Artful Paltering in Science?

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

@dga471

I understand where you’re coming from, but all of these statements involve assumptions about a certain hermeneutic of Scripture, theology, metaphysics, and epistemology.

Of course.

@dga471

If a hypothetical Christian holds a view of God that is easily disproven by evolution but also turns out to not cohere with what the most knowledgeable theologians throughout have believed (and the atheist is aware of this), wouldn’t it be misleading for the atheist to claim that his arguments disprove God in general ?

Sure.

@dga471

Basic academic etiquette is to try to attack the strongest form of your opponent’s argument that you can think of, not the flimsiest versions.

There’s a difference between attacking the strongest form of your opponents argument, and attacking a radically altered system of beliefs.

You can’t just assume that because you have a theology that might in some sense be better able to resist counter arguments that would work against other beliefs, that any putative believer would accept your stronger version merely on the prospect that it is more difficult to argue against.

But then you first have to find out whether the person you’re talking to actually would accept the “knowledgeable theologian’s” version of theology. The assumption on your part seems to be that, faced with the prospect of atheism, any believer would, out of some psychological bias against changing their mind, prefer to start engaging in Sophisticated Theology™ which might have next to nothing to do with what they used to believe.

But this makes these debates impossible, because you then first have to disabuse the average believer of their particular theology, then offer them the sophisticated version instead to try to convince them they should believe that version(but should they?), and only then can you start having an argument.

[Roy (30-year veteran)]

@swamidass

@Rumraket

I honestly can’t recall having seen someone give a pro-evolution argument

I’m sure you’ve seen this before:

I am uncomfortable with evolution because it would mean God does not exist.

Well, there is just a ton of evidence for evolution, let me show it to you. Ready to abandon God yet?

Actually, no. I can’t speak for @Rumraket, but I don’t recall ever seeing something like that. I don’t expect I ever will, because we don’t need evolution to argue against the existence of deities, because we tend to think in terms of views of god(s), not an actual god, and because theists don’t tend to address such questions to atheists in the first place.

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

@Roy

Actually, no. I can’t speak for @Rumraket, but I don’t recall ever seeing something like that. I don’t expect I ever will, because we don’t need evolution to argue against the existence of deities, because we tend to think in terms of views of god(s), not an actual god, and because theists don’t tend to address such questions to atheists in the first place.

Most atheists I know of rarely argue explicitly against God’s existence(I have never come across someone who would say it is impossible that any sort of God could exist), they rather argue against belief in God’s existence because there is no good reason to.

In that sense most arguments for atheism are rebuttals to reasons offered for God-belief(as in “here is why that argument fails”), not reasons to think a God couldn’t possibly exist. Darwin’s Origin of Species has been seen by many as a response to Paley’s watchmaker argument. The “appearance of purposeful arrangement of parts”, which is invoked as an argument for belief that a part-arrange(God) should exist, is rebutted by pointing out there is another mechanism(variation+natural selection) that can produce that same appearance.