So let me get this straight. It is OK to accept philosophical naturalism by means of argumentum ad populum...but nothing else.
No, you don't have to accept philosophical naturalism at all, you can operate on the hope that supernatural pixie power makes the thoughts you presume you have relate to unrelated but really coincidental movements of your fingers on a keyboard that the internet fairy is watching whilst everybody's internet browser software miraculously shows the exact same confused meaning, complete with superfluous addition of "philosophical naturalism". That's your call.
Accepting the premise that cause and effect are consistent is not 'argumentum ad populum' - it's an assumption, no-one is contesting that it's proven. No-one, similarly, is saying that because people appreciate that scientific findings continue to work that their belief somehow makes it right. What I'm saying is that because scientific findings consistently repeat, we can have an increasing but never total confidence that our initial presumption is correct.
Remember, scientific findings are always provisional.
I wrote earlier on that the only methodology is science. You keep a) deliberately ignoring that.
b) state philosophical naturalism doesn't have a methodology and it's OK particularly with enough support.
c) The supernatural has no methodology and it's not OK and any support it has is argumentum ad populum,
d) It's ok for anything other than science to have a methodology except the supernatural ( a fine piece of special pleading if ever there was one)
You've written a lot of things, most of it an attempt to shoehorn the phrase 'philosophical naturalism' into the conversation like a four year old that's learnt a new word.
I know philosophical naturalism is not a method. It's a presumption upon which the scientific method is founded.
We don't ignore your claim that only science has a methodology, we just challenge how you can have any confidence in your claims of god in the absence of a methodology of some sort. It's OK for anything to have a methodology outside of science - just as, say, logic and mathematics do.
So there's no special pleading here - we have a methodology, we admit its limitations, and we build our provisional understanding of reality upon it. So well supported is it in practical terms that, in everyday life, we treat it AS THOUGH IT HAD BEEN PROVEN, but we acknowledge in formal argument that it hasn't.
You, on the other hand, contend 'an experience of god' without any justification for differentiating from any of the posited alternative possibilities; you claim 'likelihood' with no method stated for determining such, and then accuse others of special pleading.
O.
