Dear one, as far as my pup goes, I could write a book about my puppy!
The Vet told me today that I’m going to have to run her every day for the rest of my life. She goes into training classes in another couple of weeks. She is already digging for bones. He said she is the smartest breed of dogs. As far as God goes, if you do take the time to read that link (url), there is physical evidence, rebuttal evidence, and testimonial evidence.
Take it easy. I try my best not to kill Science off by insulting religious scientists or non-religous ones. 
Peace and joy be with you.TS:jd,
I don’t think the thoughtful rejection of Aquinas relies on refutation of his arguments. To say they are refutable – something that bears that kind of scrutiny – is to miss the most powerful criticism of Aquinas. Aquinas certainly had crude and now laughably primitive examples and analogies (he was in this respect more backward than Aristotle nearly 2,000 years before him, I think), but those are expositive and pedagogical flaws, not flaws with his arguments, per se.
The most potent criticism of Aquinas Quinqae viae is that they cannot be refuted, even in principle. They are not liable to being true or false, but are instead notional, intuition, gossamer. Further, I don’t think that’s controversial, if one just looks at each and asks how we would either validate or falsify any of the premises and predicates he relies on.
Not looking to bend the thread toward Aquinas, but the retort that Aquinas has not been refuted in his arguments strikes me as “true in a misleading way”. They haven’t shown themselves to even rise to the level of true or false as we understand them in the context of “refute”.
Aquinas is not wrong, but “not EVEN wrong”. He hasn’t left us in his arguments anything liable to refutation, so he truly can never, ever, possibly be refuted. He’s totally safe, but in a way that disgraces him and diminishes his contribution to the quest for human knowledge.
I’d be happy with “Aquinas has never been refuted, never will be because his arguments aren’t the time that are compatible with the concept of refutation”.
Would that work?
-TS
)Good, thanks for asking! Always a pleasure sparring (or otherwise) with you. Sorry you found that overlong. But here’s is the key bits, and this I claim does say something clear and substantial:TS:
You always have a profound way of expressing gibberish. Ultimately, the atheist argument is simply, “I can’t possibly know, therefore you can’t possibly know.” I, on the other hand, am a man of few words. (At least here!
In all of those words (above) you say nothing. Absolutely nothing. A marvelous argument, but, not for this time or place. It is full of presumptions that are never expressed. It is full of assertions without spines. It is full of innuendos. They are superficial, to say the least.
By the way, how in the world are you?
God bless,
jd
Let’s grant this for a moment: Aquinas’ arguments are all apriori, conceptual, question begging, etc.
Many a weaver of words is a poor philosopher.
So he’s right.
If it’s true, then by my understanding it’s not superfluous. My point was somewhat different than you have it. If it’s not liable to falsification, at least in principle, then there’s no meaning left in saying “it’s true”. Even if it is true, if there’s no way to know that, or to identify the proposition as false, if it were false, it’s pointless to even invoke the terms “true” and “false”.
Not sure I grokked that, but if you suppose objective tests and methods of measurement (will the predictions of Mercury’s perihelion that come from this theory borne out by the observations we will make next month?) is arbitrary, I think there must be nothing that is not arbitrary. The scientific method is designed and implemented with the express purpose of identifying, removing and/or minimizing the arbitrary and the capricious from the process. In any system powered by humans you won’t acheive perfection on this, but I don’t think you could point me to any human enterprise that is as committed or demonstrably successful in fighting “arbitrary”.
TS:
It’s only objectively superior due to the lack of any positive evidence to the contrary. It’s performative AND parsimonious. The theist intuition is equally performative (God can be used to explain any scenario), but it’s gratuitous, not parsimonious.
“Definitive” is an over-narrow criterion. If we only embrace what is “definitive”, life is practically impossible to navigate. The superiority of unbelief (“wrong” seems problematic, here, unless you just mean “not intellectually superior”, or similar) is that the model provides a more thorough accounting of the world we observe around us, and makes better predictions, with less explanatory resources.
It’s the null hypothesis! Same with unicorns. They may exist, but from everything we can see and observe, and for all the models we build that perform, God and unicorns don’t factor in. Psychologically, we are evolved with a god-impulse, as we are creatures who’ve adapted to survive the eons through a well-honed stance of intentionality. We are design-freaks by disposition, so we are inclined to see everything as designed, intuitively.
OK, name one of the Five Ways in which the premises and the conclusion are falsifiable, even in principle. If you are not just blowharding on me, this should be straightforward!
And ultimately (despite your rather wordy and obtuse attempts) that’s about all you can offer me when you sacrifice truth for subjectively idealized pragmatic performance.
A proposition does not have to be falsifiable in order to be true, so objecting that a proposition is unfalsifiable does not prove that it is meaningless.
That’s why I thought my summation of his thoughts was rather good. He thinks that if something cannot be subjected to scientific falsification, even if it is true, it really does not matter (or, as he has said, it loses “meaningful” truth value - in other words, useful scientific value). Obviously, the criterion itself self-refuting.
Actually, TS, I began a thread, at your explicit suggestion, some time ago. You seemed to have quickly disappeared. I even tried to give it a second boost. Perhaps if you had stayed a while longer, you wouldn’t have been so prone to making such an absurd iteration of his First Way, as you’ve done above!
I don’t suppose there is no way to know if God exists. I think there may be, and there is a way to know God exists, if God exists. Rather I don’t know, and can’t know that God doesn’t exist. It’s an intractable proposition, proving a hidden, supernatural god does not exist. Procing a physical Zeus like God exists, and thus knowing a god exists, does not seem at all problematic to me, however.
I understand agnosticism to be disbelief, or maybe “unbelief” is more precise. But either way, a less confident lack of belief in God. But I don’t see the connection between God-as-logically-possible as any kind of grounds for belief in God. Reasonably, per your view here, unicorns are just as real as God, as well as teapots in orbit around Saturn. Those propositions are also at least possible, are you eminently more reasonable in moving toward belief in unicorns and celestial teapots???
Of course.
OK, fair enough. I didn’t cite the FIrst Way as a whole, of course, though, just a premise I recalled from it (and you had me thinking I had my Five Ways confused for a moment, and I was recalling a premise from the Fourth way or something.Actually, TS, I began a thread, at your explicit suggestion, some time ago. You seemed to have quickly disappeared. I even tried to give it a second boost. Perhaps if you had stayed a while longer, you wouldn’t have been so prone to making such an absurd iteration of his First Way, as you’ve done above!
But, this is someone else’s thread.
God bless,
jd
(my emphasis)
I don’t need to point out more – this is a premise from Aquinas’ First Way that exemplifies “not even wrong” as a way of thinking without putting one’s thoughts at risk of being discredited, practically or even in principle.
But the practical implications in believing in unicorns or tea-pots orbiting Saturn and believing in God are infinitely different, my friend.
