I didn’t bother wading through 50+ pages of replies, so I don’t know what twists the conversation has taken. But anyway.
For the life of me I can’t see how a destiny of eternal torture for the majority of human beings is a necessary consequence of free will. As a determinist, I technically do not believe in free will in the sense that there is some power of - to put in terms of your usename - “mind over matter”. The mind IS matter. Still, that does not rid us of responsibility for our actions (an actual philosopher of determinism can explain why; I just see no reason to believe in free will on scientific grounds).
As I have already explained, this is not necessarily so. Morality is rationally justified in a naturalistic universe.
Yeah - that happens all the time.
Funny, but regardless of how reasonable an answer God may be, the idiocy of mankind leads us to invent appealing fictions to deny HimOn a lighter note, this reminds me of the part of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in which God “vanishes in a puff of logic” when he proves that he exists, since God values faith over belief that he exists based on reason, so he would never try to prove he exists in the first place. Which makes one wonder why God values faith so much anyway.
- His rude habit of not leaving a literal thumb print, at the end of the day. And, of course, the very nature of reality denies absolute knowledge for at least 99.9% of us.Well, I’m largely talking about the nature of things in the UK, since this is where both Candide and I reside
Yes, but the lesson of that story is that a faithful person should be prepared to do whatever God asks of him/her, even if it is horrendously evil.Yeah - that happens all the time.
It’s a bit like saying you’ll never have children for fear of them spontaneously combusting, but a bit less likely. You of course realise that the Christian God never actually fulfilled that demand? As for hell, well, it’s always up to us
“Appealing fictions”? Such as?Funny, but regardless of how reasonable an answer God may be, the idiocy of mankind leads us to invent appealing fictions to deny Him
Now I know you’re kidding. Bill Gates is not a “ruthless capitalist”. He has used his wealth in order to make significant differences in the world by helping those less fortunate. Have you heard his commencement speech at Harvard? He has a huge heart. Rich people are not necessarily immoral.
Maybe you will find out why one day.
You have every rational reason to believe that your rational mind is not synonymous with any object that is made up of individual non-rational atoms.
I see you like that idea; to bad that it doesn’t correspond to the reality of human experience, nobody has ever found a blue elephant in a human brain.
Assertions don’t count as rational arguments.
Pretending as if there are philosophers or a system of philosophy which has proven your point without demonstrating this to be the case is deception.
First, accepting the existence of an absolute objective being, an ultimate reality that is by nature objective eternal moral perfection which created all potential realities and sustains them in being, is required in-order for objective moral standards to exist.
Its a subjective moral system based on desires; whether collective or otherwise. It has nothing to do with the existence of an objective moral standard or objective moral truth.
Your right. Instead it appeals to the twisting of words and concepts in-order to present a false representation of objective moral values in-order to deceive people into thinking its something that it is not…
I see that not being a moral philosopher does not stop you from expressing what you think you know or would like to be the case.
I don’t think you want to know
I am wondering why you have taken what I have said out of context, and instead begun complaining about not having a direct experience of God. Back to the original context, as far as it being possible to rationally demonstrate the existence of God, the statement only applies to rational people who choose to approach reality as a rational object, rather than as an assumed free launch that popped out of absolutely nothing and exists for nothing else but the expression of their desires. If you are indeed a rational person, with a reasonable IQ and possessing the ability to think beyond your personal prejudices against Christianity, you will eventually come to understand why you should believe in the existence of God. If you don’t have the capacity to think rationally and thus find it difficult to understand why God must exist, if you are honest God will not judge you for your ignorance.
You haven’t explained anything; you just asserted the possibility. Why you would want others to explain themselves rationally when you are evidently happy with mere assertions, is beyond me.
Another assertion which you dare not give evidence for, because you have none.
Gee, isn’t that a convenient way of getting out of the responsibility that you have to defend your position!
Any neuroscientist can explain to you why dualism is a dubious position. By your logic, my body can’t be a male human body just because it is not composed entirely of “male” cells. Chemical reactions in the brain do produce thoughts. That is a fact, and I am sorry that you are too blinded by your speciesist hubris to accept it.
You don’t have to. That blue elephant that I may imagine in my thoughts doesn’t exist, but the chemicals that cause imaginative thought do exist, and I perceive those thoughts in my “mind” as a blue elephant. Just because you (or no other person) don’t understand how exactly naturalism can account for thought, it doesn’t mean anyone has any reason to think that there is an immaterial aspect to the mind. Time and time again, science is revealing the human mind to be nothing more than the product of chemical reactions. For instance, injuries to certain areas of the brain will prevent the injured person from accessing certain memories or thoughts, because those thoughts do not exist anymore. They require a functioning brain.
I can’t tell you how many times that thought crosses my mind as I debate Catholics!
I am not pretending. Ever heard of Daniel Dennet or Sam Harris? They are more than just spokesmen for “new atheism”; they are neuroscientists.
That is false for the same reason that it would be false to assert that there are no objectively good strategies for winning a game of chess just because there may not be any “absolute objective beings” to state such strategies. Morality is only meaningful as a concept insofar as it is a means to a certain end. Moral facts do not have to be as objective as mathematical facts to be considered binding on humans.
You still have provided no decent reason for me to consider Catholic morality an objective moral system, so I have no standard to go on that would tell me what you consider an objective moral system. An objective moral system is one that is true regardless of the opinions or preferences of any sentient beings, and desire utilitarianism is such a system. Regardless of whether I think murder is right or wrong, it is an objective fact that all people have desires-as-ends and desires-as-means that they want fulfilled and that motivate them do certain actions. The entire philosophy stems from that fact.
Again, this is true of the Catholic moral system.
Pot, meet kettle.
You’re right, I don’t want to know, because I know that your answer will be just as unsatisfactory as that of the numerous other Catholics I have consulted on this matter.
Congratulations, you have officially established yourself as an arrogant debater who is not worthy of my time because you have the hubris to assert that I not only have “personal prejudices against Christianity” - rather than decent logical objections - but also an inadequate IQ! Christian humility at work, everybody!
Will the hypocrisy never cease?
I did give evidence for it. You are just too blinded by your snobbery to give a care what a stupid atheist like me has to say.
But the randomness is what divides atheistic and theistic belief.MOM2 - excellent post (#963). You sound very knowledgable and it was well written too.
Benedictus2 - you raise some good points, ask some good questions (as always
Then please show that our perception of atheism (that we popped out of nothing) is indeed canard.
You got as good as you gave. In fact I gave you more than you deserved.
That depends on what you mean by dualism, and their disagreement is based on their philosophical world-view, not science. There is evidence in science which gives evidence for a correlation between the mind and brain; they work together. However, There is nothing in science that necessitates the idea that the mind and the brain are one and the same thing, and it is not reasonable to think that they are since they clearly are not.
That is a fallacious representation of my argument. Sexuality is an expression of information in correlation with the processes of bodily organs. We recognise a person as male in respect of that collective functionality. None of this requires for there to be individuals “male” atoms, since what makes a person male is produced and is accounted for by how atoms “behave” in correlation with objectively meaningful information. It does not require a fundamental change in the nature of the whole in relation to the nature of its parts in order to be what it is. Its mechanistic and teleological.
You enjoy to no end making assertions, and that’s probably because you cannot back it up. It depends on what you mean by “produce thoughts”. The brain evidently processes information and stores it. This information has a correlation with our conceptual thoughts. That is what science says. But you and every other wannabe atheist on the planet go a step further beyond the evidence by saying that the brain and rational self knowledge is the same thing in nature.
So now you are saying that your imagination doesn’t exist. Is that you professional understanding?
You cannot perceive absolutely nothing. Asserting something doesn’t make what you are saying any more rational then it was when you thought of it.
Nobody has ever found a physical blue elephant in a human brain. Concepts are evidently not physical
Science has never produced evidence that the mind is synonymous in nature to physical processes. Correlation or co-dependency is not the same as saying that the brain and the mind are the same thing. There is nothing about a process in and of itself that implies rationality. You are merely assuming that they are the same because of your commitment to naturalism; which has nothing to do with science.
The mind requires the brain in-order to process information. When a part of that processing unit is damaged, the brain loses its ability to access the information that the brain had stored. So what?
You seem to think that a Christian is of the opinion that a mind is not co-dependent on the brain in order to process information. I have never said that. I said that the brain is not synonymous in nature to the rational mind. There is a difference.
They also speak as philosophers of mind dedicated to atheism and the naturalist world-view which is intrinsic to a disbelief in God (even if they are too dishonest to admit it to themselves that they are doing philosophy and not science), and perhaps one day you will understand the difference.
Why do you keep asserting things without ever trying to produce a rational demonstration of your position? Oh i know, you don’t know what you are talking about.
I don’t care to give you any reason either cause I know what kind of person you are. If you cannot see that raping a small child is objectively wrong, and that therefore there is such a thing as an objective moral standard, there is not much hope for you.
Correct
false; since preference is a matter of desire.
So if I want to rape a small child then I have the objective moral right to do so because its my desire? You’re sick and so is your philosophy!!!
Experience is certainly required in order to know right and wrong, just like experience is required to know that there is a physical reality. Just like a truly objective physical reality exists regardless of your existence, so does moral truth exist regardless of your experience, opinion or subjectivity. It is always true that raping a small child is wrong, regardless of whether or not human beings know or care to know about it.
Moral law is an expression of Gods intrinsically perfect nature.
That is not the God that Catholics believe in, but I am sure that you enjoyed making that straw-man.
Why? Arbitrarily stringing words together will not help your case.
I don’t understand what you are saying here. Homosexuality is wrong because it contradicts our fundamental nature as sexual persons. True Sexuality, as an identity, begins with genda identity; not with attraction. In this respect, homosexuality is not a true expression of what we are insofar as we are men and women, and is in fact a disorder of what we are, because it does not fulfil the nature of being a man or a women. A part of being good, is to be true to your nature and to absolutely value your identity regardless of desire. To be absolutely true to what you are, the nature that God has given us, is what God asks of us because it is apart of Gods plan for the moral and existential fulfilment of the human race. To be true to you, is an act of honesty and gratitude. To do otherwise for the sake of attraction is selfish and thus it goes against Gods good plan and the fulfilment of humanity.
Gods nature is not arbitrary.
Bill Gates morally sound!!!
They clearly are. Your assertion that the mind is anything more than physical processes that we perceive as “thoughts” is baseless, because you have not demonstrated any evidence that this is so. Yours is an unfalsifiable hypothesis, just like the hypothesis of God in general. Therefore it is not scientific, but philosophical. If you are willing to admit that the only disagreement between us on this matter is philosophical, great.
I see no reason to think that this is so.
That is not necessarily what I am saying. I’m saying I know that the mind is purely physical, but there is no evidence to my knowledge that suggests the contrary.
You’re right. Strictly speaking, my imagination exists only as the physical parts that produce thoughts that I perceive as imaginary concepts. As far as I know, at least.So now you are saying that your imagination doesn’t exist. Is that you professional understanding?
“You cannot perceive absolutely nothing”? What? Do you mean that it is impossible to perceive things that don’t really exist? I disagree with that.
Right, because concepts don’t really exist. My concept of a blue elephant doesn’t exist based on the typical definition of existence - that which is composed of matter or energy.
My “commitment to naturalism” is justified, because everything we humans know about the universe confirms naturalism. Perhaps your inability to conceive of a naturalistic explanation for rationality is your own flaw, not the flaw of naturalism. Scientists are willing to admit that they don’t know everything. That does not mean that our ignorance is a justification for throwing naturalism out the window.
If that is the case, then how can you justify your belief that your mind lives on in the afterlife, if it is dependent on a physical brain?
Then the mind is no more immortal than the brain.
Means to what ends and whose ends? And why is it not necessary for moral facts to be objective?
Huh? And how does desire utilitarianism become true regardless of any preferences of any sensient beings? First, off what exactly do you mean by desire utilitarianism.
And how does that make it moral? Isn’t morality a case of the rightness or wrongness of something?
Subjective means that the moral system is designed by the person that is supposed to espouse and act out that morality.
How is that so?
Huh? Again, how is that so?
How about because it is not what He created sexuality for?
How is God’s nature arbitrary?
Okay, if the mind is purely physical then please prove it to be so. And I don’t mean the brain, but the mind. If you know, then you must have some empirical evidence to support this knowledge.
No it is not justified since not everything we know about the universe is not necessarily everything that can be known about the universe. For all we know, what we know about it is only 0.0002% of what can be known about the universe so what makes you so smug?
So therefore you are similarly flawed because your explanation for rationality does not explain rationality either.
How refreshing.
No. It simply means that one must not worship at naturalism and think that naturalism is it. The scientific method is useful and good, the ism is not.
Perhaps what MoM2 is saying is that the Mind uses the brain to express itself so long as that expression requires physical expression. So long as the physical body is alive then the mind needs the brain to communicate and to understand the physical world. But since in the after life, one has no need to communicate or sense the physical world, then it has not use for the brain.
You come to this conclusion because of your faulty understanding of what MoM2 meant or at least in what I think MoM2 meant. He can of course correct me on that one.
The fact that their naturalism is philosophical and not strictly scientific is as irrelevant as the fact that the claims of Christian apologists are philosophical and not scientific. That doesn’t make either of their philosophies false. The difference between the person who believes in an immaterial mind that exists outside the brain, and the person who believes that the mind is synonymous with the brain, is that the latter view is more consistent with our prior knowledge about the world. Let me ask you this: Do you believe that the hominids that evolved into homo sapiens had immaterial minds as well? What about the first mammals? the first amphibians? Where exactly do you draw the line here between “strictly physical being” and “body-soul being”?
Once again, look at the pot who’s calling the kettle black.
Pure intuition and emotion. You have no proof that this is so; you’re just appealing to emotions to make me look irrational, when you are the irrational one here. Morals do not have to be objective facts to be binding (though I do think that objective moral facts exist as much as objective rules by which one should play chess effectively).
This passage demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of desire utilitarianism. If you had actually researched the subject, you would realize that there is more to the philosophy than “if you desire to rape a child, go ahead”.
Prove that last statement, using Catholic moral philosophy.
What evidence do you have that God is “intrinsically perfect”? What does the even mean? To call God intrinsically perfect is to call God good, which is completely redundant. But if God is good simply because he is God, then why should I worship him? He didn’t do anything to deserve his status as “God”. He can order whatever he wants and be justified. This leads us to the Euthyphro Dilemma. I still have never heard a decent theistic response to that.
All baseless assertions! Prove to me that God could not have been any other way than he is now.
Don’t blame me if you are the one who can’t understand my obvious point. A lack of understanding on your part does not constitute a logical failure on mine.
This is absolute gibberish that demonstrates a failure on your part to understand my point. I was merely using homosexuality as an example. How is it that God must have a negative attitude towards “sins” and a positive attitude towards “virtues”? Why couldn’t God have been “begotten” (using the Nicene Creed’s words) with a positive attitude towards homosexuality, for example?
How is it not? You are the one making baseless assertions here! Prove your point!
I’m sorry, I meant to put a “do not” in front of “know” there.
Odd question.
It is very relevant because it is deceptive. It masquerades as scientific when it is not. It is pretentious.
True, but when science extends itself beyond its purview then we have a problem.
Prior knowledge of the world. Our prior knoweldge of the world is that is flat. Should we aim for consistency?
Let me ask you this: where do you draw the line between deciding to eat an animal - Cows okay monkeys not, human beings may be?
What makes them binding then?
How about you explain what the more is
You have clearly a profoundly impoverished understanding of Catholic theology. You have a caricature in your head.
How about because He is the Sum of All Goodness who created you out of Love?
If God is what we claim Him to be then “deserving his status” is about as illogical as you can get.
The Euthypro dilemma was actually posed about gods not God.
Another ridiculous demand - requiring natural proof for something that is supernatural.
I think MoM understands your obvious point and beyond. It is you who do not understand his obvious point because your understanding of Christian theology is minute to say the least.
And the same could be said of you. This profound lack of understanding on your part is precisely why you think there is a logical failure on MoM2 part.
Unless I misunderstand your question, I’d say that that is idiotic. If God’s nature depends on a reason-giver, then obviously he is not God and that the one who is God is this Reason Giver.