>Bertvan
>Hi Chris,
>I checked and rechecked. What is written below is by you -- and about
>someone else!!!! If I were to answer your posts I couldn't have said it
>better. Amazing!!! It does seem to support your belief that in nature
>everything that is possible happens. In all that verbiage a refutation of
>you own position was bound to eventually appear.
>
> >Chris
> >Hi. I visited your sites, and looked at a couple of the pieces. I'm
> >impressed with the sheer amount of stuff you have, but not with its
>claimed
> >evidentiary value. This is because this sort of thing can be done with
> >almost *anything*. You could easily "prove" the truth of the "Lord of the
> >Rings" trilogy by this means, or you could *prove* that the claims of the
> >Koran are true by the same method. It's just too easy for a person with
>a
> >little familiarity with mathematics to come up with these kinds of
> >"evidence." Since the same method can just as easily be used to
>"prove"
> >things that are clearly false or even nonsensical, as well as things one
> >might think true, I conclude that it's not a valid method of proving
> >things, or of validating them at all.
Chris
I pointed out that Jenkins' method could be used, if it were valid, to
seemingly prove nearly anything.
Apparently, you think *my* method could be used to "prove" just
anything, so here's a challenge: Just *try* using it to "prove" ID theory, or
numerology, or your idea that the Universe itself is somehow inherently
intelligent, etc. It won't work because the method itself actually
discriminates between two classes of propositions (more than two,
actually). Jenkins' method does not consistently or meaningfully
distinguish between truth and falsehood, since it may be used to pseudo-
prove both sides of a contradiction.
Reason does not allow this to happen, which is why, when we
*seem* to have a case where reason does this, we know that a
mistake has been made. This is one of the many self-corrective
features of reason that is missing from faith.
Finally, I'm curious as to why you think my own words would eventually
refute my own position. Certainly, the paragraph you included in your
response does not do this. Though reason is far more powerful than you
think it is, it is also *much* less subject to the wishes of the user of
reason than you think it is. In fact, much of the *point* of using rational
methods is to compensate for or bypass one's feelings or desires about
some question of fact. The essentially mathematical argument for the
accumulation of variations in a process of random variation and
replication, for example, hardly depends on my *desire* to prove
evolution (and, in fact, it is only part of a larger "feasibility" argument,
anyway).
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