Are Atheists "Philosophically Limited"....?

The theist viewpoint seems to hold that atheists are more restrictive in that they reject one possible explanation theists do not. What theists fail to grasp is that the atheist view permits for an unknown number of possible answers replacing the theist’s single answer.

Consider this, if we accept that there are ‘truths’ we can or may never know, then doesn’t it make sense to first establish if and how we can actually do know something? The ‘ology of how we know something is science. If one cannot establish what is or what it means ‘to know’ then every opinion and assertion is equally valid. Therefore, it a mistake to look at science as the pursuit of materialism when it is instead a pursuit of determining and evaluating knowledge. It may not be strictly the case, but it appears to be that this is practically the case. If there is no objective component that can be evaluated by others then there is no mechanism for demonstrating shared reality. Sure, you and I could hold some shared belief (science doesn’t insist shared beliefs are impossible, in fact the opposite is the case), but holding a shared belief doesn’t make that belief ‘true’.

No. Really, no. The word repeated is giving you too much trouble. Instead of ‘repeated’, think ‘verified the method’ or ‘reviewed and duplicated’. The ‘repeat’ is part of science determines if something is objective. If no one can duplicate or verify the findings then those findings could hardly be called ‘objective’, how could they? This is not about science having nothing to say about the past. That is a bastardization and complete failure to understand of how science actually works.

I get that you like you like CS Lewis. What I don’t get is why you think he has anything valid to say about science. Scientific laws are models and explanations. He might have just as well said, no script on its own ever made a movie.

quote:

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This may be put in the form that the laws of Nature explain everything except the source of events. But this is rather a formidable exception.

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Did you even read this? Do you actually believe that Newton’s Law of Gravity does not explain the source of the event of an object falling?

I think there’s a bit of equivocation in terms here (science vs Lewis). The discussion is if CS Lewis’ argument is correct and it seemed easier to demonstrate that Lewis’ claim is wrong on the face of what he’s the arguing, rather than get into Lewis’ misconceptions of science. It appears to me that Lewis doesn’t mean scientific laws in the same sense science does, but more in the, well look at how GDR replied: I suspect that GDR is correct and I assumed that was sort of what CS Lewis was claiming some philosophical argument which is little more than psudo science.So I do believe that in the sense that Lewis seemed to be asking, that some ‘natural’ laws have enough explanatory power for the type of question Lewis is asking. Even if ‘natural’ laws never give the same explanatory power as ‘some guy with a pool cue didit’, Lewis has presented nothing more than a straw man, because certainly Scientific Theories combined with laws do have explanatory power.Anyway, I was trying to get GDR to see that Lewis’ comments shouldn’t hold up to even casual scrutiny, let alone scientific scrutiny.