Debate : 26207


Off-Topic / Debate / 26207	26206 \| 26208

Subject:	Re: Is lgbt dead in the water? & Is religion dead in the water?
Newsgroups:	lugnet.off-topic.debate
Date:	Tue, 19 Oct 2004 15:24:11 GMT
Viewed:	1278 times

In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Dave Schuler wrote:

In lugnet.off-topic.debate, David Koudys wrote:

This is where your fallacy lies. Since you ‘live the science’ you can’t accept that there might be something outside the science, today or even in the future. You can’t accept the ‘magic’ that may be in the system.

Instead, you’re asking us to accept on faith the claim that something supernatural might exist. I do not accept that claim on faith; if you have evidence of this “something outside the science,” then by all means let’s see it! .
It’s not sufficient to say “we don’t understand X therefore X must be magic.” That’s nothing more than argument from ignorance (aka God of the Gaps). In order to make a claim that magic, or a soul, or a divine hand is at work in a given system, one must provide evidence that this is the case. Lacking such evidence, the best one can offer is a leap of faith, which some people (like me, for instance) reject as an explanatory model of the universe.

Right.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”

Arthur C. Clarke

Or something like that. This argument of Dave K’s strikes me as a variant of the Designer argument, at least in some ways.

Message has 1 Reply:

		Re: Is lgbt dead in the water? & Is religion dead in the water?
(...) Also in Babylon 5 with the Technomages. :) Love that JMS... So my friend and I were talking the other day about Clarke, Asimov, Chalker, Heinlen, etc... Can anyone name a really good science-fiction author that was born, say, after 1960? I (...) (20 years ago, 19-Oct-04, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)

Message is in Reply To:

		Re: Is lgbt dead in the water? & Is religion dead in the water?
(...) That's the wrong way to ask the question, IMO. Or at the very least you're setting a task for science that isn't science's responsibility to answer. The more precise phrasing is this: Are there systems and components in nature that cannot be (...) (20 years ago, 19-Oct-04, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, FTX)

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