Does God Explain Anything At All? (Part 2)

I'm continuing our pursuit of whether doctor(logic) is correct in saying that God is never a satisfactory explanation for anything we might observe. We've been working on a fair and complete statement of what constitutes explanation to doctor(logic). It's time to try to gather what we've discussed since my first try on this, and see if this covers it adequately. As in Part 1 of this series, the purpose here is not to criticize but to understand.

Update 5:30 pm: The intention here has been to write a statement of a position that we can work from; doctor(logic)'s position, that is. Based on his 4:57 pm comment on this thread, I'm editing what follows so that we have an agreed record here of his position. This post is a work in progress, pending his agreement with its content.

This is the summary of the formulation we started with:

⁃ A) An explanation must be more than a restatement of observations
⁃ B) An explanation must have substance beyond mere words
⁃ C) Vague references to God do not qualify under (B)
⁃ D) Predictiveness does qualiy, and in fact is the only thing that does qualify [see here]
⁃ E) Predictiveness is understood to be in terms of measurable, material results (possibly, correlating to a measurable, material, explanans)

doctor(logic) said (E) is overly tight, that "material" in particular does not fit. Mathematics and logic are not material, for example, and he would admit them as part of explanations. The "law of universal justice" would not necessarily be material, either. (That brings up an unrelated question for him that we might pursue someday.

Other discussion in that comment thread established that doctor(logic) prefers explanations that can be described or expressed in terms of statistical correlations. dl wrote,

"I think this says that a statistical prediction has to be visible, in principle, with a statistical study. Throw in the fact that humans are only statistically reasonable and competent, and we're led to the conclusion that every prediction has to be supported with statistical evidence. (Logic and Mathematics are certain in the sense that their statistical uncertainty can be lowered to arbitrarily low levels, so there's no conflict with the conclusion that statistics should be applied everywhere)."

Anyway, the current statement as of changes made through the discussion thread is as follows.
- A) An explanation must be more than a restatement of observations  - B) An explanation must be more than a reference to an explanation that we don't yet have, but hope to have in the future.
- C) Vague references to God do not qualify under (B)  - D) Predictiveness does qualify, and in fact is the only thing that does qualify (see especially here for that) - E) Prediction has the implication that some future observations will raise your confidence in the explanation, and other future observations will lower your confidence in the application (see especially here for that)
- F) That which is not explained in this model is just unexplained; no other explanatory schema are admitted

Extreme statistical outliers with no known predictive explanation are to be regarded as just unexplained, in one or more of these terms:

1) X is explained. There are one or more predictive theories of X, and we have good statistical verification for one of them.

2) There are explanations of X. There are one or more predictive theories of X, but we lack evidence to infer that any theory is probably correct. X is unexplained.

3) There are no explanations of X that we know of. We have found no predictive explanations of X. X is totally unexplained.

4) X is inexplicable. X is defined to be something that cannot be described by a predictive theory.

Now, we need to know if doctor(logic) would consider this a reasonably accurate statement of his position. After that we can discuss how well it actually works.

Part of a Series

• Part 1

• Part 2

• Part 3

• Part 4

Posted: Mon - September 10, 2007 at 12:23 PM |

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson getCategoryName("<$CategoryUUID$>");

Does God Explain Anything At All? (Part 2)

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson