think the prior for God would be really low. Perhaps, given that the monotheistic Christian God is an infinite being and absolutely unique, the prior is even ~0! But we could also use the upper bound method and just agree that there is no way the prior for God is higher than 50%. Debates about divine simplicity would factor in here as well, though I don’t think they would bode well.

    You might enjoy seeing how Richard Carrier assigns priors in his talk “Bayes Theorem: Key to the Universe (YouTube). I think he does the informal upper bound method very well.

    ~

    Stephen: But in metaphysics, enormous differences in priors usually, in my opinion, mask issues really centered on coherence. The God concept can seem empirically compelling only because its internal contradiction is unrecognized.

    This is an important problem. Sometimes I’m stunned how hard it can be to recognize that all along, the thing you were talking about was logically impossible! For examples, see my discussion about P-Zombies or the supernatural.

    ~

    Different persons’ priors may sometimes show untoward divergence for another reason: sometimes a measure of intellectual honesty must be summoned. Does any educated person in the West today truly believe that humanity inhabited paradise and fell because Eve took a forbidden bite?

    Honestly, if the view is coherent (some mechanism for how a bite of an apple propagates sin is identified), the prior on that probably isn’t that low. It’s just that it is overwhelmingly shrunk via gallons on gallons of historical (more), biological (more), and theological (more and more) evidence.

62. #62 Peter Hurford (author) says:
    15 Mar 2012, 3:34 am  

    Solipsism, continued:

    Me: Solipsism isn’t the kind of thing that’s capable of being false, and it’s also not the kind of thing that can be intelligibly labeled “unfalsifiable”

    Joseph: why incoherent? It seems I could come up with a suitably weird, but coherent piece of reasoning to explain why I, or you, or anyone, is the only conscious being…

    Two reasons why solipsism is incoherent:

    (1) There is no difference between a solipsist world and a non-solipsist world. Even if no one else’s consciousness existed, people still would be interacting with you in ways you couldn’t predict, give you the same opportunities for meaningful interactions (including love!), and still react upset when you deny their existence. If you don’t get this point (and it’s a bit complex, I know!), please re-read “The End of Cartesian Demons” and comment there with questions.

    (2) We know for a fact that other people talk about their consciousness, access their memories, formulate plans, self-reflect, and act just like they have conciousnesses. Yet, this couldn’t be at all possible unless they had an actual consciousness. If you don’t get this point (and it’s also complex!), please re-read “P-Zombies are Fallacious” and comment there with questions.

    So to tie this all together, you can come up with a weird and coherent-sounding piece of reasoning, but it won’t actually be coherent, because of (1) and (2). You’ll just think it’s coherent, and be mistaken, because you don’t notice the inherent contradictions yet.

    ~

    Joseph: I admit not to understanding. It seems to perfect example of unfalsifiability. Every bit of evidence that could be used to falsify it can be twisted into evidence to verify it.

    Now, if the only problem with solipsism was (1), I would agree that it would have the status of “incoherent because it’s unfalsifiable, even in principle”. And I would agree that it is unfalsifiable.

    But because of (2), solipsism also has the status of “incoherent because it contradicts itself”. And that makes for something that cannot be said to be unfalsifiable, anymore than you could say a square circle is unfalsifiable.

63. #63 joseph says:
    15 Mar 2012, 3:57 am  

    “(1) There is no difference between a solipsist world and a non-solipsist world”
    I understand that well. I am not a Solipsist. I’m guessing it’s a defintional thing, I take incoherent to mean possessing a logical fallacy. I’d label this as “meaningless” before incoherent, and “useless” before meaningless. Useless as in of no practical application.

    “(2)We know for a fact that other people talk about their consciousness, access their memories, formulate plans, self-reflect, and act just like they have conciousnesses”

    Well I know that’s the representation my mind gives to things, so there’s no detectable, or useful, difference.

    “You’ll just think it’s coherent, and be mistaken, because you don’t notice the inherent contradictions yet.”

    It makes me miserable but this can apply to any system I think is coherent, I can but try!

    You’ll final point is spot on. Lane Craig often makes it, from the other side of the fence! He seems happy that God is unfalsifiable (type 1 – should we say emperically unfalsifiable) yet claims he would stop believing if a type 2 (logically falsifiable?) Could be shown.

64. #64 Peter Hurford (author) says:
    15 Mar 2012, 4:05 am  

    Tenability: Cyclical Model vs. God

    I talked a lot about God being unfalsifiable (or incoherent in other ways), but I haven’t talked specifically about the questions surrounding comparative tenability with the cyclical model of the universe. Time to talk about that!

    First, establishing the tenability of the “cyclical model”:

    Cl: To hell with the logical disprovability of actual infinities. We already have decent evidence suggesting the universe is not infinite but finite, not eternal but temporal (cf. entropy, KOBE). Peter hasn’t even put a dent in the KCA.

    You’re thinking of the cyclical models first proposed by Einstein, which indeed were left unsupported. However, the theory I was mentioning is what’s called loop quantum cosmology (PDF), human readable summary here, as mentioned in “Debunking the Kalam Cosmological Argument of William Lane Craig” (YouTube). This theory establishes that quantum effects can cause a Big Bounce if a previous universe was crunching prior to the Big Bang.

    You’re right that there’s very little support nowadays for the Big Crunch part of the model given entropy and dark energy, and I’m still not sure how cosmologists are dealing with that. Thus I say the theory is still speculative and weakly supported. Barely tenable, but tenable nonetheless.

    ~

    Second, establishing the untenability of God:

    Cl: LOL! Why? Because Peter Hurford–some atheist–says so? Why is it “less tenuous,” Peter? Surely you don’t just expect us to take your word for it, right? Surely you have the evidence to back up your claim, right?

    The reason why the claim was left kind there undefended was because it was summarizing what had been said in the linked resources, rather than me repeating the defended claim myself. Hence the “not reinventing the wheel”, this is a collection/anthology rather than an essay in itself.

    The untenability of gods have been established elsewhere on this blog in many, many places. See some links in previous comments on this thread, even.

    ~

    Third, establishing my conclusion:

    P1: The X model has weak to moderate evidential support in its favor.
    P2: Gods have no evidence in its favor, and lots of evidence not in is favor.
    P3: If something has more evidence in its support than another thing, it is less tenuous.
    C4: Therefore, the X model is far less tenuous than a god.

    You obviously disagree with me on P2, but it’s not like I haven’t made a case…

65. #65 joseph says:
    15 Mar 2012, 4:06 am  

    Your note on Bayes – Kolmogorov Complexity, hmmm…yes I think it would be more simple to write a program explaining the existence of laws that allowed the evolution of multiple conscious minds than laws that explained the existence of one consciousness only. Unfortunately that’s a subjective feeling on my part, I personally, can’t ground it further (partly because I can’t program for peanuts).

    Yes, divine simplicity is a major part of this discussion, I’ll check out those links

66. #66 joseph says:
    15 Mar 2012, 4:08 am  

    P.s. I think you could polish these replies into articles.

67. #67 Peter Hurford (author) says:
    15 Mar 2012, 4:22 am  

    Incoherence, Part III: The Multiple Meanings Thereof

    I’m guessing it’s a definitional thing, I take incoherent to mean possessing a logical fallacy. I’d label this as “meaningless” before incoherent, and “useless” before meaningless.

    It might be a definitional thing. The dictionary defines incoherence as “lack of cohesion or clarity or organization”; “unable to be made sense of intelligibly”.

    I’ve previously said in a comment that incoherent can refer to three different things. In light of this conversation, I think I can clear that up and make it four different things:

    1. The statement is not a proposition. We can only speak of claims if they are actually claims. Statements like “Close the door!” or “Aardvark” are indeed things we can talk about within propositions and do indeed have meaning themselves, but they do not assert anything about the world and thus cannot be spoken of in that sense.

    2. The statement involves unknown or excessively vague terms. Obviously we cannot speak to whether “snaffles are typically red” until we know what snaffles are, and likewise we have no idea if “renzlers can sometimes be garblaxian”. But this doesn’t have to be so clear-cut — something like “I have free will” or “Morality exists” sounds fine, until you realize we don’t really know what free will or morality is in a precise enough manner to discuss. Typically we have to substitute them for something else, like “I have the ability to make choices” or “A compelling reason to refrain from murder exists”.

    3. The statement involves a logical contradiction. We can’t speak of things that both are and are not. For example, it’s unintelligible to talk about the properties of square circles, because the concept of a “square circle” involves a contradiction in terms — circles cannot be square, by definition!

    4. The statement involves a theory with no distinguishable consequences. We can only speak about the world in terms of what is and what is not, and this involves finding an empirical difference between is and is not in principle. Statements like “an Cartesian Demon is deceiving me” or “Solipsism is true” are propositions that involve well-defined terms but still cannot be given truth values because we do not know the difference between a solipsist and a non-solipsist world, even in principle.

    If we wanted a way to talk about each of those four different types of incoherence, perhaps we could agree to say “non-propositional”, “excessively vague”, “inherently contradictory”, and “inherently indistinguishable” respectively.

    Thus solipsism can’t be true or false, because it’s inherently contradictory and inherently indistinguishable!

    ~

    Useless as in of no practical application.

    I’d suggest caution there, because I think a fair amount of topics have no practical application, yet meet none of the four types of incoherence I mentioned. For example, the number of sand grains in my backyard I think is a coherent concept, yet useless to know.

68. #68 Peter Hurford (author) says:
    15 Mar 2012, 4:22 am  

    William Lane Craig

    You’ll final point is spot on. Lane Craig often makes it, from the other side of the fence! He seems happy that God is unfalsifiable (type 1 – should we say emperically unfalsifiable)

    I’d be very shocked to see Craig concede that: to me he seems to insist that God is abundantly proven by empirical evidence, even going as far as to outline a cosmological argument, a fine-tuning argument, a design argument, a moral argument, and an argument from the resurrection of Jesus. He’s been nothing but prolific in these areas!

    You might be confusing it with his counterfactual claim that if God were rendered false by empirical means, he would still believe any way because of the Holy Spirit and because God is a properly basic belief.

    ~

    yet claims he would stop believing if a type 2 (logically falsifiable?) Could be shown.

    He should read “TheraminTree’s Atheism, Part I: Incompatibility”, then. :)

    ~

    Articles!

    P.s. I think you could polish these replies into articles.

    Indeed. I’ll get on that sometime in April, maybe. I’ve been meaning to write more on incoherence anyway.

69. #69 joseph says:
    15 Mar 2012, 4:28 am  

    “You might be confusing it with his counterfactual claim that if God were rendered false by empirical means, he would still believe any way because of the Holy Spirit and because God is a properly basic belief.”

    Yes, in philosophical terms, I bolloxed that up proper.

    I was thinking when asked what he would take as evidence against God, he does not every answer with an empirically testable criterion, but rather something like “if proved illogical/ self contradictary”.

70. #70 Stephen R. Diamond says:
    15 Mar 2012, 1:56 pm  

    Stephen: An argument that eschews falsifiability is actually weaker than an argument that can be falsified.

    Cl: Why? I read your comment and I still don’t see. Why should a claim automatically be considered “weaker” just because we can’t falsify it? What do you mean by “weaker,” anyways?

    If an argument cannot be falsified, that indicates that it makes no predictions that are testable even in principle, and thus tells me that it’s incoherent, not false. And this isn’t incoherent in the “supernaturalism makes no sense” angle or the “God is an impossible entity” angle, but the “there might be no difference between atheism and theism angle”.

    Just to note for the moment: the argument attributed to me above isn’t mine: it’s Thinking Emotion’s. I wouldn’t endorse it.

71. #71 Peter Hurford (author) says:
    15 Mar 2012, 1:58 pm  

    Just to note for the moment: the argument attributed to me above isn’t mine: it’s Thinking Emotion’s. I wouldn’t endorse it.

    Fixed.

72. #72 Stephen R. Diamond says:
    15 Mar 2012, 3:16 pm  

    (1) There is no difference between a solipsist world and a non-solipsist world. Even if no one else’s consciousness existed, people still would be interacting with you in ways you couldn’t predict, give you the same opportunities for meaningful interactions (including love!), and still react upset when you deny their existence. If you don’t get this point (and it’s a bit complex, I know!), please re-read “The End of Cartesian Demons” and comment there with questions.

    (2) We know for a fact that other people talk about their consciousness, access their memories, formulate plans, self-reflect, and act just like they have conciousnesses. Yet, this couldn’t be at all possible unless they had an actual consciousness. If you don’t get this point (and it’s also complex!), please re-read “P-Zombies are Fallacious” and comment there with questions….Now, if the only problem with solipsism was (1), I would agree that it would have the status of “incoherent because it’s unfalsifiable, even in principle”. And I would agree that it is unfalsifiable. …

    But because of (2), solipsism also has the status of “incoherent because it contradicts itself”. And that makes for something that cannot be said to be unfalsifiable, anymore than you could say a square circle is unfalsifiable.

    I see this “incoherence” argument re solipsism as a cop out, one which prevents drawing the lessons of solipsism, which has implications for some seemingly tenable positions.

    Solipsism makes the most obvious differences to the world. It matters whether, when I step in front of a car in traffic and am struck by a speeding vehicle, whether I would really die, or I’m just too chicken to try it (just for example). Solipsism makes more difference to the world than just about any hypothesis I can think of. Finding it inconvenient doesn’t render it “incoherent” (a term I’d recommend applying only in the manner traditional in philosophy: to internal inconsistency).

    What you’re really saying by invoking an undefined “experience” that’s supposedly identical under solipsism and any sane world view is just that, were solipsism true, we’d have no way of telling. But that’s the problem, not its solution. The skeptical argument wielding solipsism consists in trying to establish that two states of affairs, of the greatest possible vital and practical concern, are indistinguishable by any rational methods. Surely it’s a cheat to reply, “An argument that makes no difference our methods can detect is meaningless!” For one thing, if it the distinction were meaningless, solipsism would be no more “incoherent” than our ordinary beliefs. They’d be interchangeable, alternative formulations of the same theory, theories only nominally or rhetorically different from one another–and we’d probably be seeing many people who take an ordinary view of the world calling themselves solipsists. Solipsism would be no more incoherent than its alternative: the difference would be purely rhetorical.

    I’d claim that you see solipsism, the most grotesque absurdity) is unrefutable because you accept an epistemology that is itself subject to reduction to a solipsistic absurdity. You speak of “experience” as the basis for knowledge, but if you were more precise, I think you would call it “sense data.” Sensationalism reduces to solipsism, as the most under-estimated philosopher, V.I. Lenin proved in a book that Hilary Putnam used in the first year graduate courses in philosophy before at Harvard before Putnam became an anti-realist: Materialism and Emipirio-Criticism. (Just a tangent.)

    I can’t explain this fully in the space of a comment, and I plan to write something on consciousness for Juridical Coherence (the link above). [Which now contains a new essay on political ideologies at http://tinyurl.com/6pt9eq5 For now, let me address zombies a bit, for this topic brings out the difference in our world views.

    You say zombies can’t exist because positing their existence assumes that a sensationless zombie would necessarily function differently than the way we do. But this simply ignores the terms of the zombie experience, which subtracts only qualitative consciousness. The point is, why should qualitative consciousness be necessary for our functioning? What does it contribute? The point isn’t whether in fact blind sight delivers all the information obtained by sight, but why is the necessary instrumentality for this accomplishment; in fact, how could it be? What requires that the processing of information about the environment requires qualitative consciousness (that is, some phenomenology)?

    I take it that Chalmers arguments show that qualitative consciousness can make no logically necessary contribution to cognition. My conclusion is that, rather than zombies being impossible, we are all really zombies: qualitative consciousness is an illusion.

    The assumption that qualitative consciousness exists is what gives rise to the supposed nonrefutability of solipsism. This doesn’t free us from the possibility of skeptical arguments, but it does mean that arguments against solipsism are in no worse condition than any other knowledge claims. The assumption that the solipsist is endowed with the same sense data as we are (the same “experiences”) fails because there are no sense data. This is fast, and I hope I can get to the essay on the subject in a few weeks. (But I think Joseph’s comment that the same “incoherence” can be imputed to every theory touches the same point.)

73. #73 joseph says:
    15 Mar 2012, 10:58 pm  

    @Stephen R Diamond
    The question of should a Solipsist be afraid of death interested me.

    1) If a Solipsist died in this world, how could they be confident their consciousness would die also (if you die in a dream/if you die in the matrix you die for real kind of thing). That would be more of a catastrophe for the Solipsist as the whole universe as they concieve it would cease to exist.

    2) As a Solipsist had no memory of a former life, he/she could assume something like everytime he/she dies he/she loses all memory and is effectively reincarnated.

    3) A Solipsist would not necessarily be sure that he/she was the only consciousness and might admit there was a perfectly equal chance that they were the mental construct of another consciousness and when he/she died he/she would join that creative consciousness.

    4) A solipsist could simply say “I don’t know what happens after death, I don’t remember dying before”.

    So the position of Solipsism on death seems ultimately to make no difference, provide no better, or worse, answers than any of us have.

    I am largely in favour of this “inherently indistinguisable”idea (more than logically incoherent, or falsifiable by priors defined by consensus, unless a suitably rational person disagrees ideas). I realise that it applies to materialism, on the other hand I doubt we’ll ever get any answers if we argue other things that can’t be falsified.

    @Peter Hurford
    “I’d suggest caution there, because I think a fair amount of topics have no practical application, yet meet none of the four types of incoherence I mentioned. For example, the number of sand grains in my backyard I think is a coherent concept, yet useless to know.”

    The sand grains – hmm not useless, but of extremely minor importance in most applications, counting itself for example is useful even if used for a mundane purpose, as a hammer is useful even if employed as a paperweight. Also in some applications knowing minor quantities is important, Prazosin dosages are often in micrograms for example.
    Again, I can imagine examples where such things are useful in principle, with Solipsism, I think, even in principle nothing would change.

74. #74 joseph says:
    16 Mar 2012, 12:29 am  

    The Richard Carrier video has a good, clear presentation of Bayes in actions, and I particularly liked the section on Ad Hoc theories.

    The bit that bothered me the most was at around 19 minutes 30 seconds when he says something very much like “suppose we know, somehow, magically, that alien ships look like that half as often ad meteors do”. This seems to beg the question, I did like the point that you can play with the numbers until you find what level it would take until you would consider the possibility. So it does seem to admit that in the end the argument comes down to one number.

75. #75 Stephen R. Diamond says:
    17 Mar 2012, 7:34 pm  

    I know I don’t survive death based on the evidence for the closure of physics. That reasoning doesn’t apply when the events are only imaginary.

    But you have a point. Death isn’t an effective way to draw the distinction, because conclusions about death depend on so many other beliefs.

    I think I can do better arguing directly against your contention that solipsism is an equivalent formulation of … whatever you want to call it–let’s cal it “common sense.” Solipsism is palpably a different belief than common sense because to say something exists only in my mind is to say something factually quite different from saying it exists outside my mind. So, it would be rather an amazing coincidence if these beliefs didn’t have empirical differences.

    Surely, you think it _possible_ to verify solipsism. For instance, if you found that by training your thoughts, you could control the reality you experienced, even make people come in and out of existence. Except in your memory, it is as though the person never existed, for the world and its history. Were you to find this true, you would have good reason, whether decisive reason we need not determine–to think solipsism true.

    Second step. Since solipsism could be verified and hasn’t been, the absence of evidence is evidence of its absence. (As a Bayesian theorem, cl notwithstanding.)

76. #76 joseph says:
    18 Mar 2012, 1:29 am  

    If I were a solipsist I think I could defend this in a few ways:

    1) I am willing people in and out of existence, but the way my mind represents the universe you can’t observe it. I willed you Stephen R.Diamond out of existence for 5 minutes just now, and bought you back with memories of the last 5 minutes and holes in your socks, causality gets so messy otherwise.

    2) My subconscious mind controls these things, I can’t regulate it.

    3) I am a solipsist but I believe I am the mental construct of someone else’s mind.

    On a seperate note it’s hard to use verification because it gives you more open ended answers. Somebody going in and out of existence could also verify:

    i) I am a prophet, supernatural forces work through me.

    ii) A weird wormhole of somekind just opened up

    iii) I tricked you.

    Also if I fail to do it I can just say, ” I had no inclination to do so”.

77. #77 Stephen R. Diamond says:
    18 Mar 2012, 4:07 pm  

    1) – 3) seem to be hypotheses rather than evidence, and thus they aren’t germane.

    i) – iii) are alternative explanations, but the existence of alternative explanations doesn’t block the Bayesian verification (the increased a posteriori probability that solipsism is true). These other hypotheses can obtain their increases alongside solipsism, at the expense of “common sense.”

    “I had no inclination” doesn’t change the deprive having the inclination and doing it of its significance as verification.

78. #78 joseph says:
    18 Mar 2012, 11:59 pm  

    (1-3) Yes hypotheses, but so is solipsism (a hypothesiss) and ones “”verified”" (double scare quotes intended) if I could zap someone in and out of existence.

    (i-iii) yes, point taken.

    The final point taken too, I threw that in because I wanted to make sure we weren’t talking about falsification.

    So where we seem to be:

    -Solipsism is either extremely difficult, or impossible (my viewpoint), to falsify.

    - It may be reduced in likelihood by it’s ad hoc explanations.

    - Everything as we currently know it, could be used to verify Solipsism.

    - Certain events, if they could be produced, would provide stronger verification, but not only to Solipsism, but other hypotheses.

79. #79 Stephen R. Diamond says:
    19 Mar 2012, 4:53 pm  

    Everything as we currently know it, could be used to verify Solipsism.

    Not if you look at verification in a Bayesian fashion. Everything that we know is consistent with solipsism. But there’s no verification if it’s also consistent with “common sense” and if also, it is no more likely conditional on common sense that it is conditional on solipsism.

80. #80 Stephen R. Diamond says:
    19 Mar 2012, 4:55 pm  

    Should be: it is no less likely conditional on common sense…

81. #81 joseph says:
    20 Mar 2012, 4:39 am  

    “But there’s no verification if it’s also consistent with common sense”

    I don’t really understand why it isn’t verification for both bayesian, or not, though I understand why you might say the strength of verification is different. From what little I understand of the philosophy of science, the problem with verification is it’s a lot more open than falsification, even if you help it with Bayes.

82. #82 cl says:
    20 Mar 2012, 2:37 pm  

    Well. I wasn’t aware all this conversation was taking place. I suppose I shall try to catch up. Here’s one line of thought I’ve always been suspicious of:

    From the standpoint of a Bayesian analysis of the nature of evidence, failure to verify provides some evidence of falsity. (Diamond, Monday, March 5, 2012 at 8:22 pm)

    If we pretend it’s two thousand years previous and apply this to the claim that “huge flying space rocks” exist, it seems we would be committed to the idea that failure to verify asteroids provides some evidence of falsity, but that would mean we have evidence of falsity for that which was true. That seems incoherent, and for that reason, I question the standard.

    The God concept can seem empirically compelling only because its internal contradiction is unrecognized. (Diamond, Thursday, March 8, 2012 at 1:42 am)

    Similarly, I find your statement not compelling because this “internal contradiction” is merely asserted.

    Is not a logically compelling argument. It appeals to my gut, my herd instinct, but my head says in the past the consensus has proven an unreliable guide to the truth. (joseph, Thursday, March 8, 2012 at 3:26 am)

    That’s exactly how I felt when Mr. Diamond rolled out this:

    Does any educated person in the West today truly believe that humanity inhabited paradise and fell because Eve took a forbidden bite? (Diamond, Thursday, March 8, 2012 at 1:42 am)

    Bravo to your reply, which I accept in full:

    Is not a logically compelling argument. It appeals to my gut, my herd instinct, but my head says in the past the consensus has proven an unreliable guide to the truth. (joseph, Thursday, March 8, 2012 at 3:26 am)

    Now, y’all may have resolved this, I have yet to read through the rest of the thread, but I agree with what you said here, joseph. There was a time when no “educated” people believed in air travel, telephony and quantum physics. So I think you’re right to question these appeals to consensus. At the same time, there is also something to be said for consensus, so it seems some distinction is necessary. That is, when is an appeal to consensus empty vs. substantive? Diamond’s appeals to consensus strike me as empty, but appeals to consensus on, say, QM, strike me as substantive.

83. #83 Stephen R. Diamond says:
    20 Mar 2012, 3:00 pm  

    I don’t really understand why it isn’t verification for both bayesian, or not, though I understand why you might say the strength of verification is different. From what little I understand of the philosophy of science, the problem with verification is it’s a lot more open than falsification, even if you help it with Bayes.

    First of all, I don’t know what “not” is. It isn’t like there’s one unique alternative to the bayesian approach.

    What I think you’re saying is that “everything” is logically consistent with solipsism, hence verifies it. I don’t know that this would count as verification for anyone, but in Bayesian terms evidence verifies a hypothesis if it’s more likely to occur if the hypothesis is true than if the alternative hypothesis is true. Certainly, “everything” verifies “common sense” at least as much as it verifies solipsism. I’d say “everything” is much more likely, conditional on “common sense” than conditional on solipsism. But you might view simply claiming that as begging the question. That’s why I look at what hasn’t occurred rather than what has. So, I only need to say that “everything” is no *more* probable under solipsism than under “common sense.” But that doesn’t verify solipsism, the crucial point being that “everything” isn’t more likely given solipsism than given “common sense.”

84. #84 Stephen R. Diamond says:
    20 Mar 2012, 3:15 pm  

    [T]hat would mean we have evidence of falsity for that which was true. That seems incoherent, and for that reason, I question the standard.

    Evidence of falsity for that which is true seems… incoherent! This is incredibly both stupid and ignorant. You needn’t be an expert on philosophy of science, but you must at least understand the bare conceptual rudiments of any science to participate in a discussion of the nature of evidence. (Or else obtain at least the rudimentary capacity to express what you really mean, if that’s the problem here–who can know, of your nonsense.)

    I suggest you stick to your “bravo” comments. Your cheerleading approach to discussion nauseates me, but at least in that, you succeed in something.

    [I don't intend to make the mistake again of "engaging" with ignoramus-thought. Chalk up the past to the sin of vanity.]

85. #85 Stephen R. Diamond says:
    20 Mar 2012, 3:38 pm  

    “Certainly, “everything” verifies “common sense” at least as much as it verifies solipsism.”

    Should be: “everything” is at least as likely conditional on “common sense” as it is likely conditional on solipsism.

86. #86 cl says:
    20 Mar 2012, 3:53 pm  

    Keep talking trash and spouting venomous insults, Stephen. All it does is influence the impartial observer. Why such hate? Why such malice? Why condemn me for all these alleged intellectual shortcomings amidst such blatant irrationality? What makes you so bitter? So vengeful? So spiteful? So willing to accuse and slander another human being?

    Anyways, it’s fine if you won’t “engage” with me because I have already decided not to “engage” with your poisonous vitriol until you admit that I proved you wrong here. All your appeals to intellectual honesty—not to mention all your accusations of intellectual dishonesty—stand ready to accuse you if you continue to shirk your rational duties.

    I dare you to face that comment honestly.

87. #87 Stephen R. Diamond says:
    26 Mar 2012, 3:43 pm  

    Back to the cosmological argument–Angra Mainyu presents another counter-argument. The argument tries to be quite rigorous and lacks an effective summary; I haven’t studied the whole thing. In conversing about the argument in another forum with Angra, I think his essential claim is that instantaneous change is logically impossible. Hence, God must have created the universe in time. Thus, creation is subject to the same causal constraints as other temporal events, whereas the Kalam cosmological seeks to place God’s acts outside time.

    I don’t think Angra’s argument succeeds on its own terms, for the simple reason that instantaneous change occurs in nature, for example, in state changes, as when an ice molecule changes to a liquid molecule instantaneously. Angra says this isn’t the case because it involves the contradiction that at the point of transition, the molecule is both ice and not ice, hence a logically impossible contradiction. I think this is disposed of by regarding the transition point as the exclusive (rather than inclusive) limit ending the ice series and beginning the water series.

    But I think Angra’s argument does lead to a new plausibility argument against divine creation. (Angra’s blog is closed, so I can’t tell him directly.) According to materialism, according to which (I contend) nothing is created ex nihilo, the universe’s initial point, insofar as the term applies, must be an exclusive limit. (Otherwise, as you elegantly point out, the universe would begin to exist.) The exclusive limit implies either a temporally finite yet eternal universe (as you point out) or a transition point from another unknown state (as with an oscillating universe or a universe that’s the product of another universe, or like hypotheses).

    While materialism requires an exclusive limit for the universe at the beginning of time, theism and related forms of objective idealism allow that the universe has an inclusive limit at its inception. Thus, a finding that the universe has an inclusive limit at its inception–say, that the big bang singularity was an actual event) would strongly support some form of idealism. But our current understanding, that the big bang is an exclusive limit, increases the plausibility of materialism against supernaturalism. (A case where “the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.”)

    Here’s where I think my approach to defining materialism differs from your way of defining naturalism. To be informative, the label materialism or naturalism must exclude real possibilities. If “supernaturalism” is defined so that it’s incoherent, “naturalism” is uninformative. A world view must be such as to expose itself to epistemic risks.

88. #88 cl says:
    26 Mar 2012, 6:48 pm  

    Mr. Diamond,

    …a temporally finite yet eternal universe…

    And *YOU* accuse *ME* of equivocation! LOL! That which is temporally finite cannot be eternal, unless, of course, you’re, you know… equivocating.

89. #89 cl says:
    26 Mar 2012, 6:52 pm  

    Peter,

    The untenability of gods have been established elsewhere on this blog in many, many places.

    I disagree. Like every other atheist blog I’ve seen, the untenability of God has been asserted here. Granted, attempts have been made at establishing this alleged untenability, but, as we saw with the evidential POE arguments and your recent recanting thereof, the success of these attempts is questionable at best.

    You obviously disagree with me on P2, but it’s not like I haven’t made a case…

    You’ve tried to make various cases, but, again, as with your POE, I’ve not seen a successful one (and I’ve spent considerable time explaining why on various threads both here and elsewhere). Moreover, for you to say there’s “no evidence” for God strikes me as incredibly amateur. I’m actually a bit shocked that a person of your caliber would resort to such tried-and-true New Atheist strategem. You can’t simply screen off *EVERYTHING* on offer like that, it’s simply not professional. I suspect what you really mean to say is that you don’t accept the evidence on offer, but this is tautology, not counterargument or establishment of untenability (because we already know you are an atheist). Lastly, in our debate, I provided you with strong evidence—according to your own criteria—evidence you claimed would prove God’s existence “beyond a shadow of a doubt.” To date you have made no reply to that.

    From my vantage point, you have some very serious explaining to do.

90. #90 Stephen R. Diamond says:
    26 Mar 2012, 7:17 pm  

    Me: While materialism requires an exclusive limit for the universe at the beginning of time…

    That is, time reaches only finitely into the past. The alternative, also compatible with materialism, is that there’s an infinite eternity in the past. (The latter, of course, is what the cosmological argument falsely assumes impossible.)

    Let it also be said that a proper concern with plausibility allows questions like, what is more plausible under materialism: a truly eternal universe or a finite eternal universe? I would say without here arguing that the first is the more plausible.

    Other questions are possible, if seldom asked. What is more plausible under materialism, a deterministic universe or a stochastic universe? I would say a deterministic universe, although I think the evidence points to a stochastic one. (This bothers those staunch determinists, the proponents of the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.) Taken in its broadest sense, idealism has had some scientific victories, although it has lost in the most important scientific confrontations.) My best estimate of my plausibility odds for idealism versus materialism is 30/70 (to be honest, I’m far from sure that this estimate is anything other than capricious–I give it mainly for concreteness).

    If we define “atheism” as denial not just of a personal God but any form of idealism (the right place to draw it, even if I thereby abuse the term “atheism”), does that make me (at 30/70) an atheist or agnostic? [Question not rhetorical.]

91. #91 cl says:
    26 Mar 2012, 7:54 pm  

    Mr. Diamond,

    The latter, of course, is what the cosmological argument falsely assumes impossible.

    False. The latter proves itself logically impossible. That’s the entire point of Aristotle’s argument from kinesis, that, at some point, a terminus is required. Now, you can say “to hell with logic” and believe whatever you wish, but that’s at the expense of logic, not at it’s request.

    …a finite eternal universe…

    “Finite” and “eternal” are mutually exclusive terms. There’s no need to ask which is more plausible because this is incoherent.

    My best estimate of my plausibility odds for idealism versus materialism is 30/70

    Can you share the math that led you to this estimate? I’m curious. People on both sides looooooove to say their own side is “more likely,” yet rarely does anybody provide the math.

92. #92 Stephen R. Diamond says:
    26 Mar 2012, 11:41 pm  

    By the way, here’s where Peter introduces the finite eternal. (He doesn’t use these words, but I think he does somewhere else. If not, I’d be glad to take credit; except, I’m almost certain it would be undue):

    There is no past prior to the existence of the universe in which it can be accurately said the universe began to exist. Since the universe existed at all times, the universe has always existed, even if not infinitely old. This makes P1 questionable.

93. #93 Stephen R. Diamond says:
    26 Mar 2012, 11:45 pm  

    Except, I would say it falsifies P1, not makes it questionable. What leaves question regarding the conclusion is the lack of complete certainty that what we call a singularity might not occur in reality because our physics is incomplete.

94. #94 joseph says:
    27 Mar 2012, 1:55 am  

    “First of all, I don’t know what “not” is. It isn’t like there’s one unique alternative to the bayesian approach.”

    Sure, I just ment without Bayes, or using any other approach (as far as I know).

    “What I think you’re saying is that “everything” is logically consistent with solipsism, hence verifies it”

    Yes, that is the problem I have with verification.

    “But you might view simply claiming that as begging the question”

    Yes, that’s a hurdle for me.

    “But that doesn’t verify solipsism, the crucial point being that “everything” isn’t more likely given solipsism than given “common sense.””

    I see what you’re getting at, but the only 2 things I can think of that help us make this judgement are our priors (which seem difficult to justify in an non-question begging way) and Ockham’s Razor (Solipsism would probably require more as hoc arguments, more complexity to explain the limit of one consciousness)

    —

    “[T]hat would mean we have evidence of falsity for that which was true. That seems incoherent, and for that reason, I question the standard.”

    I, too, don’t have a problem with evidence of falsity for “truths”, as indicated by the scare quotes, I think we’re just tottering on to a less false model of reality.

95. #95 Stephen R. Diamond says:
    27 Mar 2012, 2:45 pm  

    I see what you’re getting at, but the only 2 things I can think of that help us make this judgement are our priors (which seem difficult to justify in an non-question begging way) and Ockham’s Razor (Solipsism would probably require more a[d] hoc arguments, more complexity to explain the limit of one consciousness)

    As far as I can tell, priors and Ockham’s Razor refer to the same epistemic process. That is, Ockham’s razor is the only principle you can base priors on; but I think it’s application is impossible to fully specify formally.

    Thus arises a gap between what we should believe to optimize [talking to these damn computer programmers, I'm starting to sound like one!] for truthtracking and what we can argue persuasively. It could be the case that it’s impossible to convince a committed solipsist, yet also be impossible for anyone to find solipsism credible. Then, the best we can do in disputation is provide an account of the possibility of knowing solipsism is (almost certainly) wrong.

    The ineliminably subjective foundation of knowledge provides an opening professors of faith. Their suppositions are plausible to them (they will say). But are blatantly implausible premises truly plausible to the fideists? Yes, because everyone thing we believe is plausible to us, and the plausibility can be deflated only by subjecting one’s beliefs to criticism. The fideist’s plight is that he lives by the principle of refusing to understand the criticisms that would change his mind. Ironically, the refusal may be couched in a view of knowledge that denounces plausibility as a criterion, thus demanding that any refutation–merely to be coherent–must provide a deductive refutation. [Even deduction is based ultimately on our sense of plausibility, with the practical difference that any informed person who isn't psychotic will assent to purely formal deductions.]

96. #96 joseph says:
    28 Mar 2012, 7:22 am  

    I’ll try to cook up some priors, plug them into the equation and see.

97. #97 cl says:
    13 Jun 2012, 4:38 pm  

    Related to the OP and this thread: Peter’s position has changed somewhat. He now states that his remarks about tenuity were premature, and that more investigation is needed. I agree, and applaud.

98. #98 Yuen Hon Chong says:
    29 Jan 2013, 5:07 am  

    The Kalam Cosmological Argument
    P1: The universe began to exist.
    P2: Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
    C3: Therefore from P1 and P2, the universe has a cause.
    P4: Only God can cause the universe to begin to exist.
    C5: Therefore God exists.

    According to current theories of physics, the universe started in an infinitely dense and infinitely hot singularity. Yet, such a singularity is currently known to be impossible. This makes P1 questionable.

    Wrong! How to create such a singularity is not known. But that doesn’t mean it cannot be done. By analogy, 1000 years ago the generation of power from electricity was unknown but that did not mean it is impossible.

    Some leading theories of quantum cosmology and string theory suggest that the universe might be cyclical and eternal. Though this is still tenuous and unconfirmed, it is far less tenuous than a god. This makes P1 questionable.

    Wrong. Whether the universe is cyclical and eternal has nothing to do with the fact that the universe exists.

    The rejection of an infinite universe because actual infinities are impossible shows a misunderstanding of how mathematics is applied to infinite numbers. P1 remains unproven.

    Wrong. Infinite or otherwise it is indisputable that the universe exists.

    The rejection of an infinite universe because actual infinities are impossible is inconsistant with the acceptance of an infinitely dense and infinitely hot singularity, not to mention an infinite God. P1 remains unproven.

    Nonsense.

    There is no past prior to the existence of the universe in which it can be accurately said the universe began to exist. Since the universe existed at all times, the universe has always existed, even if not infinitely old. This makes P1 questionable.

    Oh dear! this nonsense never stops. There was no known past prior to electricity 1000 years ago. That proved nothing.

    If I was marking the above contentions I would award perhaps a gamma double minus and fail the candidate.

99. #99 Tom says:
    29 Jan 2013, 7:21 am  

    @Yuen Hon Chong

    Hi,

    I was skimming around and noticed your comment. I hope you do not mind if I respond.

    Twice you make the argument

    By analogy, 1000 years ago the generation of power from electricity was unknown but that did not mean it is impossible.

    I just wanted to point out that this analogy is not really an argument at all. Yes, 1000 years ago the generation of power from electricity was unknown, and now it is possible. However, does that mean that after 1000 years everything that is unknown becomes possible?

    Of course not,

    For example,

    1000 years ago it was impossible for people to move backwards through time, and it is still impossible. There are many things that were impossible 1000 years ago, and are still, as far as we know, impossible.

    SO, your ‘argument’ doesn’t really make sense. Yes there are things that become possible over time, but there are also things that do not. We have no way of knowing which categories the above mentioned topics falls into.

    Does that make sense? If not, I can explain it a different way.

100. #100 Yuen Hon Chong says:
     29 Jan 2013, 9:40 am  

     The fact that 1000 years ago electricity was unknown makes the point that the fact something is unknown does not mean it cannot exist.

     What it does not say is that something that is unknown will become possible after 1000 years. That is your interpretation and it is clearly wrong.

     Coming back to my (correct) argument, the fact that we don’t know how to generate a singularity doesn’t mean that such a singularity could not have existed or cannot exist in the future.

101. #101 Tom says:
     29 Jan 2013, 12:38 pm  

     No,

     The fact that we don’t know how to generate a singularity doesn’t mean that such a singularity cannot exit, BUT it also doesn’t mean that it definitely can exist. Maybe it will exist in 1000 years, but there is just as much of a chance that it won’t.

     Your analogy implies that because electricity didn’t exist 1000 years ago, but now does, the same probably will be true with singularity.

     But the fact is, we do not know if singularity is like electricity in this case, or like telekinesis, time travel, and the destruction of matter.

     Your ‘argument’ is not an argument.

102. #102 Yuen Hon Chong says:
     29 Jan 2013, 1:43 pm  

     Wrong.

     You are reading nonsense into what I have said. So I will try one more time.

     The fact that something does not exist today does not mean that it will not be discovered tomorrow. There are endless examples of this. To deny this is to be stupid.

     But because something that doesn’t exist today may be discovered tomorrow does not mean that everything unknown today will be discovered tomorrow. That is what you are saying and that is totally stupid.

     Sorry but you condemn yourself out of your own mouth.

103. #103 joseph says:
     29 Jan 2013, 9:32 pm  

     Tom & Yuen Hon Chong,
     Your views are converging, if you would both limit the number of times you cried “nonsense” (you seem more guilty of this Mr.Yuen Hon Chong), you might proceed, and get somewhere.

104. #104 Peter Hurford (author) says:
     29 Jan 2013, 10:07 pm  

     Yuen, your responses are needlessly overconfident and antagonizing.

     Me: According to current theories of physics, the universe started in an infinitely dense and infinitely hot singularity. Yet, such a singularity is currently known to be impossible. This makes P1 [The universe began to exist] questionable.

     Yuen: Wrong! How to create such a singularity is not known. But that doesn’t mean it cannot be done. By analogy, 1000 years ago the generation of power from electricity was unknown but that did not mean it is impossible.

     Sure. By this extension, nothing is ever impossible, since there’s always a remote chance that we could be wrong. But based on what we know now, a singularity is a physical impossibility (under most theoretical physics models), not just something we currently cannot do. This is distinct from electricity 1000 years ago, which was not possible to do, but not ruled impossible outright.

     I am aware of things that have been ruled impossible outright that later on had been done, of course. But that doesn’t really matter. I said P1 was questionable, not that P1 was outright false.

     ~

     Me: Some leading theories of quantum cosmology and string theory suggest that the universe might be cyclical and eternal. Though this is still tenuous and unconfirmed, it is far less tenuous than a god. This makes P1 questionable.

     Yuen: Wrong. Whether the universe is cyclical and eternal has nothing to do with the fact that the universe exists.

     Per my conversation with Cl (see above), I agree that my statement here is unestablished. But your response doesn’t follow — using your parlance, it is “nonsense”. I never said the universe didn’t exist, I said it’s questionable that the universe didn’t begin to exist. If it were infinite in past, there would be no “begin to” exist part, since it would have always existed.

105. #105 Yuen Hon Chong says:
     30 Jan 2013, 3:46 am  

     Arguing that something is not so because we cannot do that something today, as you have done, is a nonsense as I have been pointing out.

     You obfuscate the issue with weasel words like ‘questionable’ and fancy phrases. I would be quite straightforward and say: it is common experience that everything has a cause and thus something caused the universe to be created.

     Then we can begin to debate whether God was the cause.

106. #106 Tom says:
     30 Jan 2013, 7:37 am  

     The fact that something does not exist today does not mean that it will not be discovered tomorrow. There are endless examples of this. To deny this is to be stupid.

     But because something that doesn’t exist today may be discovered tomorrow does not mean that everything unknown today will be discovered tomorrow. That is what you are saying and that is totally stupid.

     Listen,

     I am not saying everything unknown will be discovered tomorrow. To the contrary, my point is that it most certainly will not. Somethings might be discovered tomorrow, but everything will not.

     We agree on this right?

     If so, how do we know that this case is something that will be discovered tomorrow, or will not?

     You do not.

     What you are saying is the same as me saying this,

     ” Santa Claus is real. 100 years ago we thought giant squids were myths, and now we know they are real. Just because we have no proof Santa Claus is real today, does not mean we will not discover him tomorrow.”

     That is what you are saying.

     @ Joseph

     I don’t mean to “cry nonsense,” but what he is saying is not an argument. I don’t know how else to say that. If we accept having no proof of something as a type of proof that it exists, then we will paralyze ourselves. Anything becomes acceptable. If we had unlimited resources that would not be a problem. We could spend eternity searching out everything under the sun. But we don’t. We are finite, and because of that we must manage our resources wisely. Maybe we do not know whether or not singularity is possible, but as Peter says, we have to operate (to some extent) based on what we know; otherwise we will get no where.

107. #107 joseph says:
     30 Jan 2013, 10:12 am  

     @Tom,
     As I read it he’s making the weak claim that we can’t rule out things we don’t have evidence for, but his more aggressive approach in stating it makes it sound like a strong claim. I’m agreed in that it doesn’t really take you anywhere, there’s simply too many things we don’t have evidence for to believe in them all, and some are mutually exclusive. As far as I can see Mr.Yuen hasn’t made the strong claim, so you’re simply wasting your time trying to rebutt an argument that hasn’t been made. Though perhaps his manner has your hackles up, I’m not above that.

108. #108 Yuen Hon Chong says:
     30 Jan 2013, 12:09 pm  

     Tom,

     If I have put up your hackles then I’m sorry. There’s nothing personal in it. Let’s leave the point on which we have argued, it was not getting us anywhere.

     Let me put another thought to you (far from novel). Our experience in the physical world around us is that there is a cause for every effect. So I argue, as above, that something caused the universe to exist. What caused that cause is something I can’t answer. Was it God? I don’t know. If some people like to think it was God that is OK by me as long as their belief doesn’t lead to some kind of limitation on my life and those of others.

     I think this agnostic outlook is tenable. What do you think?

109. #109 Peter Hurford (author) says:
     30 Jan 2013, 1:47 pm  

     Our experience in the physical world around us is that there is a cause for every effect. So I argue, as above, that something caused the universe to exist.

     This is a fallacy of composition, though. Every effect within the universe has a cause. But that doesn’t mean the universe itself has a cause. We haven’t witnessed anything comparable to draw the analogy.

110. #110 Tom says:
     30 Jan 2013, 6:47 pm  

     Yuen Hon Chong ,

     I wish I had my copy of The Elegant Universe with me, but it is at my parents house. I would highly recommend this book.

     I agree with Peter again about cause and effect being potential contingents of our universe. A good analogy to explain why is weight. In the bubble of earth’s gravitational sphere, we experience mass in a certain way that never changes, because earth’s gravity never changes. However, if we were to go to other planets, our weight would be different. The universe is a bubble too, so I don’t think we can say what holds true outside of it.

     As for agnostics, actually I think it is very tenable. I think agnosticism is great. What’s more, if you were to comb the comments on this blog. You would find a lengthy discussion between me and Peter where I defend the need to have a healthy concern for what you belief to be impossible.

     I agree that we should not count anything as absolutely impossible. BUT calling that an argument is wrong.

     Why is it wrong?

     Because Peter is right here, and calling it an argument makes it seem otherwise.

111. #111 Tom says:
     30 Jan 2013, 7:35 pm  

     Yuen Hon Chong ,

     http://acorns2squirrels.wordpress.com/2013/01/31/sidestory-how-to-muzzle-dangerous-ideas/

     I just wrote this in the last hour for you!

112. #112 Yuen Hon Chong says:
     31 Jan 2013, 4:36 am  

     Tom,

     Thank you for your special message — I admire your tenacity but can’t agree with your view, though I’m not going down that track again!

     With regard to the bubble, I would say that we know the laws of Physics are the same anywhere we look in the Universe. We can observe that from our little platform Earth. Your example of weight is a good one. Weight depends on the local gravity which depends on the mass of the body on which you are standing — and that was found to be so when Neil Armstrong got to the moon. So one’s weight may vary at different places in the universe but we know why — we know the cause.

     Since the universe obeys the laws of physics so it is reasonable to say that it’s creation obeyed the laws of physics and thus that there was a cause.

     Another analogy. There are 22 guys running around a field kicking a ball with another guy with a whistle. Observation leads to the conclusion this is not random motion but rather that they are following rules. Where did the rules come from? Well they must have been created.

     If we have to follow Peter’s dictum that if we haven’t witnessed anything comparable then it is forbidden to draw an analogy, then we are really stuck. For example, before Armstrong got to the moon our theories about weight differences would have been forbidden. Early theories about atomic structure would have been out of bounds until we developed instruments to observe…. and so on. So I cannot accept that point of view.

113. #113 Tom says:
     31 Jan 2013, 7:35 am  

     Yuen Hon Chong ,

     Could you explain a little more what dictum of Peter’s we are talking about? I was primarily responding in disagreement with your analogy, not in a agreement with this essay.

114. #114 Peter Hurford (author) says:
     31 Jan 2013, 12:45 pm  

     Yuen: For example, before Armstrong got to the moon our theories about weight differences would have been forbidden. Early theories about atomic structure would have been out of bounds until we developed instruments to observe…. and so on. So I cannot accept that point of view.

     But that’s just it, actually! We’ve wandered a long time around Earth and made many generalizations about how weight works on Earth. It would have been natural to assume we weighed the same in space. But there was a critical difference and we’re weightless in space!

     We were able to figure this out with a better understanding of gravity and with actual tests in space. But this just goes to show how just because everything you’ve seen so far involves things with beginnings and things with beginnings having causes, doesn’t mean the universe itself must have a cause.

     For just one example about how physics may lead us to understand an uncaused universe, consider virtual particles, which are said to be uncaused. (I’m also aware of other research in physics that is elsewhere slowly cementing a firm beginning to the universe, so don’t assume that physics is trending in one direction either for or against an uncaused universe.)

     Or consider again that the universe might be eternal, thus never having a beginning to have been caused. All our understanding of causes involve time before the effect in order to have the cause take place. But when can a cause take place if time does not exist? Clearly this is not analogous to anything we will see around us in our day-to-day experience.

     We’d be just as well off thinking we weigh the same on the Moon as we do on Earth.

115. #115 Yuen Hon Chong says:
     1 Feb 2013, 4:35 am  

     There may well be places where time does not exist, or where phenomena are different to what we experience, but they are not in our universe.

     In our universe the laws of Nature/physics are the same everywhere. These continue to remain unchanged whatever we believe, as the Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman once pointed out! In such a situation I am arguing that it is perfectly rational to believe that the creation of our universe had a cause .

     I think you misunderstood an earlier point I was trying to make, Peter. I was trying to say that your prohibition of drawing an analogy on something we haven’t witnessed is not correct. And I quoted how we could work out that our weight on the Moon would be less (and precisely less) than on Earth as one example — which you nicely extended with weightlessness in space which we had never encountered in our Earthly life but had predicted correctly and with certainty. By applying the laws of Physics we can speak correctly about things we have not experienced.

     I disagree with the assertion of this thread “God is unproven”, not because I can prove the existence of God but because I can’t. I don’t know whether God exists or not. This seems to me the only tenable position to take at present. Tom and I are agreed on that one. Where are you?

     Perhaps our universe exists inside or alongside some other entity where all sorts of things exist that we know nothing of. Perhaps the laws of Nature are completely different there. These are all exciting questions which hopefully in time we will be able to answer.

116. #116 Yuen Hon Chong says:
     1 Feb 2013, 4:37 am  

     Tom,

     In answer to your question I was referring to Peter’s response #109.

117. #117 Peter Hurford (author) says:
     1 Feb 2013, 2:17 pm  

     Yuen,

     In my exchange with you, I’m arguing for the following two conclusions:

     (1) Based on our current knowledge, we currently do not know whether or not the universe had a beginning, ie we would place 50% probability on the statement “the universe has a beginning”.

     (2) It is a fallacy to conclude “The universe has a beginning” from “everything I know has a beginning”.

     Do you contest either (1) or (2)? If so, why?

     I agree with you that “[b]y applying the laws of Physics we can speak correctly about things we have not experienced”, but I disagree that doing so demonstrates the beginning of the universe. Did I miss something?

     ~

     I disagree with the assertion of this thread “God is unproven”, not because I can prove the existence of God but because I can’t.

     If there is no proof of God, then God is unproven by definition. I’m not saying a proof couldn’t be made in the future, but no proof currently exists (that isn’t flawed).

     ~

     I don’t know whether God exists or not. This seems to me the only tenable position to take at present. Tom and I are agreed on that one. Where are you?

     I think that God does not exist, but I wouldn’t assign absolute confidence to that statement. For my analysis on what it means to say “God does not exist”, see Defining Atheist and Agnostic”. For reasons why I would outright reject the existence of God, see the “TheraminTrees’s Atheism” series.

118. #118 Peter Hurford (author) says:
     1 Feb 2013, 3:33 pm  

     To make matters clearer, I do think that scientists could use physics to demonstrate that the universe had a definitive beginning. I just don’t think they have yet.

119. #119 Stephen R. Diamond says:
     1 Feb 2013, 4:43 pm  

     It is a fallacy to conclude “The universe has a beginning” from “everything I know has a beginning”.

     “Fallacies” usually mean deductive errors; so, it would be a fallacy were deduction intended. But I think the argument intends to be inductive, and were it true that “everything I know has a beginning,” then I think the induction would be justified that the universe has a beginning. It might be a relatively uncertain induction, but wouldn’t it move your credence toward believing that the universe too had a beginning? The universe might be an unusual sort of thing, but so are many other things to which we apply induction, however cautiously.

     Of course, then there’s the argument that if everything has a beginning, so do spiritual entities. If we can make inductions to the entire universe despite its unusualness (which it seems fairly clear we could—by ordinary inductive practices), then why restrict it to physical things? There would also be the argument that everything we know is physical; thus physical things are all that exist, which also seems to be a valid induction if made with proper caution.

     But that was all caveat; I think the correct answer is that it is not at all immediately clear that everything we know has a beginning. What we know is that everything has a beginning under some description. My computer had its beginning when it was manufactured, but whether it–if we define “it” as its ultimate quarkish constituents–either had a beginning or didn’t depending completely upon whether the universe did! And if we use as the description of “the universe” as the state of the cosmos at time t, it too “had a beginning” at a time prior to t.

     Unless, there’s a t=0! If everything has a beginning under some description, then our experience tells us that there is no t=0. Of course, scientific evidence can qualify this induction; no induction is guaranteed to be exceptionless.

     This would seem to argue for an eternal universe: steady state, finite eternal (Peter’s apt term for Hawking’s vision), or cyclical; although in the end, practice trumps theory: near-mode trumps far-mode, to use the current psychological jargon ( http://tinyurl.com/7yqe7zp ). Science will decide. But if one is going to examine the question based on rather pure conceptual metaphysics (as that’s the way this argument is going), my view is that the cyclical view is the only way that works. (See my http://tinyurl.com/aqcy99w and the ongoing discussion in Comments.)

120. #120 Peter Hurford (author) says:
     1 Feb 2013, 5:03 pm  

     Steven, good points. You just said what I wish I had said.

121. #121 Yuen Hon Chong says:
     2 Feb 2013, 4:11 am  

     Peter,

     I thought I had stated my position quite clearly but here goes for another time.

     The Universe is defined by the laws of physics, which show us without any doubt that for every effect there is a cause. Thus there was a cause for the creation of the universe. To use your term there was a ‘beginning’.

     I personally don’t know whether God exists and admit it openly. But I am not saying that God does not exist. My position is not proof that God does not exist.

     Stephen has repeated a point I made earlier. Given there was a cause for the creation of the universe, what caused the cause? And, as I said earlier, I don’t know the answer to that question — but that does not make my conclusion invalid for all the reasons I have already given.

     The whole of human history is a story of discovery, of setting out in a state of ignorance and gradually finding out the truth. In this situation there is no shame in saying “I don’t yet know”.

     Assigning probabilities as to whether the Universe had a beginning seems to me to be faintly ridiculous. It either happened or it didn’t. Since we are here it surely did happen — independent of whether the universe is an expanding one or a expansion-contraction system or a member of a billion other universes in other dimensions…..

     And I am not approaching this topic in ‘pure conceptual metaphysics’ whose meaning I am not sure I would understand! I approach it as a practical person, relying on what we know and experience.

     I reject such assertions as made by Peter :”If there is no proof of God, then God is unproven by definition.” This is ridiculous on several planes. Who says there is no proof? The great expert Peter! That is laughable. A long list of philosophers? I will give you a list who believe the contrary. The most you can say is that YOU don’t believe in God and my response to that is OK by me.

122. #122 joseph says:
     2 Feb 2013, 6:23 am  

     Yuen Hon Chong,
     This is a question i have posed to myself, and is a hard one, for me at least:

     What would you say the cause of a virtual particle was? That is a particle that seemingly randomly appears from the closest to “nothing” that humanity has yet attained.

123. #123 joseph says:
     2 Feb 2013, 6:25 am  

     I also think if there was nothing the question would be “why nothing”?

124. #124 Peter Hurford (author) says:
     2 Feb 2013, 11:23 am  

     Yuen: The Universe is defined by the laws of physics, which show us without any doubt that for every effect there is a cause. Thus there was a cause for the creation of the universe.

     You keep asserting this, but you never demonstrate it, and you keep ignoring my arguments to the contrary.

     ~

     The whole of human history is a story of discovery, of setting out in a state of ignorance and gradually finding out the truth. In this situation there is no shame in saying “I don’t yet know”.

     Agreed.

     ~

     Assigning probabilities as to whether the Universe had a beginning seems to me to be faintly ridiculous. It either happened or it didn’t.

     You’re not assigning physical probabilities, but rather epistemic probabilities. Imagine you take a 52-card deck and throughly shuffle it, and I ask you what the top card is. You say there’s a 1 in 52 chance of it being the Ace of Clubs. I respond that such is absurd, because it either is the Ace of Clubs or it isn’t. In doing so, I confuse a physical probability with an epistemic probability. (Some would argue, as I might, that all probabilities are epistemic.)

     ~

     I reject such assertions as made by Peter :”If there is no proof of God, then God is unproven by definition.” This is ridiculous on several planes. Who says there is no proof? The great expert Peter! That is laughable. A long list of philosophers? I will give you a list who believe the contrary. The most you can say is that YOU don’t believe in God and my response to that is OK by me.

     What merit is there to anyone ever making an assertion? I say there is no proof because every proof I have encountered has a fatal flaw. Certainly this is provisional — I could very well be wrong about a certain flaw (such and such argument in actually has no flaw and succeeds) or have not yet encountered the argument that has no flaw. …But it’s not baseless. …And certainly not decided by a vote of the philosophers.

     Imagine I said “Yuen thinks there is a beginning to the universe. Who says there is a beginnig? THe great expert Yuen! That is laughable. A long list of physicists? I will give you a list who believe the contrary. The most you can say is that YOU think the universe has a beginning and my response to that is OK by me.”

     Either the arguments for God’s existence are all flawed or at least one succeeds. This is a matter of actual dispute.

125. #125 Yuen Hon Chong says:
     2 Feb 2013, 2:08 pm  

     But your analogy of the pack of cards is asking the wrong question! I hold a pack of cards out to you and ask you “Does the top card exist?” and you answer “there’s a 50% chance”. That is absurd. You can see the card, touch the card and feel the card. Just as I can see the world, touch my toes, feel my pulse. I know I exist and the universe exists and the top card exists. It’s not a question of metaphysics but one of physical reality. You are in the same boat, though you won’t admit it!

     When it comes to whether God exists, you can’t see, touch feel… it’s all in the mind and you have your view just as I have mine — even though it’s a ‘don’t know’. You are saying “There’s no God because I’m not convinced by those who say there is”. That’s you speaking, your view, your opinion. You’re perfectly entitled to it, but not to insist that other people accept it.

     The merit of making an assertion is the ability to back it up with physical evidence. That is the basis of Scientific method.

     The merit of proposing a concept is that it might stimulate other people to find the physical evidence. For example, Mendel proposed the theory of particulate inheritance though he couldn’t put his finger on how it is actually, physically achieved. That took another 150 years. In the interim, using your argument, there was no proof therefore particulate inheritance didn’t exist. Do I have to say “Absurd”?

126. #126 Stephen R. Diamond says:
     4 Feb 2013, 4:19 pm  

     Joseph,

     If uncertainty is “epistemic” rather than “ontological,” and virtual particles are the result of uncertainty, it seems hidden variables are alternative to virtual particles. Do hidden-variable interpretations admit virtual particles?

127. #127 joseph says:
     5 Feb 2013, 1:42 pm  

     I haven’t found a single clear explanation yet (seems standard in the world of quantum), though at the same time i haven’t seen anyone challenge the theory on these grounds. I’ll keep looking for an answer, though in the meantime as Yuen Hon Chong has rather boldly proclaimed something along the lines of “physics has proved cause and effect” i shall await his answer.

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