Thank you for your sincere reply. I would like to address your understanding of our “approaches.”
We are not comparing two views, we are comparing two approaches. One approach is to examine the evidence and try to form hypotheses based on it. The other is to start with a book of myths and decide that everything we discover about reality must have some counterpart in this book.
The term worldview would of course include your subset delineations of approaches.
So your approach is to examine the evidence and try to find causes, explanations and/or hypotheses based on it that evidence.
Your view of my approach is to start with a book of myths and decide that everything we discover about reality must have some counterpart in this book.
I think you were pretty clear there.
Now here is my take on the matter …..
Your view of my approach could not be more wrong. My approach is more like yours. AKA Natural Theology. The evidence is critical. Let me repeat that …evidence is critical. I look at the evidence and try to find causes, explanations and/or hypotheses from the same evidence you are looking at. No Bible required. Where we differ is this, I can entertain, when warranted, a supernatural cause, explanation and/or hypothesis.
I know you conveniently don’t believe in a distinction between natural/supernatural and I’ll directly address that here…. You believe only in reality as mentioned before and I can agree with that to a great extent. But you, in your “approach,” you redefine reality to be nature only thus eliminating supernatural causes, explanations and/or hypotheses. Here is what I mean…..
Things either exist in reality or they don't. If we can observe them, they are potential objects of inquiry whose effects on other objects of inquiry can be examined. If they have no effects on anything, they aren't going to be part of any explanation about how stuff works. This schema exhausts all possibilities for explaining reality without once invoking any notion of "natural", "material", "physical", or otherwise. I didn't even mention science.
……. your very first word “Things”, by your own reasoning can only pertain to the natural. Thus through your tortured reduction of semantics you conveniently eliminate supernatural causes, explanations and/or hypotheses. So your philosophical method/approach methodologically considers only natural causes, explanations and/or hypotheses. Hence you’re a methodological naturalist. Thus your “approach” is inherently self-defeating. Science is perfectly restricted to natural causes, explanations and/or hypotheses our knowledge is not. Science is a subset of knowledge.
My point is that under this basic and unassuming approach to discovering reality, we have found out a great many things.
I agree that science successfully discovers reality. I just find it limited in its scope of reality because reality is more than what can be directly observed.
It could have easily been the case that, in the process of explaining some phenomenon fully, it turned out that the most reasonable explanation was that God was responsible for it. So far, this has happened zero times.
Let’s investigate then. What is the best case for the cause of the universe?
This is not because God is "outside of nature" or immaterial; once again, those words are just defense strategies you are hiding behind that don't really mean anything in the context of predicting how reality behaves
You are guilty of the very process you throw against me. Your words are just defense strategies you are hiding behind so you can avoid examining the best cause/explanation of the universe. You are simply burying your head in the sand to avoid the truth. Those terms simply don’t exist in your part of the beach.
Further….
How the universe behaves is in a different category than an explanation of its cause. I agree that the SBBM of the universe is the best explanation of how it behaves and that God is the best explanation of its cause. Thus I’m not hiding from anything. Your reasoning as presented there is a categorical fallacy.
It's because God just happens to be among the hypotheses that do not have any explanatory power as such.
You can only conclude that to be fact from a self-defeating foundation.
That assertion represents a conclusion to your thought process and needs to be examined. It seems you are deluded into believing your thoughts need no defense… they are just facts.
You can’t escape the epistemology here. And yours needs defense. Until you can rationally defend your epistemology, your assertions of this order are groundless.
It has to be modified beyond recognition into something vague and murky enough to uncomfortably coexist with the current body of knowledge, or shrink to the point where it might as well be discarded along with the luminiferous ether and phlogiston.
Another assertion without any evidence. It is a conclusion based only on your needs for it to be true. Provide some evidence for your modified definition of God.
You do NOT get to claim exemption from the commonplace requirement that explanations must be demonstrable in terms of some observable phenomenon, purely on the semantic dodge of invented categories like "natural".
There you go again….this commonplace observable nature. Look you are forcibly stating that all knowledge must be confined to natural phenomena. And that is how you avoid dealing with all of reality. That is how you deny that the supernatural exists. This process you use to limit knowledge is not scientific, it is philosophical and needs a defense.
You do not get to unreasonably claim that the supernatural does not exist because you like to use the term reality, that by process of self-blindness you redefine as observable nature only. You need to defend your self-refuting foundation of methodological naturalism from which you form your truth about reality.
Further…..
The SBBM has tons of observable phenomenon that I fully embrace. Thus again I’m not dodging anything. You are the one that is illogically dodging the whole scope of reality.
