the Naturalist has better reason for the assumption that nature is uniform then the Christian

The resolution has been ‘the naturalist has better reasons for assuming that nature is uniform than the Christian’. I believe I have fulfilled this. I want to start with contention 6 because he has not address it directly. Contention 6: Brian asserts that other worldviews cannot justify the obligation to believe anything; he offers no conclusive proof of his assertion. He argues that he is able to trust his reasoning because God guarantees it through Scripture. To interpret Scripture one must be able to trust one’s own autonomous reasoning! He presupposes autonomously reasoning, while blatantly denying it. It is unclear why we should accept the Bible as a revelation of God as opposed to the other Gospels that didn’t make it into Canon (1) Brian quotes Van Til, who argues why God’s reasoning is infallible. The problem is not about God, it is about us – how do we know which thoughts God is thinking (so that we may think them after him)? How are we supposed to determine which revelations of God are? Our cognitive tools have been stripped. Contention 1: Brian has taken aim at instrumentalism through the words of Popper, is arguing against hard instrumentalism -yet one can adopt soft instrumentalism: “Another type of instrumentalism, which we might call soft instrumentalism, grants that beliefs are real, but only in a less robust sense than is ordinarily thought. .. Consider as an analogy: Is the equator real? Well, not in the sense that there's a red stripe running through the Congo; but saying that a country is on the equator says something true about its position relative to other countries and how it travels on the spinning Earth. Are beliefs real? Well, not perhaps in the sense of being representations stored somewhere in the mind; but attributing a belief to someone says something true about that person's patterns of behavior and response. Beliefs are as real as equators, or centers of gravity, or the average American. The soft instrumentalist holds that such things are not robustly real (if that makes sense)—not as real as mountains or masses or individual, actual Americans. They are in some sense inventions that capture something useful in the structure of more robustly real phenomena; and yet at the same time they are not mere fictions. ” (2) This solves Popper’s criticism; yet there are other solutions available (3). So we have reason to continue to presuppose UoN because what we discover helps us out in our everyday lives and it provides us predictive models. Contention 2: Brian points out that not all naturalists are determinists. He's right; yet my concern is not to rescue all types naturalists. Brian asks how things are determined, he says “But what is it that prevents “internal” interruptions, or prevents there being chaos inside of a Naturalistic system instead of order? ” This is a bit to unpack. When we talk of laws of nature we are talking about regularities, about how things act. Part of what constitutes an entity in the natural world is the physical characteristics it possesses and how they interact with other entities. So, what could be meant by an ‘internal’ interruption? It seems to suggest the question, what prevents an entity from acting like itself? This question is simply incoherent. Contention 3: Brian continues to beg the question “My confidence that God will continue to govern with regularity is not based upon some inductive generalization, but bases upon who God is, given his immutable character and nature. ” Why is Brian confident? Because God is immutable. Why should we believe this will remain to be the case though? Further, why should we maintain that God’s governing of the UoN will remain consistent? Content 4: Brian seems to just assume God has an interest in the UoN, “it seems as though God gives general purposes – along with regularities – to all of his creation. ” Brian is grasping here – he is interpreting the Bible as he sees fit, not as to what it actually says. He writes: “Induction does not produce 100% certainty. But, it can produce nothing without regularities by which to generalize. God produces those regularities, albeit with sparse and obvious interruptions. ” What reason suggests God cares about the UoN? Apparently God is only interested in maintaining the seasons or with giving everything a reason. Brian appeals to Gen 1:14-15: It should be noted that this is prior to the flood, in which God promises to maintain the seasons, so this cannot possibly be used to support the idea that God’s intention in his creation was to have stable seasons. Clark says: “The Hebrews were not theoretical thinkers - wisdom was for them profoundly practical. To say that "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" is not to make a claim about proper procedure in physics, packaging, or the culinary arts. It is a claim about practical wisdom - how to live one's (moral and spiritual) life. The very idea of a biblical epistemology seems to me as misguided as the ideal of a biblical meteorology. ” (4) Later, Brian seeks to excuse miracles as anomalies: “Does the day the sun stood still for Joshua mean it won't rise tomorrow? Do singular anomalies ruin our ability to do science, or overturn scientific theories? Do you think Newton would have revised his description of the motion of the planets if he had lived in Joshua's time? “ I interpret Brian to be saying that we don’t toss out Newton’s picture of gravity simply because we observe one thing that doesn’t fit. The fact is that science did replace Newton’s vision of physics with the theory of relativity, because of the build-up of anomalies. Our scientific theories are not perfect and their refinement as a result of figuring out what those anomalies are leads to ever better scientific theories. Asimov writes: “What actually happens is that once scientists get hold of a good concept they gradually refine and extend it with greater and greater subtlety as their instruments of measurement improve. Theories are not so much wrong as incomplete. ”(4) The assumption in Brian’s objection is that scientists ignore these small problems, but as Einstein showed, they don’t. Einstein figured out what the anomalies meant (5). Contention 5: Brian continues to appeal to the notion that miracles are one-offs. He writes: “If we determine that a miracle is a special intervention or interruption then we cannot expect them to have regularity, but instead appear as anomalies. So, we should not expect something like the orbit moon to be considered miraculous (besides which, we have an example of its intended regularity described in Gen. 1:16” Of course, Gen 1:16 does not speak of God intending the orbit of the moon to be regular – this is Brian’s view. Here’s the verse: “1:16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. ” The moon doesn’t generate its' own light, it reflects the Sun's. The Hebrews weren't arguing the point that Brian is straining from the text. I asked how we know that the moon’s orbit wasn't a miracle; Brian implies that its' regularity is the key. To us, it doesn’t seem like an interruption because its duration seems to be a very long time. Time isn’t the same for God, Ps 90:4: “For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night. ” It could just be a slight interruption to God. I'll repeat, How is finite man supposed to know when, where, and for how long these interferences occur? Conclusion: Brian has attempted to refute my position, but in the end, he couldn't. Vote Pro References: (1) . http://www.earlychristianwritings.com... (2) . http://plato.stanford.edu... (3) . http://en.wikipedia.org... (4) Five Views on Apologetics, KJC, p256 (5) . http://chem.tufts.edu... (6) . http://en.wikipedia.org...