CADRE Comments

Oxford Mathematician John Lennox uses an example in his lectures to illustrate the fact that an event can have more than one explanation without creating a contradiction. He asks why does water boil? I might answer that heat energy is transferred to the molecules of water, which begin to move more quickly. Eventually, the molecules have too much energy to stay connected as a liquid. When this occurs, they form gaseous molecules of water vapor, which float to the surface as bubbles and travel into the air. (HT: Wonderopolis.com for that wording). Alternatively, I might answer that the water boils because I want a cup of tea. Both answers are correct. The first answer is scientific in that it explains the physics that leads water to boil. It is what Aristotle would have called the "material cause" for the water boiling. The second is just as correct, but it isn’t a scientific explanation at all; rather, it provides an explanation in terms of purpose or end, i.e., that ...

 Jeff Lowder wrote an article attacking my criticisms of the use of Bayes theorem to plot the probability of God. " Is It a Crock to Use Bayes’ Theorem to Measure Evidence about God ? Part 1 March 3, 2013." The point of my original article is that you can't apply scientific probably to something as basic and metahpysal as God, the ground of being, the basis of all reality. The nature of Bayes theorum is such that it only works where new information is obtainable. The sort of new information one can have about God is not available to scientific scrutiny and thus there is no new information. That means the "prior" (the prior probability that must be obtained tom make the theorem work) wont be accurate and thus the whole project is dubious. Lowder never actually comes to terms with this argument. Most of the arguments he makes are red herrings or white rabbits. .... Lowder summarizes what he thinks I'm saying: I think the point that Metacrock is trying t...

Now that school's out, I'll be able to blog more! In this post I share some thoughts in kernel form that I hope to flesh out soon in full size posts. Scientism There are two interesting varieties of scientism: epistemological and ontological. The former claims that the methods of the (natural) sciences are the only reliable ones for obtaining knowledge of the world. The latter claims that the only things that exist in the world are those which are transparent to the methods of the sciences. Note that the two must be distinguished, as one could hold to epistemological scientism without ontological scientism (there may be entities other than scientific ones, but we don't know anything about them). Epistemological scientism is vulnerable to at least two objections: 1) the claim that the methods of the sciences are the only reliable ones for obtaining knowledge of the world cannot itself be assessed using those methods, as one would have to assume their reliability prior to mak...