[lbo-talk] An Appeal to Ignorance

[ravi]

On 06/16/05 13:50, Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
> On 6/16/05, ravi <gadfly at exitleft.org> wrote:
>> On 16/06/2005 11:09 AM, Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
>> >
>> > conversely, try proving that there's no god. go ahead. in an ethics
>> > class once, i was trying to explain this, and one of my true believers
>> > said, "you can't prove there's gravity, either". i picked up the desk
>> > in front of me and dropped it back to the floor: "there's gravity.
>> > next question?" of course, he had neither an answer not another
>> > question. then i said, "so do the same for me for god"? and of course,
>> > it can't be done.
>> 
>> hmm... i (admittedly not the brightest bulb) don't get this. what if the
>> student had picked up the book off the ground and put it back on the
>> table, or perhaps dropped it back on the floor, and claimed that as
>> proof of god? what sort of proof is this kind of thing?
> 
> well, what would it mean to "not believe in" gravity?
> 
> if we agree that things we drop falling to earth suggests that
> (practically speaking) our idea that some more or less "universal"
> "law", which we refer to for the sake of simplicity as "gravity",
> accounts for the repeatable downward motion (and this student clearly
> agreed to that), where do we then have analogous empirical evidence of
> god? well, nowhere.
> 

but how is this evidence? is it not tautological or proof by definition?
let us set aside for a second the student's reasoning. one possible
answer to my question seems to be this: gravity is not defined to be the
effect of things falling down. its defined as the force of attraction
between objects. one instance of this can be observed in the falling of
things to the ground. this seems a little better... but, it seems to me,
what is under question is not whether things fall to the ground. the
debate is on what is the explanation for this event? if one posits a law
of gravity and then throwing a book to the ground exclaims, a la johnson
;-), that "i prove it thus", why not use the same device for proving
god? god being the reason that things fall to the ground (to create an
ad hoc and crude theory), the consistent falling to the ground of things
being the empirical evidence of god!


> i mean, yes, this is all very coarse and hackneyed (and YES
> problematic at deeper philosophical levels)....

yes, it does seem so. inter alia, facts are theory-laden and all that
stuff...

imho, the best *i* can say about the reason for me to believe in the law
of gravity rather than god is that the former, *in my case*, is of much
greater utility.

	--ravi, advocating for the devil, in this case, god ;-)