Educated Muslim Apologist.
Reply #161 - February 23, 2015, 11:12 AM
To say god can serve as the explanation for the natural world, through some non naturalistic process, is the same thing as saying you don't know how god did it. We cannot even in theory, know the process by which god does anything. If you don’t know how god did anything, then you don’t have an explanation. You are just guessing at what the distal cause might be, and before that, assuming there was a cause; and before that, defining a being that has all the properties that the argument requires of it.
To say theists ‘understand it [god] to any degree’, is only to say that theists personally feel that they have a some kind of explanation, and it means something to them. They understand the semantics of the words in the statement ‘god did it’; and they feel they have a comprehensible enough concept of god. That isn’t the same as having an explanation. That isn’t the same as understanding anything about the natural world.
We could even accept the entire argument, the best theoretically possible version of it. We could accept the ultimate conclusion: i.e, We cannot rule out the possibility that non naturalistic explanations can have explanatory power. We still wouldn’t understand the universe any better. We still wouldn’t know a single thing more than we do now, apart from, God might have done it…somehow.
There is no difference between ‘magic did it’, and ‘god did it’. This was described as a category error in these videos. Because they are different categories. The crux of this argument is to place god in a different, and unique category, and therefore can’t be compared to anything else, such as unicorns, or the spaghetti monster, which are composite of previously understood concepts.
I think the concept of god is very obviously a composite of previous things experienced. In fact, I think it is outright anthropomorphic. But we can concede that point too. We can assume god is in some uniquely unexperienced set consisting of a single thing – god.
That still wouldn’t make the comparison between ‘magic’, and ‘god’, a category error. All things are in unique solitary categories, in an absolute sense. It is a category error if we are treating them as if they are in the same category in question. The category in question is their explanatory power (and not the degree to which they are composite of concepts already understood). In this respect, they are both the same. Neither can provide us with a verifiable process. Both serve as an 'explanation' in the most trivial sense possible.
It doesn’t matter how a theist defines god to differentiate it from magic. I have defined magic to be able to do absolutely everything, including the logically impossible, and to be able to solve all problems I need solving, magically. We could say, all things including god, but apart from magic, are composites of logically possible concepts. Which means that magic shares even less properties with the natural world than god.
To go any further, every premise, and also the conclusion, need rephrasing or clarifying.
Topic: Educated Muslim Apologist.