*headscratch*

[PolityOfQueens]

Could someone here help me figure this out?

About a week ago, I had a thread in the ED talking about the futility of religion, when this one guy came in claiming that humans can know the existence of gods through inductive reasoning. One key message was, and I quote:

Quote:

Yes, just as I also would say that we dont need objectivity inorder to act and know things to be so. We have the capacity for induction, which is just as legitimate as deduction, and is as permissible a principle for the foundation of knowledge as objectivity. I in fact go so far to say that deduction is the least likely and worst principle to base what one claims to know, given not its weakness, but its incredible rarity and near impossible levels to be accomplished not just in faiths, but in all studies. If this be the founding principle, deduction, then man can know next to nothing. This is why we use induction all the time for the foundation of what we know and hence, the possibility for people to know what god or deity is proper.

What the discussion then properly rests upon is how strong is one's inductive proof, not whether we can know or not know at all.

This is like Pascal's Wager on crystal meth. How does this prove anything?!?  

[Raticiel]

Um... most of proofs for god's existence were supposed to be deductive, aren't those? sweatdrop that's something unusual.

Ask that guy if he can prove that all bachelors are not married inductively.  

[Dathu]

Ah rhetoric, the most popular and utterly useless weapon of any desperate theologian (if one can call him that).

In a sense he's comparing deduction to induction, which is silly because a deduction is derived from logic while induction comes from generalizing. Which, when you just look at that, you can see why Theists would favor induction over deduction since logic and religion are far from friends.

He's essentially just trying to confuse his opponent with a convoluted argument. In the end, he's said nothing more than "I don't think deduction works because religion can't stand up to it, so I use the word induction because it's broader and easier to use to attempt to prove religion is true."

Usually the best arguments are succinct. If a reply is long, elaborate, and ambiguous, it's probably bullshit!  

[Raticiel]

Dathu

Ah rhetoric, the most popular and utterly useless weapon of any desperate theologian (if one can call him that).

In a sense he's comparing deduction to induction, which is silly because a deduction is derived from logic while induction comes from generalizing. Which, when you just look at that, you can see why Theists would favor induction over deduction since logic and religion are far from friends.

He's essentially just trying to confuse his opponent with a convoluted argument. In the end, he's said nothing more than "I don't think deduction works because religion can't stand up to it, so I use the word induction because it's broader and easier to use to attempt to prove religion is true."

Usually the best arguments are succinct. If a reply is long, elaborate, and ambiguous, it's probably bullshit!

But most ways of proving god's existence are logical proofs. Just look at medieval scholastics, modern philosophy...
If he really could show any empirical data on god's existence... some kind of "mystic experience"... xd