This is an interesting claim. I’d be interested to hear you flesh this out into an argument.
Also, I wonder if this conversation would be improved by investigating what we mean by “proof” in this context. I think the original poster’s alluding to “scientific standards” was an interesting start. Physical science is useful in this context as a model of rigour, but the practices of physical scientific methodology would, I think, be inappropriate for investigating the existence of God. This is because hypothesis, repeatable experiment, and the fund of empirical consequences gained by the predictive power of the theory, are inextricably empirical, pertaining, as they do in this context, to the physical stuff under investigation. Happily, I think we all agree on this point. But this model of rigour is familiar to any mathematician, philosopher, or theologian. That is because the models used in these investigations are remarkably similar. Their content is not equally as often empirical, but their methods are, in no particular order:
hypothesis (claim, conjecture, conclusion, vaguely or ill-conceived assertion),
repeatable experiment (argument considered from all angles, chain of logical reasoning fleshed out, susceptibility to weakness of implication, contrary arguments dismantled, form and content, use and mention, etc. etc.),
fund of consequences gained by logical implication (what implications to my system of thought can be gained here, etc.). Now, these steps necessarily vary from discipline to discipline, as does the form of reasoning. For example, pure mathematics uses deduction, while philosophy uses both deduction and induction, depending upon the content under consideration as well as the motivation and emphasis of the philosopher. Contrastingly, physical science uses a great deal of induction and relatively little deduction. Then there are the social sciences discussed by the previous poster. They use a large amount of induction, depending as they must on statistical data and probability theory. But induction is weak deduction, or evidentiary deduction. In fact, in order to operate, it assumes set laws on which to graft hypotheses whose veracity is then tested inductively. The very idea that the induction will yield predictive and predictable results is built on deduction. In fact, mathematical induction is deduction under a different name; but this is a linguistic quibble; actually, more a bad joke than a quibble: mathematical induction has nothing whatever to do with induction elsewhere. Anyway, at no point in any of these sciences does subjectivism play a role, except perhaps in some confused claims masquerading as philosophy. These are mere poetry, which has its own value, probably greater than that of the disciplines we have been discussing. But that claim is only subjective.
God Bless
Jon Winterburn
