@kellyjay said
Evidence is all fine and good, but what we say that the evidence means is what matters. You leave out the justification that is what matters not that we see things we think prove our points. There assumptions come into play big time, things taking on faith.

Well KJ, it’s been real. Real what I am not sure.

I do not see a point in continuing with this bizarro-world discussion. You posted the original Lennox video, toward which I leveled completely germane critique and raised legitimate counterpoints that you have been either unwilling or incapable of addressing. And you continuously accuse me of being off-topic, whereas all the while it is painfully obvious that you are the one hijacking your own thread. Then you posted another video my way that you prefaced as being “evidence”, in which the claims of Behe are explicitly cited and discussed. Then when I point out that Behe’s claims have been refuted, you accuse me of smuggling Behe into the discussion and you pretend you have no idea why the name came up. Just bizarre behavior on your part.

At the end of the day, you just want to avoid addressing the actual issues and instead claim that it all just boils down to “faith” and pretend like that absolves you from having to defend the Lennoxian approach to “explanation”. Well, it does not boil down to faith, and even if it did (under some absurdly broad umbrella usage of ‘faith’ ), that would not render all explanative approaches equal.

You and Lennox can keep your religious “explanation” of projecting divine agency onto worldly phenomena. I’ll stick with other methods that actually, you know, work.

@kellyjay said

No need to respond, you are pathetic,

You conveniently truncated my response which clarified that the reason there is no need to respond is because it has already been refuted. Should I respond to models regarding phlogiston and geocentricism too?

There is a mountain of good evolutionary science refuted by nothing and somehow you dismiss all that and instead opt for “evidence” in the form of Behe’s claims that have been refuted soundly. That is what is pathetic here. Your selective endorsements and dismissals of the science are scandalous.

you go on and on about a discussion on the nature of explanation talking about there is no evidence/proof for God in it when that wasn't the topic

As I said, the discussion here regards what counts as explanation, and I have been on topic throughout (unlike your “faith” drivel). If you cannot see how discussion of background evidence for the existence of the entity that you are invoking in your emergent explanation is relevant, then maybe that is why you and Lennox are not doing it properly. Let’s go back to his example of a pot of boiling water. One proposed explanation could be that a human wanted some tea and took actions to bring it about; another could be that an invisible elf wanted some tea and took actions to bring it about. You see any problem that plagues the latter but not the former?

I'm not the one denigrating science, I have been giving cause for my views,

You denigrate science with your shameful selective skepticism of its deliverances. And I am not sure what you mean by “giving cause” for your view, but you have provided no support for your views worth taking seriously. You have provided a lot of personal incredulity where you just cannot seem to understand how it could all play out without a God; but, again, your incredulity does not constitute an argument or evidence. As such, I am also not surprised you have latched on to the junk science of IC and intelligent design, since in practice it often collapses to an argument from incredulity in the form of one just cannot grasp how a particular biological system could have evolved.

Scientific methods are not the issue here, people with strong religious views are also scientists with Nobel prizes behind their names.

Scientific methods are in part the issue here because we use that as an example of explanatory platform that implements methodological quality controls and regulations in a proper way, and we use this as a point of contrast to show just how impoverished is the Lennoxian alternative approach.

Of course there are accomplished scientists who are strongly religious — nothing I have said implies otherwise. But they accomplished what they did in the field of science despite their religious convictions. The history of mankind is littered with examples of religious “explanations” for worldly phenomena that were totally wrong and later supplanted with scientific ones; there are no examples going in the other direction. In understanding our universe, science has done all the lifting and religion has done jack squat whenever it did not just get in the way. Lennox, to his credit, admits most of this with his discourse on the failure of gods of the gap; somehow he thinks his approach is better at imparting explanation but that is the part he gets wrong.

You are pushing a reality that can only be understood by our senses as if nothing outside of them could play apart since the only thing science can look at is the material world,

Again, your reading comprehension blows. I am pushing a critique of Lennox’s claims, as I already laid out clearly. Part of that is comparing his approach against science to, again, make clear the impoverishment of his approach regarding divine “explanation”.

Your bit about material vs immaterial worlds is more hijacking of your own thread. I have no commitment to the existence of any immaterial world and see no evidence for such a thing. Whether or not such a thing could be studied by science in principle depends on whether it has manifestations in reality (and if it were not to have any manifestations in reality whatsoever, then how could we care about it?). You’re the one who needs to worry about how to justify the existence of the immaterial, given that your view invokes the existence of an immaterial divine disembodied mind. I wish you Godspeed with that.

@kellyjay said
https://youtu.be/9R7bdVcK0hk

If you want to talk about evidence, here is a speaker whose life was cold case murder investigations looking at evidence. He started as an Atheist and turned into a Christian based on investigating the claims of Christianity as it was a cold case murder where all of the people involved in the murder from the witness to the investigators at the ...[text shortened]... ot the nature of an explanation, you can shoot at the points this guy is making to prove his points.

There is no need to respond to this speaker’s points, since the scientific community has already refuted them. The only relevant “evidence” presented here is regurgitation of Behe’s claims of irreducible complexity (IC). Behe’s arguments never made much sense to begin with, since it follows rather straightforwardly from his very own definition of IC and some basic evolutionary concepts that IC does not entail an inability to have evolved. But at any rate, all putative examples of IC proposed by Behe (such as blood clotting, bacterial flagella, etc) have been refuted. In fact, if you look at the record of Kitzmiller v. Dover, the court even had to break it to Behe as part of their factual finding that his claims have been refuted by his peers and rejected by the scientific community! Remember when I told you that science implements methodological controls regarding peer review and such scrutiny as other people trying to prove you wrong, etc? Behe’s claims did not pass muster. Yay! for science, for having standards and whatnot!!! Oh, right, you only root for science selectively when you think it does not conflict with your theological commitments. You’re fine with science when it comes to DUT testing or actually any number of things you take for granted every day. But when it comes to evolutionary theory, which has an overwhelming body of scientific evidence behind it, suddenly you do not respect science. I am not sure why you should erect this facade anyway — like I said before, you could just be like Lennox and not denigrate science but just layer your God’s agency on top of scientific discovery like a sauce. It’s a fool’s errand but at least you do not add the disingenuity of having an embarrassingly selective commitment to scientific methods!

@kellyjay said
My views are based on what I think is true, are you any different? Nothing willy-nilly about the things I have been saying, your explanations don’t also share the same frailty of being either true or false? You assume what you are saying is correct because it aligns with your own interpretation of the universe, it must be true therefore?

As already explained, it is a truism that one’s views are based in what one takes to be true. That has exactly nothing to do with the Lennox video. You’ve completely lost the thread, which is not easily done on a thread of one’s own initiation. The discussion here is not about how one’s views are constituted; it is about what counts as a method of explanation. You and Lennox can hold your views of divine agency; go ahead and hold them to your heart’s delight, and I urge you to do so if that is honestly what garners the assent of your intellect (maybe I would also urge you to do more study on stuff though). But please do not insult the intellect of others by suggesting that imposing your view on the universe sans any evidence or any sane methodological controls is an act of explanation. After all, you’ve pointed out many pitfalls like confirmation bias and the like. Yes, that’s why you need some basic rules to the methods of explanation. Science by and large gets it right. You and Lennox do not even try to get it right.

@kellyjay said

You seem to be pushing something that you are not willing to look at in your own life the same way! You are presuming how you view things is somehow different than anyone who believes in God, a real issue for you, you have to borrow from a theistic worldview on faith, to even settle on what is true in reality!

It is absurd the way you continue to insist the scientific and Lennoxian approaches are similar. They are complete opposites, as anyone should be able to see. I am not sure if you are just trolling or if your intellect had taken a holiday or what, but I will humor you just once more and explain it slowly. If you still persist in this mischaracterization, then I will know you are trolling.

The Lennoxian approach is basically that one brings into the exercise a predetermined, ready answer; that answer is then carried forward and retained completely regardless of what evidence or information happens to be gained relative to the inquiry. This is all helped by the fact that the proposed answer has no falsification conditions and tends to be ill-defined to begin with. An example is that one can hold the view that God’s agency explains gravity (whatever that even means). Then regardless of what physicists actually discover over time regarding gravity, this person can just say yeah, and that just shows how clever my God is regarding gravity. Dumb to say the least, explains precisely nothing and adds precisely no value.

Scientific explanation, on the other hand, works in just the opposite way. There is no sympathy toward ill-definition, and hypotheses have disconfirmation conditions; there is an actual bar to be reached for retaining the hypothesis, etc. We do not enter the exercise with a predetermined answer; rather there is a range of potential hypotheses that are considered, and testing and data, along with other metrics of explanatory goodness, determine winners or at least outline directions. Pretty much everything is defeasible, and we can also say we do not know when that is all the evidence warrants.

Those two approaches are about as different as they can possibly be, so again, I find it hard to believe that you genuinely cannot distinguish the two.

You see law like normative activity in the universe and assume it will always be that way, you assume it has always been that way so you then take that on faith. When we are applying tests we do so on the faith that the universe will act as it always has, and will continue to. We work things out with science looking at the universe in our faith that it will remain as it is, otherwise, there are no strategies that we could use, for it would be unpredictable. The foundation for doing science is that what we are looking at can have facts, if not what is the point? …..

Again — and I find I have to repeat myself in this conversation with you quite a bit — what you are outlining throughout the rest of your post is nothing new. It is related to the problem of induction, diagnostic challenges with falsification, and the like. As I said (go back and read), science as a collective has tried its best to implement methodological controls for such worries. At least scientific explanative approaches try, whereas the Lennoxian approach does not even bother trying.

@kellyjay said
Nothing that you can say as truth, can be shown as true, if you are not willing to accept some things on faith, you cannot suggest because things always behaved uniformly over time before now, that they always will, that is faith. You cannot say someone is wrong about anything without first knowing what is correct, you cannot say that every view is good while disagreeing wi ...[text shortened]... y are not capable of that, if you disagree show it can be done with what we see in the here and now.

All of the challenges to objective inquiry and explanation that you and Lennox raise are nothing new. They touch on things like the demarcation problem, the problem of induction, confirmation bias and the like, which have been around for centuries. Science as a collective enterprise for the most part has done its duty to address these and implement mitigation strategies, such as emphasis on falsifiability, testability, replicability, peer review, healthy scrutiny and skepticism, and so forth. This is the honest due diligence approach, and it stands in stark contrast to your own approach, which appears to be just muddling everything together into the same “faith” bucket and rationalizing acceptance of your own impoverished view on the basis that we are all just “making it up as we go” with equal merits. Well, speak for yourself. Your “faith” approach is a product of your own failing, and do not presume to project this failing onto other inquirers who do not share it. Lennox’s view of “explanation” via divine agency is laughable, but at least it is not so disingenuous as yours. Lennox does not go out of his way to selectively denigrate science but rather just claims that such science can be synergized with his proposed manner of “explanation” (of course failing to either realize or disclose that his “explanation” is just post hoc stipulation that explains nothing). Your view, however, not only explains nothing but is perniciously disingenuous in its selective dismissal of scientific method.

@kellyjay said
How you view the world is based upon what you think is true in it, you deny that? We can fool ourselves by looking for confirmation of our biases over things that contradict them. You will not correct someone's way of thinking if you don't think they are doing it wrong, for crying out loud you are doing it here with me and you fail to see that?

The way science and real ...[text shortened]... ructions, mindlessness doesn't, can you show the facts that dispute that without running in circles?

How you view the world is based upon what you think is true in it, you deny that? We can fool ourselves by looking for confirmation of our biases over things that contradict them. You will not correct someone's way of thinking if you don't think they are doing it wrong, for crying out loud you are doing it here with me and you fail to see that?

That one views the world based on what one thinks is true is trivially correct (are people supposed to hold views of the world not based on what they take to be true of the world — how would that work exactly?). The point that you keep evading is the following: if what you take to be true is a blanket, pet presupposition of divine agency conceived of arse-pulling and having the properties of being unfalsifiable, having no prior empirical evidence or basis whatsoever, being profoundly non-parsimonious and the like; then you do not get a seat at the explanation table. Sorry, them’s the breaks. You can hold your view, but do not expect others to take it seriously in matters of explanation. Explanation is not just a matter of projecting what you believe to be true onto phenomena just willy-nilly; there are rules to the methods of explanation, which neither you nor Lennox seem to grasp.

@kellyjay said
Let me ask you, evidence in any trial is submitted to be considered by both the prosecution and the defense correct? It all must be accepted by the judge as having to be relevant to the case. So evolutionary claims that it is a natural explanation because we see molecular structures becoming more complex over time. This has life becoming more than what was there before wi ...[text shortened]... ace, and that type of thing only has one natural cause a mind, it is unnatural to suggest otherwise.

Your first paragraph is word salad.

You seem to be saying that evidential interpretation of how things work is a biased process wherein one enters and leaves with his or her pet presuppositions, just contorting whatever evidence to spare them. No, that is apparently what you and Lennox strive to do; but that is not the way science and real explanation work. You and Lennox enter with your pet theistic presuppositions regarding the agency of God, and you post hoc stipulate them onto the back of scientific discovery with impunity and call that an act of “explanation”, similar to how one might try to call peeing on my leg an act of raining. Science and programs of real explanation cannot work that way because they actually have to deal with facts and the prospects of falsification on account of said facts. With science, to explain some set of observations, it is not good enough to just copy and paste some pet presupposition. Scientists actually have to make some effort. They put forth hypotheses with testable predictions. They test them, make confirmations and disconfirmations, impart refinements, etc, and basically converge on understanding through abduction. You and Lennox can then come along and say, well, all that hard unbiased work just shows how clever my God is. Sorry, but no. Your God claims are irrelevant to the whole explanative process; add precisely no explanation whatsoever; and deserve to be ignored when it comes to matters of explanation. You are of course welcome to hold your God views. But do not expect me to take them seriously, and please spare us all the nonsense about how they add explanative content.

Apart from that, the only other thing I can make out here is that you appear woefully miseducated on the evidential support for evolutionary theory.

@kellyjay said
Why didn't you respond to this, and by responding to this, I mean the points?

"Well, a natural explanation of evolution and DNA, we can read the genetic code, which is different than just recognizing what one tree is compared to another, so within the genetic structure are syntactic and semantic information that directs forms and functions in life, information processing ...[text shortened]... rough only those things that comply with their worldviews will always miss it, it is a faith thing."

There simply are no substantive points in your response to my legitimate criticism of Lennox’s boiling water example. The point is, it is very disingenuous to suggest that post hoc “explanation” invoking the agency of God with respect to whatever the current deliverances of scientific discoveries happen to be (the details matter not since the God at issue is unfalsifiable on any such count — it would not matter if scientists discovered DNA or some radically different vehicle for explanation, this theistic program would judge God just as clever either way) is on par with explanation invoking human agency in regards to the object of recognizably human desires. In particular, there is a vast expanse of prior evidential basis for human agency; there is none for this God.

Your response regarding evolution through DNA as replicator and natural selection, etc, had no substantive points to which to respond. You were supposed to provide prior evidence of the agency of God; instead, all you provided was evidence of your own personal incredulity that such a process can play out in the absence of a divine superintending mind. Sorry, but your incredulity does not constitute evidence for the agency of God.

@kellyjay said
Yawn
Explanations were the topic, he was pointing out that more than one was possible. You want to add more to that and complain.

Wrong. Apparently, you have very little comprehension of the video that you yourself posted. Lennox does not merely point out that multiple explanations are possible (which is a trivial claim — as I said of course this is the case, as there are multiple levels of explanation with some being more fundamental, some more emergent). Rather, he goes on explicitly to put forth a particular program of divine agency as a respectable candidate for one such type of explanation. Problem is, he is simply wrong on that point. The program of theistic “explanation” he puts forth fails to qualify as explanation in any way, shape, or form for reasons I already outlined. You continue to ignore this and seem incapable of grappling with legitimate criticisms of the video’s content.

@kellyjay said
Well, a natural explanation of evolution and DNA, we can read the genetic code, which is different than just recognizing what one tree is compared to another, so within the genetic structure are syntactic and semantic information that directs forms and functions in life, information processing takes place where stored information as we find in seeds and eggs produce whatever ...[text shortened]... hrough only those things that comply with their worldviews will always miss it, it is a faith thing.

Derailing the thread again with faith nonsense.

Please try addressing the actual criticism I raised toward Lennox’s boiling water example within context.

@kellyjay said
Please don't project your denial of this, do you think if it doesn't fit your worldview, therefore, it must simply be wrong or out of bounds? Faith is simply our trust in the fidelity of something you have to trust from driving over a bridge, walking on the ground, putting your money in a bank, loaning a friend money, putting medicine in your body, and allowing someone to c ...[text shortened]... feel your were and are reading into it something not there so you can complain about so we disagree.

Well, there you go prevaricating around the term ‘faith’ precisely as I predicted you would have to in trying to make any point there.

This really is amusing. The video that you posted had nothing to do with the term ‘faith’. Lennox employs the term precisely zero times by my count. Rather, Lennox makes specific claims about his conception of God and about theistic explanation running parallel to scientific explanation — exactly the sorts of claims I outlined and addressed. So I was exactly on topic. Then you tried to derail the discussion by bringing faith irrelevancies in while accusing me of being off script. When I brought the focus back to the content of what Lennox actually said, you again chide me for being off topic and go right back to the faith drivel, which is the only part that is actually off topic. Just cannot make this stuff up.

We can leave the word ‘faith’ out of the discussion just as Lennox did. Let us look at the details of Lennox’s theistic “explanation” so that you’ll not again make the mistake of conflating it with actual explanation, of which scientific explanation is a form. Lennox begins by pulling out of his arse an unfalsifiable pet theistic theory that invokes the existence of a mysterious agent that has no empirical evidential basis whatsoever and violates rules of parsimony and all that; then, whenever scientific advancement happens and actually explains some phenomenon, Lennox foists his pet view of agency onto the back of this finding by stipulating that this agent intended things to be and work as such; then Lennox declares that this has enhanced our overall understanding. This should all be very funny if he were not so serious about it. It should be clear that this process adds no explanation at all. As I tried to point out before, his example about gravity basically makes my case, not his. Lennox claims that for all our scientific endeavor, it does not really give us any idea what gravity is, and his further implication is this is where his program of theistic explanation helps out. This is insulting to the intellect. This is akin to saying that the idea that gravity is a geometric feature of spacetime is just impenetrable; but, don’t worry, the idea that gravity is a geometric feature of spacetime that was intended to be as such by a mysterious supernatural agent whose existence has no evidential basis is crystal clear.

@kellyjay said
Why is the water boiling, the first explanation it has to do with the thermal activity of the stove transferring the heat into the pot and agitating the water causing it to boil, the second explanation is I wanted some coffee, well truthfully, an expresso. Now I could ask you to pick only one but, why would only one be true?

That was the point of the talk, looking for more and not seeing it is because it was limited to this point.

Again, yes emergent level explanation can proceed aptly through talk of agency. It works fine for the coffee example, since we have good evidence for the agency of humans and its relation to objects of desire. So, again: where is the evidence for the agency of God?

@kellyjay said
Well, let me begin by saying is nice seeing your name again even if we disagree. 😉

No matter what explanation you get or give for either that God is responsible for everything, or that nothing was at the foot of it all, both are always going to be speculative and will be taken on faith. Which is the best explanation is the only thing we can look for, and that was not th ...[text shortened]... e. What was in this talk was explanations, there are two types under discussion agency and science.

Please do not project the faith inherent to theistic “explanation” onto the subject of explanation simpliciter. Religion and science are of the same type of faith just as Grizzly 399 and Walter Payton are of the same type of bear. You have to prevaricate grotesquely to make the point.

I’m not sure why you think I was commenting on something imaginary and not put forth in the video by Lennox. I outlined two claims, both of which are explicitly put forth by Lennox in the video, and I restricted my response to showing that both claims are disingenuous. Nothing more than that.

Regarding the subject of explanation, of course it can aptly proceed through many different levels, some more fundamental, some more emergent. If I want to explain to you how a car gets from one place to another, I can talk to you about internal combustion and its movement of parts, I can talk to you about the intentions and movements of a human driver, and theoretically I could talk to you about the core theory of Physics although that would be inefficient to say the least. We do not need Lennox to tell us any of that.

I’m addressing what he did say about his own God and his own theistic “explanation”. I can only put that in quotes because what he described was not a form of explanation at all. He described a form of non-explanation where he simply engages in ad hoc stipulation in service to a God beyond falsification. It explains precisely nothing.

@KellyJay

KJ, I am checking back in after a lengthy respite and see that you are still up to your usual shenanigans. Up to no good. 😀

I think Dr. Lennox’s arguments on this are highly unpersuasive and half-baked. He makes two claims here. First, he claims his conception is not a “god of the gaps” and that scientific advancements (whatever they be) would not serve to displace God but rather only heighten his understanding of how God works. Second, he claims that scientific explanation (or description) is not the only relevant sort but actually works best in tandem with another valid form of explanation related to the agency and intentionality of God. Both of these claims, particularly in the light of his examples given, are disingenuous.

Regarding the first claim, it is an unfortunate bug (not a feature) of any putative explanative program that it provides unfalsifiable content. That Lennox’s god-commitments are not, even in principle, subject to displacement by the deliverances of science is just a natural consequence of unfalsifiability. Unfortunately for Lennox, an upshot is that his god-commitments can explain nothing at all. I am paraphrasing, but Christopher Hitchens put it well when he described such “explanation” as an ever-expanding tautology. For example, a theist can claim that God explains the rich diversity of biological life; an objector can retort, well, what about DNA and the theory of evolution through random mutation and natural selection and all that; and the theist can respond, well, that just shows God is even more clever that we thought now does it not?!? If the scientific understanding changes and gets refined further, God’s cleverness grows all the more. This is not to be taken seriously. This is not a exercise in explanation but rather one in pure ad hoc stipulation. It is profoundly unscientific. In scientific matters, one does not have the luxury of pulling an explanative claim out of his arse and then growing in respect of it under any scientific outcomes whatsoever because no set of circumstances can show it to be wrong. In science you are held to a much higher standard, since putative explanations have to survive respectable attempts at falsification and whatnot. At least in science we try to converge on a solution based on data and evidence, rather than stipulating and hewing to a solution that accommodates any evidence whatever it may possibly be, which appears to be the opposite of trying.

Regarding his second claim, where is the beef? Please provide a model for the validity of just stipulating god’s agency and intentionality onto the back of scientific understanding. Or at least explain how it would add any understanding at all. His example regarding gravity is bizarre. Newton thought gravity was a force in a classical sense and got it wrong on that count, although his equations are still good enough to explain a profound amount of phenomena; Einstein came along and showed that gravity is better interpreted as a geometric feature of spacetime and his equations explain even more. What exactly is Lennox’s addendum to all this vis-a-vis the agency of God? Does it have any more content than just that God intended such things to be as such? What precise understanding does that add? The example about heating up water for tea or coffee is also profoundly disingenuous as well. We of course can work off of theories of agency where agency is empirically evidenced, such as humans’ desiring coffee. Where is prior evidence for the agency of God?