But a muslim worships a false god. The GOD of Abram, Moses, Jesus Christ, St. Augustine and Billy Graham ARE NOT the same GOD. muslims deny the saving grace and salvation of Jesus Christ. For them to just recognize Jesus Christ "as just a prophet," is a confused and unsound doctrine. Matt 10:32-33 aptly puts everything into proper perspective. Their holy book is a "scatter brained" collection of incoherent babble, basically written during two "windows in time." The Mecca "window," and the Medina "window." My Holy Book, comprised of both the OT and NT contain a simple thesis, written by man, but inspired by the One, True Living GOD. If the muslim "would portray any sense of reason," they, themselves, would see they are on "the wrong path. The koran states allah is the great deceiver. My Holy Book states Satan is the great deceiver. Our job, as "professing" Christians, is to illuminate to the muslim, their errant path. But to legitimize islam in any manner, I refer you back to Matt 10:32-33.

What is the end point, or goal that you define as "working"? I assume folks must address this in the 499 posts below. This is crucial. Without a well defined goal or end point, to talk about reason that "works" seems an almost meaningless statement.

Sorry about my lack of paragraph breaks. Blame Disqus, not me.

Apologies for the late reply.

>> The 'problem of induction' only applies if you're a Humean; in other words, if you refuse to grant (as Hume explicitly refused to grant) that objects have specific tendencies of their own.
> No, Hume's argument applies to our experiences not to objects.

Hume did quite specifically deny final causes (rules or tendencies) in objects, even if it was in the context of a discussion about experience. From the Stanford Encyclopedia:

"While there is indeed nothing added to our external senses by this exercise, something does happen: “after a repetition of similar instances, the mind is carried by habit, upon the appearance of one event, to expect its usual attendant, and to believe that it will exist.” We feel this transition as an impression of reflection, or internal sensation, and it is this feeling of determination that is “the sentiment or impression from which we form the idea of power or necessary connexion. Nothing farther is in the case” (EHU, 75)."

Happy to discuss experiences if you want though...

"Again no, the question is whether we are justified in reasoning from instances of which we have experience to other instances of which we have no experience."

The answer to your question is 'yes' if we admit final causes ('rules'/'tendencies') as properties of an object, and 'no' if we deny them. Therefore, placing faith in the generalities proposed by science is only rational if we admit final causes.

"You mean you don't have experiences?"

Misleading. I have experiences, but not only experiences.

"So chickens that regularly receive feed from a farmer might regard that as a "law"?"

Chickens aren't intelligent enough to know whether this is a 'law' or 'something that just happened'.

Now a human being, hopefully, would be intelligent enough to grasp that a farmer is an example of category 'man'; and hence decides to feed the chickens every day, but one day may decide not do; and furthermore, will cease to exist bodily in a few decades' time; and hence will one day cease to feed the chickens.

The sun doesn't decide to rise every day; it just does; it has, as inherent properties, 'rules' governing its behaviour. Outside of an astronomical event destroying the sun or the earth, or the sun burning itself out (as it will in a few billion years' time, according to its 'rules' as we currently understand them), it will continue to do so.

Farmer != sun.

"How about "No sphere of gold greater than 1km in radius exists in the universe", would that count? Alternatively how about "No sphere of uranium 235 greater than 1km in radius exists in the universe"?"

Irrelevant. You can surely see that these are factual claims about the physical universe for which we have no evidence either way. They have nothing to do with our argument, which is a logical/philosophical one over whether causes exist in reality (Aristotle/Catholics), or whether we make them all up (Hume/materialist-atheists).

"However it [science] doesn't regard those laws as certain. Which rather undermines your second claim."

It assumes that the laws exist, even if we can't state them entirely accurately. F = m * a may not be exactly accurate in the light of Einsteinian physics, but that does nothing to undermine my claim that there's an inherent law that the model (however imperfectly) points to. Under Hume's model of the universe, where rules & causes don't really exist outside our brains, F = m * a might suddenly change to F = m * v, or F = bananas / sausages * hash-browns, overnight.

I apologise for the late reply - I wish I could spend more time doing this, as it's far more interesting than my desk job. Anyway...

"How would you go about demonstrating that is true?"

By the fact that an object behaves in regular ways. Without reference to tendencies/rules inherent to that object - viz., tendencies/rules that exist as properties of that object, just as its material structure does - it's senseless to talk of objects behaving in regular ways. But they do behave in regular ways - the scientific method takes it as a working assumption (whatever some people pretend otherwise).

"Note that making up a rule and showing that the rule is useful in predicting outcomes does not prove the rule exists outside your model."

Obviously not.

"How can you ever show that your rule is not a narrow subcase of a more complex behavior that you can't test for?"

That would show that there's a more complex rule than our model previously accounted for.

The issue is not over how accurate a description (model) of the rule we posess; it's over whether the rule exists at all. Utterly random, inherently unpredictable behaviour would imply no rules; but we know the universe is not like that (don't we?). Your example talks about the possibility of previously unobserved behaviour. This would demonstrate that our model, our understanding, our simplification, of the rule is wrong; it most certainly does not demonstrate that there is no rule at all.

A model is a model of something; it assumes the existence of a rule or tendency that governs an object's behaviour.

Sacred theology, the critical study of the revelation of the Word of God requires an act of faith, a free act of the will. For this reason, as Augustine says, belief is meritorious – it is not forced on the mind by truth itself as in philosophy. Still, in philosophy alone the Greeks got an enormous distance – they got to 'the unmoved mover'.

To get a feel again for the Biblical treatment of faith: it might help to contrast 1) the crowds who followed Jesus after feeding the five thousand, for a free feed; Jesus' silence before Herod who only wanted a show; the religio-political powers who sought His execution because he raised Lazarus (John 11:47); with Judas' supperating envy; the fall of the created intelligences'- concerned only about their own prestige; with 2) those willing to remove a roof to get to Jesus; a woman who only wanted to touch the hem of his cloak; a Roman Centurion who knew authority when he saw it and through a messenger simply asked for a word from Jesus; or Bartimaeus, fallen from great success, - calling out, expressly asked by Jesus "what do you want me to do for you?", his blindness cured Jesus said "your faith has saved you".

Jesus finally, re: on human freedom and the mystery of the human heart: "When the Son of Man returns will He find faith on earth?"

And lastly GKC on the strange sensibility that does not have the taste for awe at the givenness of things, and chooses instead prison in the microcosmos of self worship.

"Chesterton contrasts looking at the sun with looking at the moon,
which is a dead, clearly outlined circle in the sky (akin to the
tidy naturalist enterprise, which Chesterton likens to the psychological
narrowness of the madman, to a “lunacy”):

"The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one
thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at
noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own
victorious invisibility. Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense
of a popular phrase) all moonshine ; for it is light without heat, and
it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world. But the Greeks
were right when they made Apollo the god both of imagination and of
sanity; for he was both the patron of poetry and the patron of healing. .
. . [T]ranscendentalism . . . has . . . the position of the sun in the
sky. We are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion; it is
something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But
the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and
inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is
utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has
given to them all her name."

But they're derived from rules that exist as a property of the object itself.

How would you go about demonstrating that is true? Note that making up a rule and showing that the rule is useful in predicting outcomes does not prove the rule exists outside your model. How can you ever show that your rule is not a narrow subcase of a more complex behavior that you can't test for? For example, the model derived from Newtonian mechanics looked fine until cases could be tested at high enough velocities to require the Lorentz correction specified by Einstein.

Thanks.

I don't think we're going to get any further with this.

If a stone doesn't behave according to inherent rules, we have no way of knowing whether it will fall to earth or leap into the sky when we let go of it. Clearly you disagree.

Talk of models is irrelevant. The models are certainly in our minds only. But they're derived from rules that exist as a property of the object itself. Otherwise we have no way of knowing that something will behave in one way rather than another.