It seems to me this is the big point. To a true believer an explanation that involves God doesn’t require assumptions. A conclusion that involves belief is not exportable but it is hard to argue with because what someone believes has the same weight as a fact in their internal processing.
Do you “know” that what you can observe is the best basis for knowledge or is that what you “believe”?
There is a lot to that “logic” that I agree with. It is just that I’ve spent a lot of time with religious family members and I’m trying to reconcile otherwise bright people not seeing the world as I do.
But that’s not what “naturalism” means, if I’m understanding it correctly. Everyone agrees that nature exists, and that things generally and predictably follow natural laws. What naturalism insists on is that nothing but nature exists, and that there never are and can never be exceptions to those natural laws.
To the OP: I’d be interested in knowing the context of the remark—what point or argument the guest in question was trying to make at the time.
You never heard the phrase before? It means that if something is true most of the time, and you meet something that has symptoms of the true thing, expect it to be the true thing. Everything in life one experiences on a daily basis tends to operate under a naturalistic basis. Encounter something new, expect it to also be naturalistic.
IIRC, he’s a presuppositionalist - which means that he believes there is no ‘neutral’ ground. You cannot ‘prove’ worldviews per say, you can only show which ones are consistent.
Look up Van Til, Gordon Clark, Greg Bahnsen.
It’s a load of rubbish, but it’s quite sophisticated.
I actually have problems with both premises of the Kalam.
I don’t think we have an experience with ‘nothing’, so I do not think our intuition is enough to ground ex nihilo, nihilo fit. Further, I don’t think the universe did ever not exist. The Kalam presupposes the a theory of time, which I do not support.
Well, there’s certainly some things we can logically deduce from what science claims to know.
If Stephen Hawking is right, in that time, space and matter were created at the moment of the Big Bang, then whatever caused the Big Bang was timeless, spaceless and immaterial.
That sure doesn’t sound to me like we’re still talking about “naturalistic” forces…
Even though I read his book, I can’t remember what he posited with regard to the beginning of the universe. Your position supposes that he is right, of course, which isn’t a settled issue.
That said, there are a multitude of models that put forth a universe ‘from nothing’. Here’s one.
It does to me, then again, I don’t know what you mean by supernaturalististic forces.
It was not necessarily timeless, spaceless, and immaterial. It is simply that what we define as time, started with the Big Bang. The problem we have is that we can not observe what existed before, due to running out of what we define as time.
It is possible, to pull one example out of many (and simplifying _vastly), that our universe is a bubble inside a large universe, like air bubbles in jello. Perhaps this outside universe has existed for ten times longer than ours has. We can’t tell: we can’t look outside the bubble we’re in.
DJ starts out with a series of questions trying to understand the guest’s ‘worldview’. He asks questions like “Is matter all there is?” “Do we live in a closed system of cause and effect?” “Does everything need to be empirically verifiable?”
So the guest wasn’t yet arguing a point, he was just in the hotseat while DJ asked him questions to explain his worldview. The guest said he believes in tangible, physical, demonstrable reality. Somewhere along the line DJ made the point that his worldview presupposes naturalism.
DJ has a model of a natural world with god existing outside, in the supernatural, whatever that is.
He uses the terms naturalist, materialist, and empiricist interchangeably, AFAIKT
I’m no physicist, but the link you provide here theorises about a universe originating from quantum tunnelling, which requires, at the very least, one particle. In other words, something. Not nothing.
Aristotle came up with the best definition of nothing that I’ve come across: Nothing is what rocks dream about.
But we need to be consistent with our definitions when inside a singular context. By our definitions, whatever caused time, space and matter to exist, must, by definition, be timeless, spaceless and immaterial.
But there’s no evidence for this, hence, no reason to believe it.
