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Theoretical Philosophy » William Lane Craig and Kevin Scharp | Is There Evidence for God? » 4/15/2016 1:36 pm

rjonesx
Replies: 337

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I am just excited that you showed up :-)

So, in your last response to me you asked specifically for my defense of these 2 premises...

2. Evidence Y1 shows no one else could fine tune the universe other than God.
3. Evidence Y2 shows that fine tuning the universe unintentionally is nearly impossible

No problem.

There are a couple of options for defending premise 2.
1. I could retreat and say something like "God is the most likely candidate for being able to fine tune the universe" and marshal the following arguments...
2. I could bring up other cosmological arguments in defense of it being a spaceless/timeless/blah blah you get the point.
3. I could point out that it would have to be intelligent, whatever it is, and that simply pushes back the question 1 more step, what made that universe finely tuned
4. I could simply ask, what else would have both the power and knowledge to create and finely tune a universe? 

It seems to me that unless you are willing to deny the physical reality of this universe, it is hard to get past the "designer" as also being a "creator of physical reality". 

Defending premise 3 would be accomplished in the same way as defending the premise that the universe with these constants/quantities would be improbable on chance. It would be improbable whether it was created or not. The improbability is only surmounted if it was intentional. 

That being said, I think this is beside the point. They might be additional objections to the argument, but I don't think they resolve the Divine Psychology issue. It seems to me we have 3 options...

1. Necessity 
2. Chance 
3. Design

Now, the question is what probabilities should we assign to each? And then we can pick the one with the best probability. For the sake of argument, we have assigned 1 and 2 very low probabilities. We have no idea what #3 is. To me it seems that we should prefer an unknown probability over a known low probabilit

Introductions » Hey folks » 4/14/2016 12:52 pm

rjonesx
Replies: 2

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I'm Russ,

I found this in a Youtube comment regarding Dr. Scharp's debate with WLC. I'm a Christian in North Carolina (US) and would probably be classified as Evangelical, although there is a lot of nuance in that.

Theoretical Philosophy » William Lane Craig and Kevin Scharp | Is There Evidence for God? » 4/14/2016 12:38 pm

rjonesx
Replies: 337

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@KevinScharp FWIW, I didn't mind those attacks. Craig values consistency very much in his philosophical/theological positions (as do I). If Dr. Scharp could show inconsistencies, he could press Craig on what makes it applicable in one place and not in another. All's fair in love, war and debate :-)

Theoretical Philosophy » William Lane Craig and Kevin Scharp | Is There Evidence for God? » 4/14/2016 9:24 am

rjonesx
Replies: 337

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First post :-)

I had 2 primary objections to Dr. Scharp's arguments...

1. Weak Theism, Belief and Epistemology

I don't think that Dr. Scharp's position on epistemology amounts to a meaningful critique of Craig's apologetic, even if we take at face value his numbers (which he selected for the purpose of discussion and not specifically to defend).

Let's presume weak-belief/knowledge is in the 51%-80% range and 81%+ range would be strong-belief/knowledge.

Craig's case, as he describes many times is a "cumulative case". Let's imagine a different scenario, where a person is investigating a crime scene. In the crime scene we find 5 pieces of evidence. The first is a fingerprint, but it is only a 60% partial print. The second is a hat, but it is missing 40% of it. The third is camera footage, but the right 1/3 is blurred out, revealing only 67% of the assailant's face. The fourth is a mole on the assailant's arm, but only 53% of it is viewable. And finally, the fifth is a footprint, but only 57% of it remains. Suspect A matches all of these, being seen in pictures with a hat in the past resembling the portion they found, having a footprint consistent with the portion they found, so on and so forth.

All of these, under Dr. Scharp's assessment, would be "weak beliefs" (which I think is correct), but would it not be right of us to think that 5 weak beliefs might combine in a cumulative case to fairly strong belief that Suspect A is the culprit? As long as the evidence is independent of one another, this seems intuitively right. 

I think this is because we make a big mistake when we think of the probabilities behind belief in something like the LCA. A 30% confidence in the LCA is a 30% confidence that it shows God exists, not a 70% confidence God does not exist. To that effect, we should actually consider any confidence in the arguments to be points, so to speak, on a scoreboard which keeps the balance between reasons for God's existence and reasons again

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