Ehh, give him a break. After all he is trying to prove the existence of God while providing valid reasoning and reliable sources.
Is that what he's trying to do? Besides the usual tired old false "no morality except for God's absolute universal code", all I could see was him complaining that nobody would agree with him that science cannot deal with the supernatural, which is suspicious on the face of it -- and since he continues to make that complaint even after I agreed, I know for a fact that it's not true -- and adding that there are far better and more relevent ways to studying the supernatural. But then he completely ignored repeated requests for what those other ways are and how well they work, AKA "how reliable are they?" Finally after I had repeatedly pressed him for an answer, he angrily tossed out four candidates (I take his cry of "Philosophy!" as being his single answer, with the next four items being specific disciplines that are a part of philosophy), two of which do not even belong:
Dr. Sing writes:
Philosophy! Metaphysics, Ethics, Logic, Philosophy of religion.
Ethics does not belong on that list, because it deals with morality, not with the supernatural. Also, logic does not belong, because it likewise does not deal with the supernatural, but rather is a tool used by many other disciplines -- it would be like claiming that arithmetic deals with capitalism just because accountants need it to balance their books.
I strongly suspect that that "list" was merely an angry outburst instead of something that he had actually thought through. As such, I would be surprised to see him support that list and discuss it.
As for asking whether they are "reliable", by that I meant how much confidence we can have in the conclusions they offer us. What kind of testing do they use? To return to the navigation analogy I have offered sac??? and which he still does not understand, let's say that we have two aircraft, both of which are launched at sea with orders to find land (or to find the enemy fleet, as in the case of "Strawberry 5"), but without any charts to lead them. They both fly out at a random heading. The first pilot sets up a wide-area search pattern no knowing where they are and performs a visual search. Effectively, he tries to make educated guesses and then tests those guesses by "pulling his head out of the cockpit" and actually looking. OTOH, the second pilot covers up his cockpit so that he cannot look outside and reads from a crossword puzzle book for clues as to which way to turn and when. He might even do a critical analysis of certain letter intersections, but at no time does he ever look outside to test whether he's in the right place or not. Which pilot is more likely to accomplish his mission?
Now, in trying to deal with the supernatural, both methods are hampered in that
neither approach is able to deal with the supernatural. The scientific approach has nothing to observe nor any way to test hypotheses. Similarly, the philosophy way has no true premises that it can start with as well as virtually nothing to test. I say "virtually nothing to test", because there are only two cases I can think of for philosophy to put its conclusions to the test:
- If a line of reasoning results in a logical contradiction, then that line could be disproven.
- If a line of reasoning makes predictions about the natural universe, then those predictions can be tested and hence that line of reasoning as well, including its premises. This is what "creation science" does, those predictions have indeed been tested, and they have proven to be wrong.
Other than that, I cannot think of any way that philosophy can deal with the supernatural any better than science could, which is to say that neither really can. All we know about the supernatural is what we and other people make up about it. So all that philosophy can do is work with stuff that people made up. They can analyze what had been made up and even make up some more stuff themselves, but the bottom line is that they are not dealing with the supernatural itself (which is also something that we've made up), but rather with stuff that people have made up.