Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Nov 21, 2020 8:36 pm
Advocate wrote: ↑Sat Nov 21, 2020 7:03 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Nov 21, 2020 6:58 pm
"Replicable" is a funny word there. Are you implying that something can't be real unless you can "replicate" it? If that were the case, your own birth would have to be "unreal."
You don't have to justify your birth by direct replicability, you have to justify the means by which you justify your birth by direct replicability.
No, that won't work. If you replicate somebody else's birth, that doesn't provide you sufficient reason to believe in your own. That would have to be an inference, a sort of analogy that what happened in the case you "replicated" was the same as your own case. But you wouldn't have any empirical data to prove that was so.
Both empirical measurement and logic, the two ways of knowing, rest on replicable certainty.
Actually, both are untrue. Empirical measurement only increases probability estimates, not certainty. And logic doesn't rest at all on replication. It rests on basic principles like Aristotle's Laws, but doesn't make any appeal at all to replicability.
You are not treating Inductive reasoning as a subset of Logic, something that used to be ignored. Now, we call the prior Deductive-only logic of the past, "formal", to distinguish the difference of view. Formal logic (deduction) treats the conclusion as necessarily following the premises whereas, Induction (sometimes called, "informal") is a kind of inverse: a process of looking at patterns to guess what the formal logic MIGHT be. In this way, 'science' takes up Induction as its main method of determining reality by 'sensing' (origin of 'science') instances and then electing from them the most probable as the conclusion. This then is reversed to test if a formal logic using such guesses suffices to give us our original observation. This means it has to be 'repeatable'. One instance in which you 'repeat' the logic you guessed as being unable to 'predictably' give the identical output would then require rejecting.
I think of "Science" as the process of tearing apart what we see in order to try to guess at how something works. Then, if you think you've got the logic correct, you require running it forward to see if you can get it to work as you initially observed it. So "logic" is the actual forward process or mechanism that makes something work.
If you take a old clock, for instance, the 'observation' might be to see that it gives you time. But if you did not build the clock, you might try to tear it apart carefully, observing each stage of deconstruction and keep careful notes of this. This is the 'science' part. Then, if you have figured out how it works correctly, you assume doing just the opposite by reconstructing it. If you fail to get the clock working,
that is 'replicability'. If your logic is correct, you should also be able to reconstruct a new clock from scratch, of which the success of the project would be the 'replication' you seek. For each of any scientific theory, the logic guessed is technically NOT the 'science' but the 'logic' guessed that leads to the expected conclusion becomes the 'theory'. Since this is possibly not completely correct, but nevertheless useful, it is kept until a better explanation comes along. However, if and where possible, the new proposal would be most effective if you could at least still use the new proposed logic with less complexity where ideal.
So 'logic' OF a 'scientific guess (hypothesis)', can be considered a
replicable. Note that I DO agree about this with respect to grand theory involving the very large and small. So in context to the question of religion as being one such topic, I understand your argument. But the grand theories tend to remain 'theories' and NOT 'theorems' because many cannot be conclusively certain and are often relatively more vague than the more
proximal sciences, like chemistry, biology, et cetera.
BUT, here is where you CAN use this kind of thinking to propose what may be POSSIBLE: If we can create some 'logic' that
replicates God, or some property of something we thought was impossible or hard to prove, you can at least prove it 'possible', as a stepping stone to further inquiry. The cell phone, for instance, is a kind of 'mind-reading' aparatus that we thought remained science fiction at best, and supposed, "pyschic" phenomena at worse. But note that where people have proposed some 'psychic' capacity, they did so PRIOR to actual mechanisms...that is, using actual physics to demonstrate it 'repeatably'. So, even if someone recognized some potential
psychic ability to communicate to anyone independently (a partial property of being 'psychic'), the lack of actual 'logic' beyond superficial religious declarations are all that the psychic can assert. They thus lack the ability to 'replicate' the phenomena from the perspective of those who require this to reasonably gamble in paying them any further attention outside of entertainment.
You are alive, all currently existing humans were born, therefore you were born.
This is a good example of the fallacy.
"I am alive" does not give me, "all currently existing humans were born." And both together doesn't give me "therefore I was born."
You need a first principle, something that states, "All live human beings have been born the same way." So no clones, no cyborgs, no asexual reproduction...
Then you need, "I am a human being" which we can perhaps grant...though you could still be a program or a bot, at least on this forum. And then, and only then, do you get your conclusion.
But you don't know that for certain. You just estimate that it's improbable that things like AI or clones can happen. You don't KNOW, and you certainly aren't CERTAIN. But you think the alternatives highly improbable, and invest your faith accordingly. That's not certain, though.
This is still what we are able to 'replicate' of things other beings. I can test this by having sex and observing whether this leads to the origin of a 'child'. This kind of question is what differentiates the question of the supposed 'miracle of Jesus born of a virgin'. If you cannot witness a normal reproduction of this sort, then the lack of replicability suggests that the story was either mistaken or misinterpreted.
As a comparable 'theory' on what was meant by the origin of the story, one could propose that the original referred to Mary as having a child out of formal wedlock. The name 'Mary', also hints at this. It was the term for the female stage PRIOR to having children. You needed to "get
married BEFORE you had a child or the child was considered "illegitimate" or accidental. In the case of Jesus, the nature of its 'accident' would be a type of 'theory' we can guess that has the ability to be tested by its logic. The logic (as a guessed mechanism of reasoning) in the cas of Jesus birth, here, then has a more 'sound' justification than the belief that Mary didn't actually have sex.
