Massimo Pigliucci: The Problem with Scientism

That's a list of moving the goalpost fallacies, not valid objections.

You should re-read my reply and what I was responding to. You argued all meaningful characteristic commonly attributed to God or gods has been disproven. I pointed out you can't say that when the goalposts can move freely.

Science proved that about minds. Human minds, animal minds, makes no difference, it's a material thing. Hypothesizing a "disembodied mind" is like thinking of a "hardwareless program", a contradiction in terms.

Again. You're completely missing the point. Science has only proven things about minds we can study. It can't prove anything about the general concept of what a mind is. That's ontological--not empirical--territory. The mind is just a system of interactions. The specific mechanism of those interactions is irrelevant--just like a computer can be made with electricity or gears. It's theoretically possible for the interactions of a mind to take place in form we wouldn't call physical. Is this likely? I doubt it, but that doesn't matter. If it's conceivable, you can't call minds proven to not be that.

The fact is that the god of the gaps is a series of failed hypotheses all called by the same name to foster an equivocation. These hypotheses were disprovable and HAVE BEEN disproven, one by one.

You're not appreciating the god-of-the-gaps problem at all. Yes, you can prove specific claims wrong. But when the concept is a moving target, you can never prove it wrong. This is a very important distinction for a skeptic.

/r/skeptic Thread Parent Link - blog.apaonline.org