By humans continuously improving ability to discover new things about the universe.
Our ability to observe through our senses. A significantly powerful mind to process the information obtained from our senses. The position we have in the universe that helps with observing the cosmos and the raw materials (matter) that we can use to improve discovery.
The null hypothesis is that this is all an accident.
Sorry, but that only says that we can understand the universe (to some extent). It doesnāt say the universe was specifically created for the purpose of being understood.
Not a well-formed null hypothesis. You have no hypothesis of what the universe would look like if it were not designed to be understood. There is no reason to believe that design is necessary for comprehensibility. You just assume it.
Yeah, thatās what āitā in the bolded sentence you quoted referred to. God did it[created the universe as it is for scientific discovery] because he wanted to. So no strawman.
Yes, all hitherto undiscovered things, that most things have yet to be discovered, and that vastly more things never will be discovered and have disappeared without leaving a trace and hence couldnāt possibly ever be discovered in the future. Rocks, mountains, entire continents, lakes, rivers, and oceans that came and eroded away without leaving a trace behind. Unfathomable quintillions of living organisms have lived and gone without a trace. And thatās just on this Earth alone.
Consider all the planets that have so far existed, and every possible fact there might have been about their history, every asteroid, meteorite, comet, star, and interstellar molecular cloud that came and went in the preceding 13.7 billion years alone. That nobody ever laid eye on.
If any one scientific discovery is evidence for your hypothesis, then any undiscoveredand and obscured thing is evidence against it. Since vastly more of the universe will never be discovered, and since thereās already 13.7 billion years worth of history on faraway planets and in faraway solar systems that no sentient being will ever know, and some things they canāt even infer, it seems to me the evidence against your hypothesis so incredibly vastly dwarfs whatever tiny smidgeon you think supports it - that it is inconsistent with observation and reason to a literally incomprehensible degree.
Another problem is the total arbitrariness of the idea that the universe was somehow made to be particularly favorable to scientific discovery. How could you hope to make any objective measurement of how facilitating in magnitude a universe should be, for that hypothesis to make sense? At what decline in the rate of discovery of new facts would you start to doubt it? How often and far into the future should we keep discovering new things, and which ones and on what topics? How many human beings will live and die without knowing the tiniest thing some distant descendant of us will discover 10 million years from now? How many have now already lived in total ignorance of things discovered just this year alone?
You donāt have anything that could be said in any way to rise to the level of a hypothesis. Itās just a vacuous ad-hoc rationalization that predicts nothing and can be made to fit anything at the whim of itās proponents.
No, thatās an alternative hypothesis that you are misrepresenting as the null hypothesis because you are obviously trying to shift the evidentiary burden.
You might want to look into the difference, as itās important in understanding how science works.
How could something that has always existed have a cause, given that such a cause should have necessarily preceded the thing in question, which is absurd?
All a negative result yields is that the experiment or instrumentation failed to detect God.
I have a few ideas - but this is your claim, and you should have pondered such things before making it, and included whatever additional premises are required.
āI canāt think of a counter-exampleā does not lead to the conclusion you are aiming for.
I am afraid you are the one here who is not fit to determine anyone elseās shortcomings in logic. Indeed, premise 1 of the kalam cosmological argument is a universal statement that is supposed to be true for everything that ever began or will begin to exist. And by allowing the possibility that even one thing began or will begin to exist without a cause, you are basically contesting the universality of a universal statement, ie., you are claiming that the statement is false.
Suppose what ID proponents call āDarwinian evolutionā was true.
The existence of ID proponents who do not believe in Darwinian evolution would falsify your hypothesis.
It would be particularly problematic because ID proponents are the very ones who most strongly believe in a god who created a universe for them to understand.
If you eliminate what is in bold then you have the original argument.
Are you making the case that the universe is built for unlimited discovery?
The real issue is that the universe is discoverable as I donāt think anyone will dispute it has predictable characteristics, observers and raw materials the observers can use to help with the discovery. The question is, is discoverability the work of a mind, an accident or some other explanation.
If for arguments sake we assume it is the work of a mind is it reasonable to infer, based on the evidence, that discoverability was part of the overall plan for the design of the universe?
No, Craig doesnāt believe it is possible for the universe to come from nothing, and neither do I.
You are aligned with Craig here
Sure. Saying that something begins to exist from nothing means that this thing has no cause.
False. Allowing the possibility that the statement may be false is not the same as the unequivocal statement that it is false.
Not necessarily. It could be the case that ānothingā is an inherently unstable state, and therefore must inevitably give rise to āsomethingā. The ānothingā would itself then be the cause of the something coming into existence.
The āreal issueā is that the fact that some aspects of the universe are discoverable does not provide adequate evidence that the universe was ācreated for discoveryā. You are simply assuming ubiquitous ādiscoverabilityā without either evidence, or even rigorous definition.
So all this amounts to nothing but woolly written-in-jello hand-waving.
Is not a material thing essentially discoverable by mere virtue of existing? The whole question is superfluous.
Soā¦ he didnāt want to? He was forced against his will?
Uh-huh, and how do we tell?
I donāt see why it would be. Do you have lots of experiences with created universes such that you are able to tell which ones are created for discoverability, and which ones arenāt?
Great. Then in what sense did the universe begin to exist?
This is also trivially false.
You seem to think that the only possible reactions to a claim are to accept it as true or to reject it as false.
You are ignoring the obvious third possibility that the reaction to a claim may be that its validity is unknown - that whether it is true or false has not been determined.
Premise 1: I have a pet cat.
Do you accept this premise?
According to your ālogicā, if you do not accept this premise āyou are then forced to accept the opposite claimā, i.e. you are forced to accept that I do not have a pet cat. You leave no room for not knowing.
Six-year-olds can understand this. Why canāt you?
That āit is supposed to beā is exactly the problem: itās an unjustified assertion. No one is required to accept your premises just because you think theyāre good.
No, Iām stating that it is an unsupported claim. Pointing out that a premises is unsupported affirms neither the truth nor falsity of that premise.
I donāt think Cosmetology has anything to do with the existence of God.
Iāll let myself out.