::The codification of moral rules does not come from examining the world or thinking about logical necessities; it comes from individual human beings examining their own desires, and communicating with other human beings to formulate rules of common consent.::

and the sad fact is that for a large number of people, there isn’t much phenomenological difference between contemplating the manson murders and harvey milk’s love life. the same feelings of disgust and discomfort occur in the contemplation of either situation. this feeling of disgust is the basis for the establishment of law.

now, you speak of the possibility of the “normalization” of the concept of homosexuality. that is well and good, except it implies that the basic foundation of the compromises we call law (the gut reaction of the people) can in some cases be mistaken. and when it is mistaken, you or somebody has the obligation to correct it. now if you are a serious moral relavist, you do not have the framework to correct the general ickiness of the people. there is no absolute framework to give your minority perspective any more value or importance than the majority opinion.

a moral relativist who thinks that the majority opinion is wrong doesn’t have a lot of options. who are you to “normalize” away the disgust of the masses? they are already normal, you are not.

If all that science does is explain natural processes by using other natural processes, then to automatically reject a God because you can make explanations that satisfy you is the equivalent of automaticallly giving up on an relationship.

No, it’s not, because the fundamental reason why supernatural causes are excluded is because they cannot, by definition, be explained. All that science is saying here is that everything can, in principle, be explained. Everything. We may not be able to discover all of those explanations. In fact, we almost certainly will not. But to resort to an explanation that is itself unexplainable is meaningless. It’s a retreat from providing an actual explanation.

So, science is excluding nothing here. All it is saying is that if there is such a thing as a god, then that entity can, in principle, be understood and explained in detail. We may never actually be able to perform the experiments to actually show what this deity is, but we could at least do so in principle. In principle, we could describe what sorts of things this deity was made up of. We could describe the mechanisms by which it performs some “miracle” or another. We could describe how it went about creating the universe. We could understand how it came to exist, and what processes led up to its existence. In principle. Actually determining the particular mechanisms may be beyond us, but it should be doable in a hypothetical sense (if I could only build a gajillion dollar instrument…).

Resorting to concepts and ideas that cannot ever possibly be explained, even were I to have infinite resources to construct an experiment, are simply meaningless. They are just fluff to fool people into thinking they’ve said something with meaning.

Another problem is in believing you could find evidence independent of a God if He did exist. If God did exist, by definition everything would be dependent on Him.

Yeah, so why isn’t the evidence plain and obvious to everybody? Why is it that everything that we learn about science leads us away from the idea of a supernatural god and towards a fully naturalistic existence?

Don’t you see that the opposite side of my coin holds true?

If all that science does is explain natural processes by using other natural processes, then to automatically reject a God because you can make explanations that satisfy you is the equivalent of automaticallly giving up on an relationship.

A dog chasing its tail, can’t imply it doesn’t have an owner.

You can be certain of what is NOT out there to be discovered ONLY if you know everything.

Are you claiming to be God?

Another problem is in believing you could find evidence independent of a God if He did exist. If God did exist, by definition everything would be dependent on Him. Consequently, there might not be any evidence independent of His showing Himself to you.

So no, the analogy isn’t even remotely similar. Instead what we have is a real, measurable, physical process. It is perfectly understandable to expect that this real, measurable, physical process can be explained in some manner. That’s all that science does, and positing a god is the equivalent of giving up on looking for an explanation.

Imagine you’re driving in West Texas. (It’s pretty bleak out there if you’ve never been!) You notice a row of fence posts paralleling the road. On top of one of those posts you notice a turtle.

I’m sure that someone, maybe you, could come up with an explanation for how the turle got on top of that fence post all by itself, i.e. an explanation that would exclude anyone putting it on top of the fence. I’m also certain that this explanation would satisfy many people.

My point is this: what criteria you use to determine whether or not an explanation is satisfactory has nothing to do with your explanation.

So, to believe that the scientific method in and of itself proves that there is not a creator, or that the results of the method proves there is not a creator, is to bring to the method, to bring to your results, something that is extra to the method and to the science.

In short, you have brought your prejudice.

As Freud would say, I see your slip.

The reason this is so is simple: there is only one truth, but a near infinite variety of untruths. Finding the truth about reality can be likened to hitting the bullseye on a dartboard. If you’re going to just throw out there the possibility that X is true, without providing any evidence for it, then that’s rather like blindfolding yourself and spinning until you’re dizzy before throwing the dart, and then thinking you’ve got a chance in hell of actually hitting upon the right answer.

Obviously this is nonsense: the expected result is that in doing so, you’ll miss not only the bullseye, but the entire dartboard. This is why when something is stated without evidence, we can naturally expect that it’s probably quite incorrect.

I’m sure that we could describe in intricate detail how a clock works.

I’m sure that we can do so without ever making a single reference to the guy who designed the clock or put it together. However, it would be a fallacy to believe that there was not a person who designed or made the clock just because I can explain how a clock works without making reference to either of these people.

Likewise, just because the scientific method can be used to explain much of our world without reference to a creator, does not mean I can conclusively prove there is not a creator. If someone were to say that the scientific method does so, I would infer that they brought that (dis)belief to their science.

In other words, one is not being a scientist if he or she says there is not a creator.