I was using the term as in to suppose beforehand. I see the distinction you are making, though I am not sure that one of them is actual and the other apparent. As long as the suppositions were prior to the main argument, I would think they would all be actual presuppositions. But that’s getting a little picky and likely pointless.
OK, perhaps I can illustrate it with an example I was going to present to foreveryoung to illustrate the importance of evidence and of rigeur.
For "to suppose beforehand", let's use the term "hand-waving," which is after all basically what we're talking about here, since when you have nothing more to support what you're saying than your own assumptions, you will employ hand-waving at that point of your presentation.
Though there is another very valid reason to employ hand-waving, which is when it would not benefit the presentation, but rather detract from it, to provide too much information; ie, all the hard background work has been done, but there's no need to plod through that entire mountain range of information nor could you in the 10 minutes you're allotted. Simple example: "Why is the sky blue?" That was one of the questions Clifford Stoll (of
The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage fame) was asked in his orals for his PhD in Astronomy. It took him 3 to 4 hours to answer that simple question completely. When your four-year-old asks you that question, that is not the kind of answer that you could or even should give him, but rather the answer that you give him will involve a lot of hand-waving.
Now for the featured example. I have found a handful of different sources for Kent Hovind's solar-mass-loss claim. This one is transcribed from his seminar video as was on his site circa 2003 ( #7, "Questions and Answers", from 37 minutes 40 seconds to 39 minutes 54 seconds):
quote:
All you got to do is step outside and look up. Obviously the sun is burning. It's losing 5 million tons every second. You can't just keep losing 5 million tons a second, pretty soon you start to lose weight. And so the sun is losing this mass -- 5 million tons every second -- which means it used to be larger. And it used to be more massive. If you increase the mass of the sun, going backwards in time for several billion years, you start to create a problem with the gravitational balance between the earth and the sun. It's going to suck the earth in and destroy everything.
Other than the single fact of the rate at which the sun is losing its mass to fusion, the claim is pure hand-waving. The question we must ask is whether he had worked through the problem rigorously enough to support his conclusion that the ancient sun's mass would have been so great as to have sucked the ancient earth in.
So I applied a modicum of rigor by calculating how many seconds there are in 5 billion years and hence how much solar mass would have been lost in that time. It's a really huge amount: 7.8896 10
23 tons. But then I compared that to the total mass of the sun, which is 2.19 10
27 tons. That means that only a few hundredth's of one percent of the sun's total mass has been lost through fusion in those 5 billion years. Which means that the ancient sun's mass was about 1.036 times what it is now, which means that the ancient sun's gravitation was 1.036 times as great, which would have "sucked" the earth in by about 34,000 miles.
So we have two different conclusions: Hovind's and mine. Hovind's was based purely on hand-waving, whereas mine was based on actual calculations. However, my presentation here employed hand-waving, since I did not walk you through every step of every one of my calculations. If I had, then you would not have even bothered to try to read it. But even though Hovind and I both employed hand-waving in our presentations, in my case I could provide my calculations if required to, whereas he not only could not, but would do everything he could to avoid doing so (I know, because I had emailed him for any piece of information about how he had arrived at his conclusion).
So, while it would appear that we both based our conclusions purely on assumptions, it is only Hovind of which that is true. My conclusion was based on actual calculations with valid bases. Of course, I had to depend on established scientific findings, such as the measurement of the mass of the sun, the rate of mass loss in its fusion reaction, the very existence of that fusion reaction. The results of decades and even centuries of rigorous work that has been tested almost constantly.
In the case of the scientific disciplines, it appears to me that the methods used have a pretty respectable degree of validity, but no claim to final certainty or enshrinement in the Temple of Truth for several reasons
What scientist has ever claimed to "final certainty" or "enshrinement in the Temple of Truth"? You're tossing out a red herring there.
If you are trying to claim that religion and science are equal because neither has claim of "final certainty", then you are wrong on at least two points:
1. All religion has are unsupported assumptions. Science is based on centuries of rigorous work which involved repeated and near-constant testing. Religion has nothing but its assumptions to support any of its conclusions, whereas science can show you in great detail how it arrives at its conclusions, meaning that, unlike religion, science can indeed support its conclusions.
2. Religion
does indeed claim to have "final certainty" and "enshrinement in the Temple of Truth". Nearly all the sects that contradict each other.
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