Quote Originally Posted by Gilrandir View Post
Still, the difference between one and more than one is obvious while between "few" and "many" is vague. Like if you have three children - for Uzbeks it would be few, for Ukrainians (at present) - many. Thus, using such terms should be very limited for the sake of accuracy in debates on philosophy.
I am talking about terms of comparison because "real" numbers are impossible to come by. You're asking the right question but rather missing the point of it. If I ask "what is 'many'" the answer is "more than few" and the reverse is likewise. You are correct that the terms "few" and "many" only have meaning when you attach a concrete number to one term, that's because they are comparatives.

The point I was making was, very simply, that a universe created by God is not *less* likely than one which came into being with God - that's all I have to prove to undermine the "complex God" argument. I'm not trying to prove that it's more likely God created the universe, although I suggested that was possible.

I'm not trying to convince you to my world-view. If you thought I was that may explain why you don't understand my point.

All sciences can be roughly divided into those that study human and groups of humans aka societies (those are humanities) and those that study the world around the human (natural sciences). Some sciences thrive as a case of overlapping (technical sciences in the broad sense - those that explain how humans can profit by knowing what's going on around them, e.g. pharmaceutics, agronomy, engineering). Philosophy fits neither category as it aims to expose the most general laws which rule the world, the society and the mind. Trying to study everything results in discovering nothing. Practical application equals zero. Hence, pseudoscience.
Well "pseudoscience" means "not real science" which can be reasonably applied to anything which does not rigidly adhere to the scientific method, and depending on how strict you are you could exclude everything up to Pure Mathematics.

A lot of this is down to a branding exercise, in the late 19th Century "Natural Philosophy" became "Natural Science" and started to define itself by its method of enquiry rather than its quest for knowledge. That was an effort to distance itself from the Academy at large and concentrate on "hard science". That approach has manifest practical advantages but it creates the impression that "Science" is not subject to metaphysics - but it is.

Metaphysics asks "how do we know what we know?" and the answer, ultimately, is that we have to take it for granted. You can't "test" the Scientific Method because no test you devise would be outside the Method and therefore you're stuck in a logical paradox.

Let's try a simile - If I want to test the strength of a piece of steel I could cut it in half and then use one half to test the other half by striking it until it broke. This tells me how strong the steel is against itself but not against, say, granite or diamond. There's no point of comparison, so I only know how the steel stands up to itself, but I don't actually know how strong it is against anything else. The steel could be very strong, or very hard, or very brittle, or it could be none of those things. Logic has the same problem, you can construct many logical problems to demonstrate the internal consistency of logic but it's impossible to construct a logical problem to prove that logic actually applies to the real world. the reason is that all logical problems rely on logic and therefore logic must be accepted as functional a priori ​before you even begin to construct a logical problem.