On 19 Jun 2008, at 02:51, Brent Meeker wrote:
>
> Günther Greindl wrote:
>> Brent,
>>
>>> scientific theory. Occams razor is a vague desiderata. You can
>>> justify
>>> almost anything by choosing your definition of "complex", e.g.
>>> theists
>>> say, "God did it." is the simplest possible theory.
>>
>> no you can't:
>> http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/09/occams-razor.html
>>
> [...]
> But I agree that the problem with God or The Witch as a theory is
> that they
> can explain anything and so fail to explain at all.
It all depends of your theory or theology. If by God you mean the
creationist God who build the world 6000 years ago, then you get an ad
hoc theory, which nevertheless can be taken as a falsifiable
explanation. This is exactly Vic's Stenger point and I agree with him.
Not only such a theory is falsifiable, but it can be considered as
having been falsified and has been wisely abandoned by any reasonable
scientist since. This is where I agree again with Vic Stenger.
[aparte: ... and given that some creationist asks for a course on
"creationism" at school, then I think that creationnism should indeed
be taught at school in the introduction to biology and evolution so
that the failure of that theory is well explained, and here Vic
Stenger's book can be very useful indeed. The creationist God is not
supported by the facts].
If by God you mean the physical universe, and by "it", the physical
universe, then indeed, as a theory, this explains the existence of the
physical universe in a trivial way, so this does not explain the
existence of the physical universe.
If by God you mean the physical universe, and by "it" you mean
"consciousness", then you get a falsifiable theory, which is indeed
falsified in all the computationalist theories (by UDA).
If by God you mean "arithmetical or mathematical truth" then you get a
falsifiable theory of both consciousness and of the conscious
appearance of physical (observable) universes. The theory predicts the
existence of non trivial third person sharable probabilistic
interfering dreams (subjective experiences) and is today well
sustained by facts and logic. Indeed QM confirms its most counter-
intuitive statements. But tomorrow it could been falsified as well.
That is not obvious at all, but follows again by UDA.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Received on Thu Jun 19 2008 - 04:36:19 PDT