If you have no confidence in anything you believe to be true then why on Earth are you in a debate? Debating is a war between ideas, if you have no confidence in your ideas your the debate equivalent of the UN. This is another instance of your world view resulting in nihilism. What you stated is a paraphrase of the Nietzsche quote I posted. Who gave you the sponge to wipe away the horizon?
I was talkng of fundamental truths. Like for instance that time does not flow. Or that a photon senses all possible paths in the Universe in order to go straight. Or that spacetime bends like a rubber.
And how unreliable my intuition is. That does not entail that my arguments are based on my intuition, and what my senses say, only. They are not. Please, do not confuse rationality with sensorial or intuitional perception. I hope your arguments are not based on your intuition only.
Wait a minute, you did not qualify your statement, which was: I don't know. For what concerns me, I find your biblical arguments more convincing than the secular ones. Now your saying that only if you were a Christian you would find biblical arguments the most convincing.
Yes, sorry. i meant more convincing if you debate them with a Christian. For it would make no sense to use Biblical arguments to anyone who does not believe in the divinity of the Bible.
There are many ways to investigate the bible's divine origin. Miracles like being born again, over 2500 prophecies, the integrity of the authors concerning what can be verified, etc........
It is easy to write about a prophecy on a book, and its fulfillment in the same book. The same with miracles, of course.
But let's be honest. Even if all those miracles were possible, the rest is totally implausible. The twelve skeptical abut the first reports of Jesus return? C'mon. The whole narrative does not hold logical water.
No, it merely invalidates absolute certainty, not the inference to the best conclusion. The burden of faith is only the absence of a defeater, however my post's burden are to the best conclusion.
Best conclusions do not have any guarantee to be true, unless you define what you mean with best. Best for you? Or best for me? Especially if the inference is not necessary, in general.
Every time anyone acts with rational intention is an exception. I thought we went over this. If determinism were true intentionality shouldn't exist. The causal chain that leads to my wanting to buy a doughnut would not also allow my to make the hundreds of decisions necessary to go get a doughnut. There are literally trillions of examples of what determinism cannot explain. I know of few things as blatantly false as universal determinism. As for QM there are at least 10 possible mathematical models used to try and decipher it, lest I heard 5 were non-deterministic.
That is not what I asked. What I asked is: did your choice to wanting to buy a doughnut begin to exist?
The laws of physics are only one of the two necessary causes for certain events. Thermodynamics may explain why water boils, but to explain why the kettle is on the stove requires the choice I made to have some tea. Again we have been over this, many things (actually all things in the ultimate sense) require an agent as well as a mechanism.
Physics explains where the ball goes, it does not explain how I chose to kick it. When Newton discovered Newtonian physics he did not say look how great determinism is, he marveled at the wonder in God's lawful mechanisms. Natural laws are descriptive not prescriptive.
No Robin, the laws of physics dictate that the new position of the ball was inferrable by the prior physical state of the Universe. Much prior to your existence. That ball cannot be anywhere else than where you kicked it. There are no exceptions. There is no mysterious agency that introduces irreversibility or surprise in the process. None whatsoever. This is actually a rule all physical laws must obey to. Take a look at lesson one of Dr. Susskind internet course about the theoretical minimum from Stanford. No math in that introduction.
You said above that no exceptions to determinism exist, now your suggesting the use of non-determinist tools.
Yes, probability theory. Meaning: tools that treat things as if they were not deterministic. And if such tools can effectively represent ultimately deterministc things, then you cannot exclude a priori that the tool between your ears, that evolution gave you, is not doing the same.
Even if it has always existed, so that means that it still requires an explanation. If it existed before the universe began to exist then there is no natural explanation for it and thousands of other abstract concepts. If you include God then you have a perfectly adequate explanation for the existence of abstract concepts.
Are you planning to use logic to deduce the explanation of logical abstracta? Do all your other logical arguments to prove God assume God in the premise?
If that was so easy, why do you complicate your life with Kalam, Modal logic, ontological arguments, teleological arguments, etc. when you could simply say:
1) (either is X true or false) is true
2) ergo a God exists, for without Him I could not make that logical inference
Oops. I am not sure that would work either, without begging the question.
Anyway, all those arguments were ridiculously redundant and useless if you really believed to have strong evidence that all those miracles and prophecies in the Bible were true.
It would be like looking for phylosophical evidence of the existence of at least one generic cartoon hero, when you have already strong evidence that Batman exists. A waste of time, don't you think?
Ergo, you, and your fellow believers, attempts to use those complicated arguments intended to prove a generic God, prove to me that you are not so confident about the other evidence that a well specified kind of God already exists, after all.
I do not know the right word to use, maybe profound. The most common core beliefs humans like to affirm (or you could also say the top ten questions humanity has) include origins, destinations, equality, the sanctity of human life, the hierarchy of nature, moral values and duties, purpose, meaning, etc..... only exist or can only be answered if God exists. I don't care about the semantic labels you put on this it remains just as true.
Yes, I am sure that Apollo or the great Juju at the bottom of the sea are very profound conclusions about the existence of the Universe and those deep things. Fact is, your belief is not substantially different from theirs.
First of all most of the physicist and mathematicians for hundreds of years have looked for the unifying theory of everything. I think they call it the super unified theory or something similar. Second if you set out to explain the current state of affairs, you must appeal to a previous state of affairs, and keep going backwards until you wind up at the singularity but the singularity requires both a cause and an explanation but you have run out of nature. To ultimately explain everything else you must appeal to something that transcends nature (supernatural). You also cannot have a infinite regress of causation. You must eventually come to something that looks very much like the biblical God to account for everything else. As even C.S Lewis knew all to well, natural law explains how A leads to B, but first you must catch your A.
Singularity is a moniker for "what we do not know". That is what our theories do not cover, yet. So, I completely agree. The cause of "what we do not know" is God. And since without a macroscopic time context causes and effects are interchangeable, we could translate that into: the effect of what we do not know is God. Which looks more or less what you are saying.
God, the ultimate patch that covers our ignorance.
Exactly, that is why I am defending or positing that exact type of God, and it gets far deeper that human institutions which a God exactly like mine alone explains.
Cool. Unfortunately, you are begging the question by doing that. For, if I believed in a gay God who blesses gay parades, how would intend to make your case convincing to me?
You confusing epistemology and ontology. I am talking about the nature of whatever the purpose of creation is if God exists. I am not talking about how I perceive that purpose. I can spit out the biblical purpose for creation but what the specific purpose is, is not what I was talking about.
Begging the question, again. This is a bad habit of yours. You assume that there are ultimate purposes and meaning.
If I told you that Mickey Mouse is a true existing being in love with Swiss cheese, and you just don't see the truth of this because you confuse ontology with epistemology, would you find that convincing?
There exist no objective moral values and duties which exist simply because someone believes in them. They only exist if God actually exists. However for this context it does not matter whether he was talking about faith or God himself.
Again, you assume that they exist.
Well that is bizarre. First you need to identify which God your referring to. If it is the Christian God I would say choice 1.
Are you sure? That would entail that you prefer to live in a world where everybody, including you (yes, I said everybody), does not believe in an existing (Christian) God. What does that bring to you?
Christianity grows by the equivalent of the population of Nevada every year, and no mainstream faith I have ever heard is currently being persecuted as much as Christianity. The only thing people are not doing concerning Christianity is ignoring it. Those were pretty low ball claims for you to make. I gave you more credibility than that.
Come to Sweden. Nobody will persecute you. In the same way we do not persecute Kopimists, or Jediists. We take all of them equally seriously
Imagine, we do not even have a war on Christmas. Which would be completely inconceivable here. You could still enjoy those cute nativity scenes with baby Jesus, ok, together with some pagans goats, in public space and nobody will complain. Isn't that a dream not to see those posters from all those pesky atheists during the holydays season?
Caveat: your beliefs about abortion and gay marriages, possibly among other things, will not take you anywhere. But I make the safe assumption that rejecting your ideas is not the same as persecution. Or at least, I hope so.
Take a look to that youtube video of that Pastor from Georgia visiting Scandinavia. You will see that Christians here have nothing to fear, even if they are really fundamentalistic. True, they might laugh at you, but that is a whole lot better than being hanged, waterboarded, crucified, or whatever.
Don't you think so?
Ciao
- viole
