What I find interesting is that my challenge to your pointless and useless enlistment of philosophy and theology vs. the methods of science to advance knowledge leaves you stuttering and mumbling with duck jokes.Putting a “finer point” on a bankrupt argument will not save the argument. I guess we must put it in the same category as failed “pwoofs” of your imaginary philosophical, scientific and logical pwoofs for your gawds; A vacuous claim that you were unable to actually support.Putting an even finer point on the point in the above. Hawking is famous—or is it infamous?—for claiming that "[p]hilosophy is dead." Yet the work in which he makes that amazingly obtuse claim is in fact pure philosophy, scientifically unfalsifiable assertions regarding the metaphysics of ontology. Dude! But then the philosophers of the new atheism are notoriously bad thinkers and utterly unaware of the fact that the historical cannon of ideas rendered their "new" objections to theism moot centuries ago. LOL!
Why would any qualification in philosophy or theology be necessary? The issues here are not philosophical or theological. The natural world (to exclude such supernatural inventions as your partisan version of gawds) is entirely a scientific issue. The natural, ie:, rational world, can be discussed, explored and understood without any necessity of recourse to philosophy.
This is why religionists, supernaturalists, ect., tend to run screaming from actual discussion of the science involved and instead insist that the issues are philosophical or theological. They must set up and knock down irrelevant straw men, otherwise they are directly faced with their lack of scientific evidence or argument.
Philosophy (as eventually separated from science) is among the most futile of human endeavors. It delivers essentially nothing of genuine human utility. It can be used to argue anything, since it ultimately has no obligation to be true.
Sadly, Hollie, trying to have a discussion about this stuff is often like trying to play chess with a rooster. The rooster will just kick all pieces off the board and crow in triumph every time.
Don't be silly, AtheistBuddah, Hollie doesn't know anything worth knowing about science either. He/she always writes this very same drivel about philosophy and science, which is utterly wrong, of course, as science rests on a metaphysical presupposition, and then runs the moment I do get into the science.
So since neither one of you are packin' any intellectual heat worth engaging, how about a duck joke?
_______________________________________
A duck walks into a bar, bellys up and orders up a charcoal-filtered nice on the rocks. This quack likes his smooth chilled, see. The bartender serves the duck his drink, and the duck tells the bartender to bring him some gumballs.
"Sorry, don't have any gumballs," the bartender tells the duck.
So the duck downs his smooth, pays and leaves, see.
The very next day the duck returns and orders another nice on the rocks. "Let me get some gumballs with that," says the duck.
"Like I told you yesterday, I don't have any gumballs."
The duck downs his smooth, pays and leaves.
Same thing the very next day: the duck orders a nice on the rocks and gumballs.
"Look here, you stupid quack. I've told you twice already that I don't have any gumballs. Ask me about gumballs one more time and I'll nail you to that wall by your bill. Check?"
So the duck downs his smooth, pays and leaves.
The duck comes back to the bar again the very next day and orders a nice on the rocks and a box of nails.
"Does this look like Ace Hardware? I ain't got any nails either."
"In that case, I'll have some gumballs," says the duck.
As usual, your utter inability to defend the theistic worldview, wherein you live in trembling fear of angry gawds and fantastical claims of an inversion of a reality based existence is actually pretty nihilistic and child-like. You revile science because it strips away the fears and superstitions you require to maintain your religious dogma. You require that there remain questions about the natural world that mankind can never hope to attain true knowledge about, and that means our place in the universe is hopelessly obscured. This is a sweepingly nihilistic and child-like point of view, and you fundie zealots don't connect the dots to this inescapable conclusion. The cul de sac remains forever in place-- "Gawds did it, and that's that."
How this suffices as an answer to anything is beyond any reasoning I can come up with. I understand that those three words, "Gawds did it" are enough for a lot of people, but people of careful thought should be deeply dissatisfied with it. That they are not smacks more of a desire to keep a comforting myth as opposed to facing a sometimes cold-- but understandable-- reality.