CCC comments on Open Thread: March 4 - 10 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: Coscott 04 March 2014 03:55AM

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Comment author: Bugmaster 13 March 2014 03:39:17AM 0 points [-]

The evidence that all perfectly natural mechanisms were set in place by God relies on the existence of God in the first place.

That sounds less like evidence and more like an assumption. You say:

Should an omnipotent and omniscient being exist, it's trivial to show that the current universe must have at least avoided the disapproval of such a being; and it is quite possible that the universe was constructed or altered into its current form.

I completely agree; however, I am not sure how you could get from "our Universe exists" to "an omni-being exists and takes notice of our Universe". I do agree that going the other way is pretty easy; but we are not omniscient, so we don't have that option.

Comment author: CCC 13 March 2014 07:57:42AM 0 points [-]

I'm not going from "our Universe exists" to "an omni-being exists and takes notice of our Universe". I'm going from "an omni-being exists and takes notice of our Universe" to "said being controls the universe".

I may not have been perfectly clear upthread, so let me try rephrasing and explicitly stating what I had been taking implicitly: If God exists, then all perfectly natural mechanisms were set in place by God.

Comment author: Bugmaster 15 March 2014 05:48:13AM 0 points [-]

Understood; but this means that you can't look at any natural mechanisms and interpret them as evidence for the existence of a God. That would be circular reasoning.

Comment author: CCC 16 March 2014 04:23:38AM 0 points [-]

Well, not merely on the basis of the existence of natural mechanisms at all; that would, yes, be circular reasoning.

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