[Dimensio]

I looked up the quote. It's missing the end piece, where he justifies and qualifies his statement:

"The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen. "

In other words, he's saying that we must assuming only the natural and reject the supernatural (within scientific experimentation) because once we start assuming a "god", we throw out any chance of objectivity -- if you allow explanations outside of known properties of the natural universe, then you can just make anything up for your reasoning and justify it as a "miracle".

Thing is, he's right.

[Ahban]

"In other words, he's saying that we must assuming only the natural and reject the supernatural (within scientific experimentation) because once we start assuming a "god", we throw out any chance of objectivity -- if you allow explanations outside of known properties of the natural universe, then you can just make anything up for your reasoning and justify it as a "miracle".

Thing is, he's right."

The thing is, he is blinded by his dogma, as you seem to be. The idea that the order and complexity of this universe is soley the result of unguided chance is what is hard to believe. The idea of God takes less faith than believing that nonsense.

What you are doing is starting out with an unproven assumption that there is no God and calling that "objectivity". Ridiculous. It is simply a decision you have made that by your own confession you cannot prove or disprove scientifically. It then becomes a matter of labeling your personal preferences as "objectivity".

If you RULE OUT in advance, regardless of the evidence, an explanation outside the known properties of the universe then you close the door to the unknown. Thus Naturalism posing as science is a threat to the progress of real science. What you call "supernatural" today may be a natural part of a higher plane of existence that we can one day discover- if investigations into it are not ruled out in advance by the high priests of Naturalism that have taken science captive.

[Ahban]

PS- the quote is solid. The "justification" he supplies to support his naturalist dogma in no way undoes the fact that he is admiting that he is refusing to consider theistic options regardless of evidence.