You simply won't believe what the IDiots are saying now!

Do you remember Vincent Joseph Torley (vjtorley)? He's the IDiot with a Ph.D. (2007) from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne (Australia). That's a legitimate university. Apparently Vincent Torley went off the rails sometime after 2007.

Here's his latest post on Uncommon Descent: Does scientific knowledge presuppose God? A reply to Carroll, Coyne, Dawkins and Loftus.

The scientific enterprise stands or falls on the legitimacy of making inductive inferences, from cases of which we have experience to cases of which we have no experience. The aim of this post will be to show that there can be no scientific knowledge if there is no God, and that there is no way of justifying inductive inference on a systematic basis, in the absence of God.

BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, etc. etc. etc.

I alluded above to the troubling fact that even if we assume that objects somehow instantiate rules, there remains the epistemic problem of knowing whether we’ve chosen the right model, or identified the right mathematical equation (i.e. laws of Nature) for characterizing the rules that define a certain kind of object – be it a tiny electron or a star, like the sun. But if we make the two assumptions about God which I referred to in the preceding section – that God wants to make intelligent beings, and that God wants these intelligent beings to reason their way to God’s existence – then we can infer that the rules which are embodied by objects in the natural world must be tailor-made to fit the minds of intelligent beings that are capable of contemplating their Creator. In other words, the universe is designed to be knowable by us. Hence we don’t need to concern ourselves with the theoretical possibility that the rules which characterize things might be too complicated even in principle for us to grasp.

God, then, is the ultimate Guarantor that science can work.

Well, that does it for me. Either I stop being a scientist or I have to become a believer in God in order to continue doing science.

Tough choice. Let me get back to you on that one ... anyone want a job as a professor of biochemistry?

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Posted in: Rationalism v Superstition, Science