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Touchstone
Guest
OK, not what I was thinking. At any rate, ‘pure reason’ garners no particular hostility from me, as such. What provokes contempt – and should – is analytic knowledge putting on airs and trying to pass itself off as synthetic knowledge. When you can turn tautologies and your own definitions into truth claims about the real world, that’s a clever trick, but a trick all the same, a form of anti-knowledge.
But pure reasoning as such is not a problem!
-TS
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James_S_Saint
Guest
That is a bogus excuse. The idea that “you can’t prove a negative” is just another axiomatical ploy to setup the playing field for the Atheist.
You can prove that 2+2 is NOT 5.
Given a definition of God, you can prove that such a defined entity cannot logically exist.
But of course, that is assuming logic has any say. Atheism is a political position, so logic and truth are not really the objective, but rather merely persuasion. Thus logic and truth will tend to be dismissed in convenience for gaining persuasion.
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Matthias123
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When you are saying this you are assuming that none of these definitions correspond to reality – a very big assumption.
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Matthias123
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I second the objection.
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tonyrey
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Orogeny
Guest
Strawman. There is no such rule in baseball, nor has there ever been.
Sorry, I just had to point that out.
Peace
Tim
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Detales
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Orogeny~ What, you’ve never played sandlot?
Tonyrey~ Sorry, again, though I know God IS, “wonderful” and its synonyms don’t constitute “proof.” And with that, for some you might find it difficult to posit “wonderful” as even pointing to a “spiritual” dimension. Sense of aesthetics? Maybe. What are you trying to do? And I’d like to know why you feel a “spiritual” explanation is needed?
Tonyrey~ Sorry, again, though I know God IS, “wonderful” and its synonyms don’t constitute “proof.” And with that, for some you might find it difficult to posit “wonderful” as even pointing to a “spiritual” dimension. Sense of aesthetics? Maybe. What are you trying to do? And I’d like to know why you feel a “spiritual” explanation is needed?
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a_priori
Guest
Hey, in the fifties we lived and died by that rule. Say it ain’t so!Strawman. There is no such rule in baseball, nor has there ever been.
Sorry, I just had to point that out.
Peace
Tim
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Orogeny
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So did we, but, unfortunately, it really isn’t, nor has it ever been, a REAL rule. Of course, a lot of the rules we made up as kids weren’t REAL rules. Especially those rules we put into place when we played 3 on 3 baseball!
Peace
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Touchstone
Guest
This is how knowledge works. Look outside of this question – you cannot demonstrate a universal negative. This isn’t a principle made up for or only used by atheists on the question of God’s existence, it’s the nature of knowledge, a general epistemic limitation.
If we’re just monkeying with definitions, you can prove anything you want. Analytic knowledge (e.g. “2+2 = 4”) is being confused here with synthetic knowledge – the very problem I was cautioning Matthias123 against. Acquiring and demonstrating synthetic knowledge is a whole different ballgame, and takes more than just definitions and rules we can construct without consulting real world evidence.
This means that negating synthetic statements are also different than negating analytic statements. All that must be done to negate an analytic statement is show that rules and definitions have been violated. This is not the case for a synthetic proposition. “There is no God” is fundamentally UNLIKE “2+2 != 5”, then. One must show via real world evidence that God does not exist, and that’s an intractable problem; no matter how many bits of evidence are cataloged that fail to identity God, God could obtain somewhere else, somehow else.
Sure, if you define God as a logically incoherent concept. But that takes, again, no consultation with the real world. It’s just monkeying with definitions, analytical propositions.
Once again, you’re marking out the most political positions of all here, and the least engaged with the ideas. You’re dismissing, apparently, an opposing viewpoint because of some supposed motive you’d like to demonize as a means of persuasion on your part. It doesn’t get any more cynically and cheaply political that that. Atheists don’t really value logic or truth, so their words can be discounted, whatever they say. If politics is a problem here, I think you need to look at your own words for the source.
-TS
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James_S_Saint
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Haha… That is a very fascinating post. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. TS, you are a truly textbook case of the fractured, feminized male mind. Someone should be writing a book on you individually. You perfect the concept. :tiphat:
The most prevailing symptom is that of the guilt accusing itself. You do it so well. :bowdown2:
You cannot demonstrate a universal positive either. Demonstration doesn’t actually prove anything but the moment of the demonstration. And even that could be doubted.
And yes, it was designed specifically for anti-God use. It is designed around the lack of logic, an almost inverted logic, but not quite. It is literally the design of Eve.
Fascinating, really fascinating.
Does it hurt? I mean like headaches or heart aches? :console:
The most prevailing symptom is that of the guilt accusing itself. You do it so well. :bowdown2:
First, how do you know “how knowledge works”? Mustn’t you also know “how knowledge doesn’t work”? How do you “prove” either one? But also…
You cannot demonstrate a universal positive either. Demonstration doesn’t actually prove anything but the moment of the demonstration. And even that could be doubted.
And yes, it was designed specifically for anti-God use. It is designed around the lack of logic, an almost inverted logic, but not quite. It is literally the design of Eve.
Take that statement you made for example. Who said anything about changing any definitions? No definitions were mentioned. No definitions were changed. The definitions being used were trivially simple. Yet you slip in an accusation, “monkeying with definitions” (suspicions, paranoia). And proceed to invent a couple of them yourself;
Emm… “If we’re just monkeying with definitions, you can prove anything you want.” Isn’t that the way you put it?
Then you proceed to lay the foundation for the upcoming bemusement utilizing the newly invented concepts expressly denying “definitions and rules” unless they are first “atheistically observed”. And of course we already know that atheistic observation means “interpret the data how ever necessary to avoid the undesired conclusion - logic is only a convention”. I can still hear the echo of Gordon Stein.
And the dance starts up. :hypno:
Fascinating, really fascinating.
Does it hurt? I mean like headaches or heart aches? :console:
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tonyrey
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“wonderful” implies that you are filled with wonder. Wonder at what? Surely the inestimable value and unfathomable mystery of existence. Could that be the result of chance or purposeless processes? Hardly.
Where is beauty derived? Is it entirely in the eye (or ear or nose) of the beholder?
What about harmony, symmetry, proportion and fittingness? Beauty is another aspect of the value and purpose of life.
Establish the inadequacy of any explanation which rejects the inestimable value, purpose and rationality of existence!
Because we all live in a spiritual, intangible realm in which we are directly aware of our thoughts, intuitions, emotions, images, feelings, perceptions, sensations, choices and decisions. We all interpret the physical world differently and we can never know it as it really is. For all of us the primary, inescapable reality is our stream of consciousness on which all our knowledge depends. It is putting the cart before the horse to derive matter from mind. From the dawn of history human beings have known intuitively that the spiritual world is distinct from, and more significant than, the world of material objects…
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Fran65
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Have to object here! Just what is wrong with a feminized mind per se? I have a perfectly good feminized mind.
Although I have to say, as a woman I wouldn’t want a masculinized mind.
… so I’ll let that one past before anyone starts calling me the f word (whisper it…feminist)
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James_S_Saint
Guest
:clapping:Have to object here! Just what is wrong with a feminized mind per se? I have a perfectly good feminized mind.
Although I have to say, as a woman I wouldn’t want a masculinized mind.
I think EVERY woman should have a feminized mind.
And actually there is nothing particularly wrong with a male having a feminized mind IF (and only if) he accepts, as almost all women do, that LOGIC is not their thing.
Conceptually the difference between the male and female, and literally the difference between Ahdam and Eve, is the difference between the purely logical and rational versus being partly logical but largely wishful and willing to forgo exact reasoning in hopes of obtaining the desired.
But such is compensated by the male having the weakness of too strongly defending his errors whereas the female more readily accepts her defeat in reasoning. It makes a “loving” combination.
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Touchstone
Guest
Setting aside the problem of the apparent implication that “feminine” is somehow “illogical”, what is it that you find illogical here? You take time for armchair psychoanalysis, but not the time to identify what you find problematic in terms of logic. The discussion will be more interesting and more productive with more of the latter, and less of the former, don’t you think?
Synthetic knowledge is proved by performance in the real world. To the extent one can justify the belief, and test it, and show that it performs in non-trivial ways, one has demonstrated knowledge.
If the proposition is just a matter of symbolic calculus (e.g. “2+2=4”), the knowledge is nothing more than validating the proposition as derived from the given rules or tautologies. If we say “all bachelors are unmarried”, and we “John is a bachelor”, we know, in the definitional sense, that John must be unmarried. Note that this is not attached to any real world state of affairs, as is - we would have to invoke observations from the real world that get applied to convert this into synthetic knowledge. Just as a statement, “John is a bachelor” produces the necessary implication (based on our definition of 'bachelor") that John is unmarried. Analytical knowledge.
Sure, which supports my complaint against the idea of a “tie” or the nullification of a question because “proof” is not a practical goal. “Proof” is a hint to the reader that red herrings lurk nearby; “proof” either for or against in some unassailable sense is a fiction. We work, instead, with models that are not vehicles for certainty or cosmic absolutes, but tools that perform or not to some degree.
If one says “proof” is the crucial standard, then no knowledge is available, since noone can prove nothin’. Which is a very good ‘scorched earth’ strategy for proponents of weak or frivolous ideas and models; it destroys the critical grounds for judging ideas and beliefs on their relative merits. If a 6,000 year old earth cannot be “proven false” – and it can’t, all we can do is acknowledge that all the available evidence thoroughly discredits that idea, and also acknowledge that a putatitve omnipotent god is by definition powerful enough to fool us with “ancient-earth” evidence, or even some applied “Last Tuesday-ism”/Omphalos shenanigans – then, why, young earth creationism is just as legit as any other idea!
Eureka!
Throw out the “proof” canard and the artificially high demands for unassailable certainty, and you have left a reasoning process that leaves all propositions somewhere short of ‘certain’ or ‘proved’, but yet able to be judged as performatively superior to others. We can’t be certain of an ancient earth, but that model absolute destroys a young earth model when tested against the evidence, for example. Similarly a “godless model” of the universe competes favorable in terms of parsimony and evidential consilience over a “godful model” of the universe.
Just because neither model can be “proved” does not mean they are thus somehow equals or at epistemic parity with each other.
Maybe you could tease that out, here, and show me/us what you mean. What is the “syllogism” or logical principle that applied and how was that illogical or fallacious, in your view?
-TS
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Touchstone
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You brought up the example of “disproving” that 2+2=5. That’s false in a trivial, tautological sense. It’s wrong by definition, rather than wrong as incompatible with the evidence, which is the sense invoked by the OP – God as an actual, real entity in the metaverse/universe. So you objected to a discussion happening in the context of real-world knowledge by pointing out that some statements can be definitively shown to be false. But that’s only because they are only trivially true in the first place.
So I was talking about the real world, where evidence obtains as the arbiter of what’s true and what is not, and you object by saying rules and definitions we set up artificially can be violated, and shown to be contrary to those rules. Well, yes, they can, but it’s not pertinent to epistemic question at hand. A ruse, a distraction using definitions as a proxy for statements about the real world, concepts about observations and the relationships and dynamics between them.
I hope my paragraph above was sufficiently clear, but just in case: I’m not objecting to the use of definitions, of course. That’s a ludicrous idea. Rather, “monkeying with definitions” meant offering examples of “definitionally true” or “definitionally false” statements as some kind of retort against my claim that a universal negative like “there is no God” as a statement about the real world defies exhaustive demonstration.
I was talking about the real world, and you saw fit to inject “well, we can show 2+2=5 is false”, which only indicates a deep misunderstanding of the epistemology at work here, or a bit of hand-waving distraction.
Yes, and that’s a profound point you are apparently still not getting hold of. Detached from observation and sense data, you can imagine/define things any way you’d like. The unreal/imaginary world is your oyster. But as soon as you have to account for real world evidence, definitions can’t save you. Labeling a deadly meteor heading on collision course with the earth won’t save you. It doesn’t matter what you call that thing, or how you define it or conceive of it – the meteor couldn’t care a whit for your definitions. It’s operating according to physics, not language.
Similarly, our labeling and conceptualization processes don’t reify or eliminate any God. God obtains, if it is a real, actual being, outside of and independent of whatever definitions or labels we might concoct. What establishes that for a reasoning mind, just like the reality of an inbound meteor, is the evidence and sense-data we have to go on that supports the proposition, or not.
But we don’t ‘already know that’, and I can’t think of a more politicized, prejudicial way to avoid seriously engaging what I’ve said on the merits than the way you’ve put it, here. Once again, you’re suggesting it doesn’t matter what opponents say or do, because “everybody knows” the system is rigged toward deception, and the opponents cannot be heard on the merits.
I invite you give a try to responding with some substance here. I think it will be much more interesting and product than just indulging yourself in political vamping.
Do you think showing “2+2=5” as false is analogous to showing “God exists is false”? Maybe we can start with that, and see how logical your objection was.
-TS
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donsnow
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Hi, Detales -
With the thought in mind, that there’s such a thing as too much analysis will shred the very thing being analysed, I accept the Synoptic Gospels as valid authentication of our Lord’s birth, ministry, miracles, death, burial, resurrection and ascension. So, we each have different views, here. I understand why for yours, and wanted to explain why, for mine. So, we don’t have to dwell on this.
Thanks for not throwing out Josephus. And, yes, it’s only hearsay…appreciate your not dismissing it out of hand.
This computer has WindowsXP, so I clicked where you directed me. Sure enough, “Check my spelling as I type” was enabled. It underlines with red, when I misspell a word, but it doesn’t provide a list of other spellings, from which to choose the correct one.
Whine, whine, complain, moan and groan.
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donsnow
Guest
Hi, Touchstone -
I’d like to step in, here.
Thank you.
Comparing Unicornists and a-Unicornists to theists and atheists acts, imho, like comparing oranges to apples. Unicorns are said to be killable. God and not-God are not killable.
Well, at least your second paragraph starts with comparing different theisms, which strikes me as comparing apples to apples. Then, you introduce science and its attendant fields of study. With that, comparing the different theisms to science et al is again comparing apples to oranges imho.
And, that’s the crux of the whole debate between atheists and theists, I think. You see, when reason and faith walked side by side, in amiable conversation, there were some who believed in no-God, but recognized faith at work in other than religion. (At that time, there was no evidence having been found for either atomism nor evolution, two ideas carried along by faith for millenia).
But, now, reason and faith no longer stroll together. Reason has been torn from faith. And, I submit that the result is unnatural and self-defeating.
Science nor reason cannot provide eternal life. Yet, we each have an immortal spark of something in our make-up. It’s there. This is where reason bereft of faith becomes self-defeating, imho.
That’s enough, of my point, for now.
QUOTE=Touchstone;6048777]This I cannot understand.
Are “Unicornists” and “a-Unicornists” at a respectful stalemate, too, with neither carrying the burden of proof for a claim?
Or, should we present “young earth creationism” and “hindu creation theology” alongside scientific cosmology, anthropology and biology because none of these are amenable to invincible certainty (ok, YECs have invincible certainty, but I mean justified certainty…)?
A ‘respectful stalemate’ is a prescription for intellectual nihilism, trending toward solipsism. For example, a young earth creationist is delighted to have a ‘stalemate’, as that is parity on the cheap with science; it has nothing to recommend it, is incoherent, ad-hoc, and foolish, and most importantly, utterly without any evidence that support its claims in a positive way. What a delight to achieve a stalemate with the enterprise of science. Like a child playing chess a grand master learning he can just declare a “tie” at any point before he’s in checkmate – Junior’s at parity with Kasparov, and doesn’t even need to know how to play!
This is a crucial bit of ground. If theism can declare a “stalemate”, just on the grounds that neither claim can be demonstrated with certainty, it’s Theism For the Win! It’s gotten out from any burdens of proof for its claims, and stands to be warranted belief, just as a brute idea, excused form the burdens reason places on our other beliefs as a qualification for embracing them.
There’s enormous apologetic value in that – see the young earth creationists forever suing for a stalemate, for ‘parity’, ‘parity’ which will preserve and protect it, and place it alongside science in the classroom, even.
But from a reasoning standpoint, it’s a basic failure of logic applied to claims about the real world. What we observe to work as a heuristic is the demand for evidential support for existential claims. If you tell me you own a car, I won’t ask for anything more than your claim in order to accept it. It’s a perfectly mundane claim. If you tell me you have a special custom Ferrari that can also fly you to the moon, I’d consider that a claim that needed some significant support in terms of evidence before I’d accept it.
But at the outset, I’d have to say, I don’t know you don’t have such a Ferrari, if that was your claim. Do you suppose we’d be at a ‘respectful stalemate’, so long as you could not substantiate your claim, and I couldn’t show you didn’t have one of those machines???
-TS
I’d like to step in, here.
Thank you.
Comparing Unicornists and a-Unicornists to theists and atheists acts, imho, like comparing oranges to apples. Unicorns are said to be killable. God and not-God are not killable.
Well, at least your second paragraph starts with comparing different theisms, which strikes me as comparing apples to apples. Then, you introduce science and its attendant fields of study. With that, comparing the different theisms to science et al is again comparing apples to oranges imho.
And, that’s the crux of the whole debate between atheists and theists, I think. You see, when reason and faith walked side by side, in amiable conversation, there were some who believed in no-God, but recognized faith at work in other than religion. (At that time, there was no evidence having been found for either atomism nor evolution, two ideas carried along by faith for millenia).
But, now, reason and faith no longer stroll together. Reason has been torn from faith. And, I submit that the result is unnatural and self-defeating.
Science nor reason cannot provide eternal life. Yet, we each have an immortal spark of something in our make-up. It’s there. This is where reason bereft of faith becomes self-defeating, imho.
That’s enough, of my point, for now.
QUOTE=Touchstone;6048777]This I cannot understand.
Are “Unicornists” and “a-Unicornists” at a respectful stalemate, too, with neither carrying the burden of proof for a claim?
Or, should we present “young earth creationism” and “hindu creation theology” alongside scientific cosmology, anthropology and biology because none of these are amenable to invincible certainty (ok, YECs have invincible certainty, but I mean justified certainty…)?
A ‘respectful stalemate’ is a prescription for intellectual nihilism, trending toward solipsism. For example, a young earth creationist is delighted to have a ‘stalemate’, as that is parity on the cheap with science; it has nothing to recommend it, is incoherent, ad-hoc, and foolish, and most importantly, utterly without any evidence that support its claims in a positive way. What a delight to achieve a stalemate with the enterprise of science. Like a child playing chess a grand master learning he can just declare a “tie” at any point before he’s in checkmate – Junior’s at parity with Kasparov, and doesn’t even need to know how to play!
This is a crucial bit of ground. If theism can declare a “stalemate”, just on the grounds that neither claim can be demonstrated with certainty, it’s Theism For the Win! It’s gotten out from any burdens of proof for its claims, and stands to be warranted belief, just as a brute idea, excused form the burdens reason places on our other beliefs as a qualification for embracing them.
There’s enormous apologetic value in that – see the young earth creationists forever suing for a stalemate, for ‘parity’, ‘parity’ which will preserve and protect it, and place it alongside science in the classroom, even.
But from a reasoning standpoint, it’s a basic failure of logic applied to claims about the real world. What we observe to work as a heuristic is the demand for evidential support for existential claims. If you tell me you own a car, I won’t ask for anything more than your claim in order to accept it. It’s a perfectly mundane claim. If you tell me you have a special custom Ferrari that can also fly you to the moon, I’d consider that a claim that needed some significant support in terms of evidence before I’d accept it.
But at the outset, I’d have to say, I don’t know you don’t have such a Ferrari, if that was your claim. Do you suppose we’d be at a ‘respectful stalemate’, so long as you could not substantiate your claim, and I couldn’t show you didn’t have one of those machines???
-TS
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Touchstone
Guest
Ok, Hi, nice to “meet” you.
OK, that’s definitely a difference between Unicorns and God, at least if we aren’t wondering about Immortable Unicorns (we aren’t, right?).
What do you see as the relevancy of that distinction, though. I agree it’s a difference. I don’t see (yet) where that makes any impact on the discussion, so far.
Let’s try to keep it very simple and basic, to start with then. We have this proposition:
God exists.
Without getting bogged down with debate about the ‘attributes of God’ yet, can we agree that this proposition is a statement about the real world? That is, the proposition is one that is subject to evidence and observation as the supporting justification for embracing such a belief?
At this point, I think we can avoid bickering about various flavors of theism and atheism and focus on just whether “God Exists” is a statement that is statement that is confirmed (or not) by evidence and observation of the world around us, as opposed to being confirmed by tautologies and definitions (e.g. I have an intuition that God logically must exist, ergo he exists!, etc.).
I think there’s something to that. The farther back we go, as man operates with less and less real knowledge, that means that there is far less chance of collision and contradiction between faith and reason. When reason doesn’t have much to say, there aren’t going to be many disputed faith claims. 2,000 years ago we had no clue about the physics and cosmological discoveries we have available to us today that indicate a billions-of-years-old earth, so ‘reason’ really had no objection to young earth claims in particular, beyond their superstitious basis. For all reason knew, the earth could have been young.
It’s only as reason starts to pile up knowledge upon knowledge, and acquire discovery upon discovery, that it gets uppity in thinking that Faith is, on many issues, a self-satisfied fool. Reason had no way to reject a “young earth” claim 2,000 years ago. Reason has a wealth of reasons to dismiss a “young earth” claim as utterly discredited, today. Reason and Faith on the “young earth” issue was possible when Reason was Ignorance. Today, with Reason slight more clued in than it was 2,000 years ago, the comity between Reason and Faith-in-young-earth is something more like enmity.
Both those assessments (unnatural and self-defeating) seem to beg the question as to the terms they use. Nothing seems more nature to me as a human than inquiry, the application of reason, and the striving toward knowledge, slowly growing out of barbaric superstitions and toward models that rely on a robust and accountable framework of reason and empiricism rather than religious credulity.
Would you say ignorance is the ‘natural’ we should cling to?
I understand. But reason is laying the axe to ideas much farther down the tree, at the roots. That is, reason cringes at statements like " we each have an immortal spark of something in our make-up" as a statement of knowledge. It’s an idea reason can take on provisionally and examine, but it doesn’t hold up, and looks like so much superstition under a critical, objective method of review.
I understand that “self-defeating” for you obtains from these beliefs, these presuppositions you are offering, and that you harbor. But I suggest reason militates against those starting points themselves.
-TS
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