Who won the Collins-Dawkins Debate?

I think Dawkins won quote satisfactorily depending on your scoring system. I think that God can be a question of science - not current science but whatever science has become in the future. If science is ever able to completely understand reality, how it came to exist and what it all means - we'd be able to rule out most of the traditional roles of a god. At that point any deity would take the rather undignified position of 'hypothetical/philosophical entity that has no influence in reality, generally agreed to live in some kind of 'super reality' which is entirely seperate from what we know as reality.As Dawkins concludes:

quote:

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If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.

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I think it is scientific evidence - it is data collected from a measuring device that you happen to trust the reporting of (ie, your spouse's brain). Unfortunately, it is not an instrument that somebody else necessarily trusts (brains are notorious for deliberately misreporting data so one has to have a good knowledge of the reporting accuracy of the brain before one can make a conclusion (not to mention any factors that might influence the brain to deliberately misreport Since most people have not got any familiarity to your spouse's brain, they cannot trust the brain is correctly reporting), so you can use this piece of evidence that is convincing to you to go collect more evidence that will convince more and more people.This is a little like someone who reports their machine has detected cold fusion. A lot of such devices have been shown to be highly affected by background noise, so without intimate knowledge of the experimental setup (probably via replication), few people will accept the results.Unfortunately, reconstructing your spouse's brain is not a practical possibility - so its brain's report is questionable scientific evidence.

If I had a tape measure that I knew had accurately recorded lengths and I measured my table to be three foot long I'd trust it without further evidence.Some tape measures are not accurate. If we knew, that certain tape measures were sometimes out by a factor of ten and I told you my table was three feet long you'd think it was between 3.6 inches to 30 foot, pending further information.Now, if I had a device that detected rain placed in my garden but that device recorded false positives 1% of the time, I could say that it was a scientific piece of evidence for it having rained if it recorded that it rained whilst I was away.In these cases we know the error margins.What if my device was manufactured by Acme corporation? Acme are devils and some of their devices register false positives as much as 100% of the time, sometimes as few as .0001% of the time. One cannot know which one it is until you had tested it.If I had tested my machine and recorded that it has over a period of 5 years never recorded a false positive on its rain count for any day, I can be confident that my positive result for rain means that it did in fact rain whilst I was away.That would be scientific.One final step. If I didn't bother to test my device by observing it for 5 years and I bought another Acme device that connects to the first and tells me how accurate it was I would find myself in a similar position to the rest of the world with the wife scenario.The second device can produce false results occasionally as well you see. The second device says the first is reliable and this is a valid piece of scientific evidence. It is less likely that both the devices are unreliable, but not impossible.In analogy terms my wife's brain is the first device and my brain is the second device.As with any scientific evidence only relying on two measurements is hardly good science (especially when both evidences are using Acme devices human brains). There is still a good chance we're getting false positives. Our conclusion is highly tentative. The more evidences we have (and the more evidence we have that the evidence is reliable evidence) the more certain we can be that the conclusions we draw from the evidence are accurate.