Arguments vs. Facts

I keep hearing this really dumb idea that "we don't want arguments we want facts that prove things." They seem to have adopted this tactic as a new mantra along with "there's no proof for your God." It reminds me of one of my favorite Monty Python things about the "argument clinic." "Argument is an intellectual process by which one lays out a logical heuristic in favor of a proposition, not the automatic gain saying of anything he other fellow says." "Yes it is." Sounds like CARM. I wonder if people who make this distinction between argument and facts understand what argument is.

The problem is, as with all English words, there many meanings and they are determined by context. When logicians say "argument" they mean something as different in the context of logic from when a historian says "argument" as Black Adder from real history. In general when we have people making arguments for the existence of God, the context in which this discussion arises, they are usually going to be people who have read William Lane Craig or Plantinga, and who are given to the emulation of philosophers and philosophical thinking. In that context the definition is going to be closer to that of the "straight man" (Michael Palin) in the Python sketch linked above; the heuristic supporting a logical proposition.

Many atheists speak as though this is just BS, it's just like saying "I deem that X = Y because I like X, and it has sanctifying grace and it reminds me of my geography teacher in eighth grade." Of course they just skip right over the fact that many such arguemnts are attempts to plug scientific facts into propositions confirming belief in God. I have had three major arguments spanning huge threads about the fine tuning argument. In the first one atheists went 40 posts wit out saying anything more substantial than "that's no good, that's not scinece, I don't like that." Every single post I made was about scientific facts, most of them were quoting a scientist named Andre Linde (on Doxa) who is an atheist but you took Fine tuning seriously enough to write an article several years ago (Scientific American, Oct 97) listing many of the more obvious problems facing the formation of life in the early development of our universe.

This argument is all about facts, it contains thousands of facts. Of course their reaction to it was something "this is stupid. this doesn't prove anything." I have a feeling that what they mean by "a fact that proves something" is something DNA. They want to find God's fingerprint or hair sample, but it has to be so obvious the it can't be questioned. Of cousre they can always question. Like the EPCEP thing, it's just another excuse to raise the bar as soon as the request facts are produced. The fact that half of my God arguemnts turn upon scientific facts (in my list of 42 arguments) doesn't even mean anything to them. What they really want is a done deal, something they can't even begin to question that totally prove it so they are forced to believe and they can't possibly be mistaken.

The idea that you have a fact that proves soemthing and you don't have to make an argument to show how it proves something is ludicrous. That's arguments are, they are connecting links that move from evidence to conclusion and explain things.Arguments are not tricks or emotional tirades that seek to lul one into a frame of mind apart form facts. Arguments can be based upon logic, they don't have to be based upon empirical evidence, but you can't make empirical evidence "prove" something without making an argument.Even if you could somehow pull back the curtain of reality and see God at the controls, so to speak, you would still have to make an argument that this si God and these are the controls that govern the universe, just pulling back the veil itself wouldn't do it.

The only potions atheists embrace are those shaped by arguments. They think that when they say "there's no proof for your God so I have no rational reason to believe" that they are making a statement of fact that needs no elucidation and is transparent when spoken. In point of fact that in itself is an argument.All the atheists potions are the result of argument and not of facts.
Science data is not self explainable or self revealing. It only means something when you shape into an argument and make it mean something.

Facts do not announce themselves as such. Nature is not festooned with little tags that say things like "scientific data, by nature." "This is a scientific fact." There is no scientific data until we transform qulia into data by the process of scientific study. No one just stduies raw data by itself. Economists don't collect dates on coins in the economy, sociologists don't count the number of bricks in housing projects, geologists don't count the grains of sand on the shore, then let it go at that rejoicing that they have found scientific facts. Data is put into context of "meaning" through interpretation. Data always must be interpreted and the complexity of the world means there can be more than one interpretation. This is a very simplistic source but I think anyone naive enough to think that scinece is just a pile of facts needs this level of simplicity:

Understanding Science: How
Science Really Works.

Evaluating an idea in light of the evidence should be simple, right? Either the results match the expectations generated by the idea (thus, supporting it) or they don't (thus, refuting it). Sometimes the process is relatively simple (e.g., drilling into a coral atoll either reveals a thick layer of coral or a thin veneer), but often it is not. The real world is messy and complex, and often, interpreting the evidence relating to an idea is not so clear-cut. To complicate things further, we often have to weigh multiple lines of evidence that are all relevant to the validity of a particular idea. Tests typically generate what scientists think of as raw data — unaltered observations, descriptions, or measurements — but those must be analyzed and interpreted. Data become evidence only when they have been interpreted in a way that reflects on the accuracy or inaccuracy of a scientific idea. For example, an investigation of the evolutionary relationships among crustaceans, insects, millipedes, spiders, and their relatives might tell us the genetic sequence of a particular gene for each organism. This is raw data, but what does it mean? A long series of the As, Ts, Gs, and Cs that make up genetic sequences don't, by themselves, tell us whether insects are more closely related to crustaceans or to spiders. Instead, those data must be analyzed through statistical calculations, tabulations, and/or visual representations. In this case, a biologist might begin to analyze the genetic data by aligning the different sequences, highlighting similarities and differences, and performing calculations to compare the different sequences. Only then can she interpret the results and figure out whether or not they support the hypothesis that insects are more closely related to crustaceans than to spiders.

That process contains a number steps that are not only very similar to argument but that also require argument when interpretations vary. Just interpreting data requires a form of argument sense one is making a connection from sign to conclusion based upon a logical association involving a claim. In the argumentation theory of Stephen Toulmin data is part of the grounds or a claim. The warrant links data and other grounds to a claim, legitimizing the claim by showing the grounds to be relevant. The warrant may be explicit or unspoken and implicit. It answers the question 'Why does that data mean your claim is true?' That process is just like the process through which one assertions the significance of any given data in hypothesis testing.

On a more sophisticated level we can see that entire scientific project rests upon "paradigms" which in effect are arguments. Science changes when the paradigm is no longer able to adsorb and explain or dismiss anomalies that cause us to question the paradigm. This is part of the thory of Thomas S. Kuhn. Kuhn was the biggest name in history/philosophy of scinece for several decades, even beating Popper (the 60s-90s). When the Postmodern project fell apart in the 90's Kuhn went down with the ship even he was only tangentially related to Postmodernism. I think we can argue that Kuhn's fortunes have risen again as I predicted at the time they would. I see much more Kuhn related material, he's still in universities. One such class is that of Professor Frank Pajares, Emory University. He prepares an online study guide and his summary of Kuhn's first chapter in Structures of Scientific Revolutions runs as follows:

Kuhn begins by formulating some assumptions that lay the foundation for subsequent discussion and by briefly outlining the key contentions of the book.

1. A scientific community cannot practice its trade without some set of received beliefs (p. 4).
1. These beliefs form the foundation of the "educational initiation that prepares and licenses the student for professional practice" (5).
2. The nature of the "rigorous and rigid" preparation helps ensure that the received beliefs exert a "deep hold" on the student's mind.
2. Normal science "is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like" (5)—scientists take great pains to defend that assumption.
3. To this end, "normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments" (5).
4. Research is "a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education" (5).
5. A shift in professional commitments to shared assumptions takes place when an anomaly "subverts the existing tradition of scientific practice" (6). These shifts are what Kuhn describes as scientific revolutions—"the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science" (6).
1. New assumptions (paradigms/theories) require the reconstruction of prior assumptions and the reevaluation of prior facts. This is difficult and time consuming. It is also strongly resisted by the established community.
2. When a shift takes place, "a scientist's world is qualitatively transformed [and] quantitatively enriched by fundamental novelties of either fact or theory" (7).

In other words science is like a status quo of a governmental regime or one might liken it unto the negative in policy debate round, it is the status quo, the way we view the world. If it is going to change it must do so because it can no longer answer crucial questions (absorb anomalies) that must be answered to continue to assume the received view of the world. Kuhn himself tells us:

"scientific revolutions are here taken to be those non-cumulative developmental episodes replaced in whole or in part by a new one..." (Thomas kuhn The Structure of scientific Revolutions, 92). "The choice [between paradigms] is not and cannot be determined merely by the evaluative procedures characteristic of normal science, for these depend in part upon a particular paradigm, and that paradigm is at issue. When paradigms enter as they must into a debate about paradigm choice, their role is necessarily circular. Each group uses it's own paradigm to argue in that paradigm's defense...the status of the circular argument is only that of persuasion. It cannot be made logically or even probabilistically compelling for those who refuse to step into the circle." The Structure of Scientific Revolutions(94)In section X we shall discover how closely the view of science as cumulative is entangled with a dominate epistemology that takes knowledge to be a construction placed directly upon raw sense data by the mind. And in section XI we shall examine the strong support provided to the same historiographic scheme by the techniques of effective science pedagogy. Nevertheless, despite the immense plausibility of that ideal image, there is increasing reason to wonder whether it can possibly be an image of science. After the pre-paradgim period the assimilation of all new theories and of almost all new sorts of phenomena has demanded the destruction of a prior paradigm and a consequent conflict between competing schools of scientific thought. Cumulative anticipation of unanticipated novelties proves to be an almost nonexistent exception to the rule of scientific development.The man who takes historic fact seriously must suspect that science does not tend toward the ideal that our image of its cumulativeness has suggested. Perhaps it is another sort of enterprise. [ Structures...92-94]
(see my entire summary of Kuhn Here)

The simplistic concept that science is a pile of facts that prove the truth of all reality as long as we peruse the proper scientific methods is just a fantasy. There is no neat simplistic choice between fact and argument. Expecting to test the validity of God belief on the basis of the belief to conform to the norms of scientific is equally stupid. This is why I do not argue for the existence of God. All of my arguments I bill as "rational warrant for belief" simply becuase God is beyond empirical data. It would be as absurd to expect to prove god empirically as it would be to prove reality itself empirically. If you remember what I've said in the past about basic epistemology, that cannot be done. No one has. The only thing that was every produced along those lines is a epistemological judgment based upon warrant. Every time I argue it out with atheists to this point they say proudly and triumphantly "I can rest assured with a very good implication of what I know based upon the probability suggested by empirical data." I love to deflate that line when I say "that's what I get with my God arguments."

That's all they have to do, all we need is a rational warrant becasue the gap there between absolute certainty and warrant, which even the atheists admit they can't fill, that's the gap one leaps over in a leap of faith. The atheist has just admitted he leaps over it too. So the big fortress of facts that seems so assuring in atheist rhetoric is really just propaganda sloganeering.

The Atheist montra: "there's not a Shred of evidence for your God"

Been posting on CARM again. You know what trouble that brings? The atheists have been fired up repeating their mantra "there's not a shred of evidence for God." There are times when I find that annoying and times when I find it amusing. The reason for either reaction is because all believers know they have reasons for believing and a lot of those reasons are based upon good evidence. Even those who don't have evidence sometimes have sophisticated reasons why they don't need it. The atheist world is simplistic it defies anything sophistocated. This is a true example of what Tillich meant when he said "if you know that being has depth you can't be an atheist." The atheist is assuming that the so called "default" amounts to the basis for a tennable world view, assuming (fallacious) that the alleged default is based upon a true appraisal of the world as it is, which is reflected accurately by a surface view of things proved to exist (or thought to be proved to exist) and no need to delve any more deeply into the matter of being.

The atheist assumption lends credence to the ideologically assumption that to accept only the most well proved scientific assumptions is to mount up a great fortress of facts that demonstaes a scientifically validated world view. There are three major problems with this approach:

(1) Selective and self serving: creates truth regime.

(2) Creates a template effect that is used to screen out any other possibilities

(3) Assumes fallaciously that the surface level equates to an adequate world view

(1) Selective and self serving: Of course in implying the big fortress of facts ("I only believe things that are totally proved by science" I have heard many of them say) they are actually selecting the facts they choose to believe and ignoring others they can't stand. The 200 empirical studies on religious experience are a good example. 200 studies is a vast body of scientific data, that is literally a fortress of facts. They don't accept a word of it. I've seen the most idiotic excuses to doubt the studies form bold faced assertion that they are all done by preachers (most of them done by real social scientists) to attacks on the bibliogrpahy compiled by a promoter of the research, which is guilt by association (the bib included both the good studies and some wacy source like Depok Chopra and to these atheists was sure proof the studies are not good). Another example is the big bang. Atheists used to cling to the big bang as the word from science because it seemed to represent the universe popping out of nothing. Then Christians began to observe that it fit creation better, so now atheists turned against the big bang. One good joke, I found atheists quoting a particular site quite a bit and it turned out i was a creationist site! They were quoting like it was a valid scientifically authoritative site because they didn't get that some creationsts are against the big bang.

(2) Template: The selective nature of the fortress of facts means that that atheist is not nobly or boldly sticking to "only that which is proved by science" but is actually creating his/her own truth regalement that seeks to control what is understood as reality and bend the facts to support an ideological view point. The term truth regime refers to an ideology or a world view that screens out all other possibilities and only allows one view to be true. This is just what atheists have done. This is what's reflected in their often heard mantra "there's no proof for your God." It's not becuase they are considering alternatives or weighing coutner evidence. It's pretty clear that they way they decide the question is to create a template that says "here is the only from of knowledge and anything else has to be wrong." Of couret template is based upon an atheist reductions world view. Hold up the God arguent to the template, doe it fit? This is about God adn the tempalte says no God so it doesn't fit, therefore, this can't be proof.

A good example of this is yesterday in sparing with the inimitable "big thinker" as this guy humbly calls himself (as opposed to "tiny thinker" who actually brilliant). I made temporal beginning argument (in a nut shell):

(1) Time begins with the big bang
(2) there can be no time beyond event horizon (this is "before the big bang" to the laymen but since there can't be a "before" before time, physicist such as Hawking transfered it to spacial coordinates and speak of "beyond" time and "within space/time." Or "even horizon" which is euphemism for the big bang).
(3) No times no causes thus nothing can come to be.
(4) there must be some thing that can change the rules for creation (I go on to argue that this rules change can only be a mind--God). For the actual argument see here.

Bigthinker says,"you argument doesn't do anything. it's meaningless." I say "why?" He says "becasue it doesnt' do anything." I said "it proves God." he says 'not can't becasue it's meaningless," "why is it meaningless" "because it doesn't do anything.

Just like the idiocracy in the movie "it's got what plants crave"
what's that?
"electro-lights"
why do plants need electro-lights?
"It's got what plants crave."

If the argument is right, I'm not saying an intelligent atheists in good shape at the top of his game can't find valid things to argue agaisnt it. This guy is clear just going in circles because as presented the argument does prove nothing should be here without an all seeing mind capable of re-writing the rules for creation. Yet this guy keeps saying "It doesn't do anything" but he never says what he means. One guy, so what? The whole board has been stumped by it so far. I've done this before. this very argument had sec webbers screaming and cursing becuase they could not find an answer. At times when I have insisted on pushing to the limit and forcing them to face that the did not answer one of my arguments, they would saying "I dont' think arguemnts prove anything anyway. We've seen this over and over again. The Lungs of Charles Anne. Second miracle to put St. Teresa of Lisieux (sp) over the top. I did everything but get the xrays. They demand that I get them. They wont even investigate they just demand that until I own the Xrays (which are in the archives the church in Eruope you can buy copies but expensive and I can't find anyone who can tell me how) until I own those Xrays it's not proven it's bull shit it's not valid they can't be bothered with it. Becasue part of the evidence comes from a saint adoration site then they just dismiss completely, even though I have spoken with a member of the Lourdes/saint making medical committee who swears the X-Rays are there and they are genuine. I am not even asking them to take my word for it, they wont even investigate by search for other sources.

(3) Surface Level = world view:The atheist rests in his comfort zone imagining that the surface level of appear is a valid world view. The surface level (that which is clearly proved by science) is a very basic level and a very misleading level. Of course they don't even understand the basic problems of epistemology. when you confront them with that they poo poo. They will tell me my sense of God's' presence is totally untrustworthy worthy because perceptions and experiences are subjective and subjective is always misleading. You ask them "how do you know you exist" they say "O don't be stupid, I see the world around me, I'm here. It appears to me so clearly as I experience the world." The surface is the world of superficial perceptions. Trusting that as "that which is proved by science "is totally illusory. Consider particle-wave duality. The more closly we seek the answer the more unreal reality seems.

Belief in God is a world view. It's at the world view stage of belief, just as the concept of the big fortress of facts or the validity of scinece, the distrust of the subjective all of these are world view level concepts. Its' a world veiw precisely because you can't prove it. That would like trying to prove that one should love others, or that one should be a democrat or republican. These are sweeping ideas that rest of on vast sets of assumptions. There's no way to prove a world view as the world view is the scale in which we weigh proof. When we accept that something is proved it's proved agaisnt the background of our world view. You can't prove the background of proof that would be redundant and requite a regression. You need another world view against which to weight the evidence for the first world view and so on.

World view are paradigms and they shift according to their abilities to handle anomalies. This is basic theory according to Thomas S. Kuhn. We absorb anomalies into the paradigm. Something doesn't fit we just say "o that's just an anomaly, just wait and further evidence will clear it up." When there are too many of these and another world view answers them better then the paradigm shifts. Kuhn says this is the engine that really drives science. It's not a cumulative piling up of facts, as the atheists would have it with their fortress of facts, but the shift when the former world view can't hold anymore. The fortress of facts topples when we come to realize there is too much depth in being to be dismissed and the fortress of facts is not enough for a world view.In the mean time they decide the truth of evidence comparing the template and saying 'this God argument doesn't fit the atheist template so it must be wrong, therefore, it's not proved."

At that level the concept of proof in God argument is superfluous. They are not really comparing facts in a fortress they are slectively keeping out facts that contradict their view. This all makes them content with the surface but then anything that disturbs the surface is a proof of depth and thus a reason to believe there can be more. The atheist fortress of facts is self defeating.