Monday 6 April 2015

Sawing off the Branch It's Sitting On

The belief, adopted by many of the Dawkinsite faith, that things are only true if they are proven experimentally has the effect of cutting off a couple of the things that they depend on. One is the multiverse theory in opposition to the spectactular degree of fine tuning our universe shows. The concept of multiverses is currently untestable, may never be testable, and if it is never testable it must be untrue. Even if testable and provable it is no disproof of God's existence. Partly because there is nothing in the concept of God that would say that the Creator is unable to create more - for we clearly have a God for whom creating is a bit of a passion. And the other is that it merely begs the question, why do we have a goldilocks multiverse? It's turtles all the way down, this one.

The other is that the belief in testability being the only source of truth, itself, being untestable, is a self-weakening statement. The Maverick Philosopher does a good job here. What's interesting to me is that it was Bertrand Russell who The M.P. quotes - who is a kind of Dawkins with intelligence, wit and substance. 

Personally I'll stick to my own belief, that if you're in the scientific world it's the empirical method that works. Let's put it this way - even Boko Haram, who believe that Western education is forbidden, use weapons that have been developed using Newton's laws of motion and the results of chemical developments based on Western education and the empirical method. They may be a bunch of murdering gets, but they still know that Western methods work.

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