@cloudyday2 I have watched your video. This illustrates what I said nicely.
Dennett argues that Scientific statements that are counter-intuitive are acceptable because they are backed by data accrued by scientific method, but to use such an argument from other axioms is somehow less plausible. What?
He is assuming that Scientific data is accurate beyond question, he ignores basic Epistemology. For Science requires the assumptions that facts are knowable, data measurable, results repeatable, senses trustworthy, that Reality exists as presented, etc. Basically 1500 years of philosophy was required to get to the point where Scientific Method could be articulated (Grosseteste and Roger Bacon in the 1200s). So his objection that constructs built on individually reasonable axioms create massive ricketty structures is accurate, but the problem is that he is throwing stones while living in a glass house himself. He even admits that he would not attempt a formal reductio ad absurdam nor look for logical inconsistent propositions but only surmise where they may lie.
Basically he is dismissing his opponent's arguments by an false analogy between Scientific constructs and a broader Philosophic construct, secure in the knowledge that his audience will immediately accept the Scientific one based on our modern assumptions of the almost-infallibility of Scientific method. This is only possible because his audience is largely unaware how the Scientific construct was created or validated and had been taught to trust it implicitly their whole lives without question. This seems to make the one 'mind-boggling' result more plausible than the other, but this is very much not the case. Richard Bernstein adresses this very problem when discussing Cartesian Anxiety, how truth cannot be ascertained and therefore to decide which propositions are more or less plausible is largely guesswork. It is as if playing a field sport like Rugby or Soccer and we are allowed to move the goalposts and lines as we see fit - how do we then determine when and if a goal was scored? Only when the audience agrees with where the lines are painted and of course due to our modern curricula, this has largely been done, but we don't know where the lines truly lie. Basically he is not adressing his opponents arguments, but attempting to undermine the broader view from which it is derived.
It is reminiscent of Marxist dialectic in a way, a secure belief in your own thought paradigm and thus you can use it to dismiss any other without adressing their criticism.
This is exactly the type of sloppy reasoning that I object to, that feeds on ignorance to validate it.
This was only a 10m video, so perhaps I am being unfair and Dennett adressed it more fully elsewhere, but I doubt it. Modern Atheists have it easy, they jump on implicit trust in Science and this mistaken idea that something held a priori somehow invalidates an argument - while doing exactly that themselves. It just makes me more despondant on the fate of Western Civilisation when such epitomisation is judged sufficient. Such specious argumentation would not have been deemed acceptable by the 'old' atheists, who were at least intellectually honest.
