Interesting post, Kenosis.

I haven't read the God Delusion yet (got a few other books to get through first) so I can't address Dawkins' arguments specifically, but I will try to address the rebuttals you've made. I didn't read through the rest of the posts in those threads, so forgive me if I'm repeating things that have already been said.

It seems that your most major qualm here is with Dawkins' claim that "the question of God's existence is one that can be resolved by scientific inquiry". The idea that the question of God can addressed (if not necessarily "resolved") by the scientific method is a point that I've made since long before the release of the God Delusion:

quote:

Both science and religion address issues of epistemology (how we "know" what we "know"), ontology (the nature of being and beings) and human nature (our fundamental facticity, our reasons for certain behaviour, our origins etc.) and, as such, I believe, they should be held to similar logical and empirical constraints. The existence of an interventionalist God (that is, a God that is actively engaged in the workings of the world), for instance, should produce quantifiable phenomena. If we do identify quantifiable phenomena that could have only come from a being as powerful as a God, then these phenomena should be as readily addressed by science as by religion. The manifested God, under these circumstances, immediately becomes a scientific issue and the tennets of science would have to change to accomodate his existence. If God could be proven, it would change the nature of science as drastically - if not more so - as it would the nature of religion. So if science and religion - at their most fundamental levels - are asking similar questions, searching for similar truths and examining the same phenomena (or lack thereof) along the way, then they are either compatible or they are not. The notion of "faith" - which, as the article states, is merely an indefensible retreat for theists whose rational and empiricial inquiries have yielded answers that are unsatisfactory to them - doesn't change this reality and I don't think that the other traditional fallback position of "the mutual exclusivity of religion and science" has much merit either given that, as I've said, religion and science have many fields of inquiry which overlap.

(From this thread.)

In order to be considered valid, the contention that the God question can be addressed scientifically requires the satisfaction of two assumptions:

1) That such a God intervenes in the universe.
2) That the nature of this intervention is in some sense apprehensible.

If neither of these are true, then of course the argument falls flat. Nonetheless, let me put on my pragmatic hat for just a second: if the argument can be said to fail because these conditions are not met, then what sort of God are we left with? What sort of God have we failed to "disprove"? The answer is, unavoidably, a God that has no discernable influence on the universe: a God of absolutely no consequence.

I like what Arbiter said earlier:

quote:

You are correct that "God" (in a general sense) can't be disproven using the scientific method. This is precisely because theists will always simply resort to moving the goalposts and define/re-define their "God" as being "outside of" or "transcending" whatever scientific methodology is used or proposed.

In undertaking these mental calisthenics to shield their God from the criticisms levelled against it by atheists, apologists don't ever seem to stop and think exactly what sort of a God it is they are ultimately arguing for. Even if I were to accept your contention that it is "possible" that there is an existent God which transcends the scope of scientific inquiry, I would like to know what tangible consequences this "proof" holds for us. In saying that God is completely empirically inaccessible, you may invalidate the ontological atheistic arguments, but you also inadvertantly prove all the pragmatic ones: you have successfully demonstrated that there is no God of discernable consequence within the universe!

In any case, I'm still not entirely what this argument is meant to demonstrate: is the baseless belief in a god that transcends space-time any more rational than the baseless belief in a god that doesn't? That is to say, if God truly exists beyond space-time and we have no way of quantifying / qualifying his existence, how can we ever consider belief in such a God to therefore be justified?

Moving on, the Kantian space / time argument you raise is a unique one, but it fails on two levels.

The first follows from my earlier point:

quote:

God, though, is not like all the examples of phenomena, whereby we can make statements about the probability of this or that existing or this or that being a likely causal explanation. God is being outside the universe, is not a conditioned object like a proton and is not perceived in the way that protons are perceived: that is to say, not perceived at all. God is not a ‘scientific fact about the universe’ since ‘scientific facts about the universe’ are restricted to phenomena, objects of perception, which are conditioned realities.

Your contention that "God is a being outside the universe" is a meaningless one. You could substitute the word "God" for any other collective noun in the English language and the paragraph would remain as axiomatically true as the one you've just presented:

quote:

Elephants, though, are not like all the examples of phenomena, whereby we can make statements about the probability of this or that existing or this or that being a likely causal explanation. Elephants are beings outside the universe, are not conditioned objects like a proton and are not perceived in the way that protons are perceived: that is to say, not perceived at all. Elephants are not a ‘scientific fact about the universe’ since ‘scientific facts about the universe’ are restricted to phenomena, objects of perception, which are conditioned realities.

If I arbitrarily consign elephants with the property of existing outside the boundaries of space-time (as you have done with God) then the paragraph makes sense. I'm not being flippant here, either: I'm making a serious point about the "special appeals" that occur so frequently in theological debate. Apparently everything that exists does so (tautologically) within the bounds of the universe: that is, of course, with the sole exception of "God".

My point is that this argument, as with many other theological arguments, is rendered futile if we adopt it (as we should do if we are being intellectually ingenuous) as a universal maxim. If we can just invent existent beings and argue that it is reasonable to accept their existence on the grounds that they exist outside of space-time, then we are left with an epistemological quandry: how can we possibly disprove anything by this logic? How is your belief in a God which transcends space-time any more reasonable than my belief in a herd of elephants that transcend space-time? How could it be said to be reasonable to believe that either exist? Do you understand the problems that this argument raises if we allow it to be adopted as a universal, epistemological maxim?

As for the Kantian argument more specifically, you are right to point out that we are necessarily constrained by our own subjectivity, but it's not only science that you taint with this pseudo-Cartesian sophistry: all other systems that attempt to make truth claims about the world (including religion) must be thrown into doubt as well. If you don't want to go down this solipsistic path - and you accept, at least provisionally, that our senses accurately render the nature of the world - than I would ask on what grounds you would dispute the preeminence of the empirico-scientific method in illuminating the nature of phenomenal, if not noumenal reality?

You also appeal here to the Kantian synthetic a priori categories of space and time. Yhe argument you make is, I think, that because we are conditioned (inexorably) to conceptualise the world in a spatio-temporal context, that we are therefore incapable of grasping something (such as God) that exists "outside of" these categories of cognition? If so, I find that following this logic through to its conclusion actually serves more to disprove the existence of God than to prove it.

Firstly, I'm not sure if Kant ever argued that we are bound by (that is, incapable of transcending) our synthetic a priori categories of cognition, so much as he offered them as a means of overcoming the ontological rift that had occurred in philosophy between the "internal" (mental) and "external" (physical) worlds. Hume argued that there was no such thing as synthetic a priori judgements and Kant's categories of space and time - that we have "knowledge" of before encountering them in the external world - were offered as a refutation of this idea. Kant didn't say that we are epistemologically bound to our comprehension of space and time - at least not to my knowledge - and in any case, if he did then he is wrong.

Analytical a posteriori judgements (i.e. scientific ones) can be made that trascend, if not directly contradict, our a priori conceptions of space and time. We are inexorably bound to conceptualise and understand space in three dimensions, yet we can still make observations which show that the fabric of the universe curves into dimensions beyond the Z axis. We are inexorably bound to conceptualise and understand time as a linear chain of causalities, but we now know that time is dimensional and bound up in the fabric of space. Each of these "discoveries" have shattered the a priori judgements we make about space and time and yet we were still able to make them. If we cannot measure things that exist beyond our a priori conceptions of space-time, then these discoveries should not have been made. The fact that we did make these discoveries, though, raises the question as to why we should consider God to be empirically inaccessible just because he - just like the fourth dimenstion - exists beyond the a priori, Kantian conceptualisation of space-time? It is impossible to comprehend the curvature of space, yet it is still observable - why can the same not be said of God?

I've got more to add, but it's going to have to wait until later.

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