From: posting-system@google.com Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2002 4:32 PM To: brian@holtz.org Subject: Re: JH: The Design Argument Follow Up Flag: Follow up Flag Status: Completed From: brian@holtz.org (Brian Holtz) Newsgroups: alt.atheism.moderated Subject: Re: JH: The Design Argument References: <396X7.8281$NE5.45601@rwcrnsc53> <200201060849.AAA18455@lsil.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 12.236.1.8 Message-ID: <29c16047.0201161632.69006fbc@posting.google.com> [Note: in the interest of a.a.m. bandwidth, I'm replying offline to Paul's allegations of argument from authority.] "Paul Filseth" wrote > There isn't any possible thing that, if it were to exist, would > definitely be a god under your definition, IMHO. Why wouldn't the Christian God Yahweh not meet my definition (or, alternatively, not be possible to exist)? > > lexicographic evidence that my definition harmonizes with both > > general and specialist usage. > > IIRC, you pointed at dictionaries, not usage. Dictionaries document usage. I also pointed at specialist usage in the philosophical literature that is consistent with the dictionary definitions. > I was the one pointing out discrepancies between your definitions > and how people actually use the words. Oh? As I noted in my unrebutted posting of Sep 3, your last posting in that thread simply ducked my question about actual usage: > > Do you seriously doubt that most philosophers (and most people > > in general) would conclude that the debate had been settled in > > favor of something they call "supernaturalism"? > > [..] Why do you care so much what most people would conclude? Because we're debating whether my definition of "supernatural" matches common usage. If you're now ready to resume debating actual usage, then by all means answer my Sep 3 question above. > > your claim that supernaturality isn't well-defined > > enough to argue over whether it exists. > > Now there you go again, using the same invalid inference rule. Do you or do you not think there is any possible definition of 'supernatural' that would render meaningful the traditional philosophical debate over whether supernaturality exists? > _your_ belief that > mainstream scholars agree with you about what "supernatural" means I've never claimed that any scholar has ever explicitly agreed with my definition (but see below). Rather, I've said repeatedly that a) there is no evidence the philosophical literature uses the term to mean anything other than its dictionary definition; b) my definition harmonizes with the dictionary definition; and c) my definition captures the more precise notion needed for use in metaphysics and theology. > According to you, you've never seen a journal article or even > a citation of one that raises the issue of whether your notion of > supernaturality is well-defined. No. According to me, I had never seen a journal article or even a citation of one that raises the issue of whether the dictionary definition of supernaturality is well-defined. (And now, thanks to you, I've seen article not on "supernaturality" but on "miracle" -- one that is refuted both by an atheist philosopher as well as by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.) > the second possibility -- that scholars came > to the (alleged) consensus without debating the matter. As far as you > are aware, they've never actually considered the alternative. I.e., > they _unphilosophically_ took their violates-natural-law concept _for > granted_. If so, the oxymoron argument is _unrefuted_. I've answered every objection you raised in our "definitions of god, atheism, etc." thread. If you disagree, please reply to my Sep 3 posting (available on Google). As for the literature being unphilosophical in its use of "supernatural", note that "violates-natural-law" is a a non-standard definition that is repudiated by the literature (see below). > you also claim they have a good reason to agree with you, or you don't > claim that. If you claim they have such a reason, that's an ordinary > "X exists" statement, so you have burden of proof. I claimed not that they explicitly agree with Brian Holtz, but that they agree with the dictionary definition and that my elaboration of it is a rather straightforward application of the relevant ideas. I indeed have the burden of supporting this claim, and said burden has been comprehensively met in the thread leading up to my unrebutted Sep 3 posting. > Whether the term is well-defined at all depends on > whether the pros use a better definition than yours. And you're the > one who's making a claim about that question, not I. Yes, and my claim is that there is no evidence the philosophical literature uses the term to mean anything other than its dictionary definition. Your McKinnon citation misses the mark, both because it is about "miracle" not "supernatural", and because it has been convincingly rebutted. > (* Alastair McKinnon, "'Miracle' and 'Paradox,'" American > Philosophical Quarterly, 4, No. 4 (October, 1967).) McKinnon defines "natural law" as "a description of whatever happens". His paper tries to make its point with the trivial exercise of substituting "the actual course of events" for "natural law". His simplistic definition does not capture the way philosophers use the term "natural law". A paper by Keith Parsons (an atheist) at http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/keith_parsons/thesis/chap1.html demonstrates that McKinnon's definition fails to consider that the term "law of nature" can also mean a regularity that exists in nature independently of our forumulae, descriptions, and propositions. The meaning of "miracle" that corresponds with such an understanding of "law of nature" would therefore be "an alteration or suspension of the usual regularities of nature". Parsons goes on to describe miracles as the logically possible cases in which God "might occasionally cause things to happen which otherwise would never occur". Similarly, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Miracles cites McKinnon's paper but nevertheless uses a definition similar to my own: A miracle is a supernaturally (divinely) caused event - an event (ordinarily) different from what would have occurred in the normal ("natural") course of events. It is a divine overriding of, or interference with, the natural order. The two papers make no other effort do define "natural" and "supernatural" but use them freely. The Stanford Encyclopedia article seems to directly attack McKinnon's argument in two paragraphs that conclude that an argument like his is to deal with the possibility of miracles in the most superficial of ways, by defining them out of existence using either an indefensible concept of a law of nature, or supposing a suppressed argument against the possibility of nonnatural interference. Finally, the philosopher J.L. Mackie is quoted as saying: The laws of nature, we must say, describe the ways in which the world - including, or course, human beings - works when left to itself, when not interfered with. Thus, the closer you look at philosophical usage of "supernatural", the closer its definition looks like mine: Supernaturalism is the thesis that the fundamental laws of physics describe processes whose outcomes can be made different in otherwise identical situations if the only relevant difference between the situations is that some agency's volition is different. -- brian@holtz.org http://humanknowledge.net