It is absurd that this person has chosen to lump Dennett in with Dawkins, since they are dealing with very different parts of the human experience of religion, and that, specifically, IT IS COGNITIVE SCIENCE WHICH ATTEMPTS TO NATURALISTICALLY BRIDGE THE GAP BETWEEN THE MATERIAL AND QUALIA. We may not need “God” for this at all.

The daily tirade by this frightened community has become nothing more than a clown show. You and others like you are sooo transparent. Keep trying to reenforce you’re not whistling past the graveyard but the noise is becoming deafening.

The obviousness of Design has been backing you guys into the corners of absurdity for a while now—first by what we can plainly observe and experience and Now, without question , by the Math itself. You’re own discipline has betrayed you guys. You entered the field of origins to make sure their was no piper to pay and now its clear you’re gonna be broke. The “appearance of design” is gone. The math matches the appearance.

A prudent man would just zip it from here on out but I guess its your very nature that leaves you guys in the shadows defending your creepy little worldview.

The use of the word ‘Scientistic’ seems to be to frame science as a belief system. Science is a skeptical system, if anything. Do scientists refer to themselves as ‘Scientistic’? Creating a label for your opponent is disingenuous. It’s name-calling.

Predicting what questions Science won’t be able to answer has been a bad bet in the past. Beauty, for example, is subject to scientific inquiry already.

Definitions of God that put God outside of the Universe, or give God special properties, have not been biblically based. Where do these come from? This is Christian theology based in quicksand.

Indeed, coming up with a definition of God is not a great idea. Before “The act of ‘to be’ itself”, an Ontological Argument had it as “The most perfect being.” No one uses this Ontological Argument definition anymore. But both definitions define God to exist. It’s pretty silly. The idea that ‘Serious believers’ believe this definition of God is totally arrogant. Where is the reference to a survey? How does one define ‘Serious believers’?

Philosophy brought us forward. That’s what Aristotle used. But once the scientific method required evidence, it turned out that much of what Aristotle and others had proven was wrong. Though philosophy continued to aid in the search for truth, of late, philosophers have added little, and even mislead the search. But philosophers do care if their ideas are correct.

While “Can we imagine laws/patterns which describe a universe without God?” is great, it is not a disproof of the existence of God. It does say what God isn’t.

On the other hand, God’s role in the Universe has shrunk with time. Pinning your hopes for a proof of God’s existence on a required role is not a good bet.

Carroll takes the priest’s argument to be about causes and says that causes are not fundamental, so reasoning like “all things have a cause, but there can’t be an infinite regress, so there must be one thing which doesn’t, et hoc dicimus et cetera et cetera” won’t work, because Carroll won’t concede that all things (or perhaps anything) has a cause. Given this, why would he think that an argument over whether the laws of nature have a cause made a difference to whether or not there might be a god?

On (d), of course I didn’t carry out every experiment in the history of science, but Carroll (and you) are talking about rationalism and empiricism. The history of science was not in my mind without first being in my senses. I doubt Carroll is claiming that it’s illegitimate to reflect on that history, rather he’s complaining about claims like “Everything that begins to exist has a cause, I mean, it stands to reason, dunnit?”

On induction: One sometimes sees theists saying stuff like “science relies on faith, therefore you atheistic scientists are just like us, really”. If that’s your argument, it is wrong, though we’d need to tease out what “faith” means here to see which wrong argument is being made. As Talmont-Kaminski says, doing science does not need commitment to believe an ontology (“faith”) in the way that being an evangelical does. Sometimes the argument is that we all need “faith” to avoid radical scepticism. Chris Hallquist says “belief in the Christian God isn’t very much at all like most of the common-sense beliefs commonly cited as threated by Descartes & Hume-style skepticism (like belief in the reliability of our senses), but is an awful lot like beliefs most Christians wouldn’t accept without evidence–namely, the beliefs of other religions.” So I don’t think it’s that either.

Perhaps you meant to argue specifically that the claim that “there are causes” or “all things have causes” is as justified as our rejection of grue as a silly category. I think that might be right until we encounter evidence to the contrary, but Carroll is claiming he has it in the case of causes. If we got to 2013 and stuff stopped having mass, we’d probably reconsider that too.

I’d include history in what I mean by empirical investigation: historians don’t learn stuff by sitting in their armchairs and thinking about it, either. I don’t think repeatable experiments are necessary for science: I don’t imagine geologists do many of those.

Religious claims are subject to examination by our best tools for finding out about the world, which are empirical ones including (but not limited to) science. Attempts to rule out such investigation with claims like “science cannot investigate the supernatural” end up effectively saying “well, what if anything could happen in my favourite special case?” In one sense this gets something right: the results of these investigations are subject to revision in the light of new evidence, and to set the prior probability of anything to exactly zero is irrational. If pigs do in fact fly occasionally, clearly we’re missing something. But I don’t see why we should take flying pig claims more seriously if the claim is that God did it than if the claim is that advanced aliens levitated the pig with their tractor beam (a naturalistic claim): merely saying “supernatural” isn’t going to make me think “oh it was supernatural, why didn’t you say so? Obviously that’s much more reasonable.”

Here’s Russell Blackford over at Talking Philosophy (“Religion and science: the issue that won’t go away”: I’d link to it but I think links get moderated here): “Recall that the rise of science did not subtract from our pre-existing resources for investigating the world. Rather, it added to them; and the old pragmatic and scholarly methods and the new, distinctively scientific, ones can always be used together in any given case. We need to know whether such claims as that Jesus rose from the dead and that the universe was created by God are plausible when set against what we know overall about how the world works, both through methods that we could have employed anyway and through the distinctive methods developed by science. When the question is framed like that, surely we don’t think that these claims come under no pressure at all from our best empirical investigations of the world?”

http://old.richarddawkins.net/videos/517674-daniel-dennett-on-scientism

John Haught is also present.

So then are you saying that empiricism is invalid if a particular piece of empirical evidence is not regularly repeated, thus disallowing us from drawing inductive conclusions about it?
Must therefore every phenomenon be duplicated or infinitely repeated before it is acceptable as evidence? If you see a man kill another man will you refuse to believe it happened unless he kills several more? Are there no one-off events at all,–ever? If you say no,–then that is obviously false. If you say yes, –then every one-off event must be a miracle;if you drop a particular jug on a particular floor, is that a miracle because that particular jug cannot be re-smashed again on the identical point on the floor. I would say that it is empirical evidence for the existence of the now broken jug,–but presumably you would say it never happened as it is not repeatable;–or else that it is a miracle. Are all one-off events miracles?

So are you implying that we have not read philosophy, because if we had, we would be agreeing with you that God is in his Heaven and anyone who thinks otherwise is ignorant? Bit patronising , no?
Incidentally, I give regular Philosophy talks to my own U3A Philosophy group.

Maybe Paul apparently dismisses the “philosophy of religion” by saying theism is not subject to proof or disproof,– not because he has not read up on the subject,- but-because he has; that is if he is anything like me personally who has studied the subject as an amateur for 55 years (I am now 72), and find the “philosophy of religion ” an empty waste of time, and that the natural result of studying it is to reject its conclusions.
The fact that there are endless writings about religion and philosophy of religion seem to suggest that no conclusions have yet been reached which might support its veracity. Or to put it briefly; it’s all just words.