I got into a huge, very heated debate with my Philosophy of Religion instructor tonight. We actually had to take a break and leave the room for about 15 minutes but everything is fine now. We talked one on one for a little over 2 hours after class but there was one thing we couldn’t quite reach common ground on.
She says to deny this argument is to give up reason and take away all meaning from my life. The argument goes as such:
[At this point I spend A LOT of time trying to draw Aristotle’s square of opposition in ASCII, only to fail, and head off to do it in mspaint]
Now if you’re familiar with the square, you know that what she’s trying to say is that some is eternal.
Again, she says if you disagree with this you give up reason and your life has no reason or meaning.
Or course, her answer, based on this logic, is to invent god. I already pointed out to her that that’s an assumption and gets you nowhere (who created god?) but that’s not what I’m asking about here. I’m asking if there is any logical or scientific refutation to this argument.
The teacher’s assertion was that if everything is temporary, life is meaningless?
Bertrand Russell said something much the same: Because the universe will end in the Big Crunch/heat death life is ultimately meaningless, and that any philosophy must be build on a firm foundation of unyielding despair. But I can’t find the exact quote right now (I did find this though when searching: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/features/2000/augustine1.html).
What’s wrong with saying something like: “My life has whatever purpose/meaning I choose to give it.”
Why does life have to have some kind of externally imposed purpose?
I don’t get the last implication of the ‘Nothing is eternal’ corner. How does the proposition there imply that being from non-being is impossible?
Interesting thread though, I’ve never seen that Aristotle square thing before.
I’ve never seen the square either, and it doesn’t make much sense to me.
Is this the same mixed-up teacher featured in a recent GQ (moved to GD) thread?
At any rate, I myself believe that something is eternal: the eternal laws of pattern and number, which are in no wise dependent on any physical instantiation.
Further, would it not seem that, even if we grant that reductionist materialism is correct, we occupy our own corner of space-time eternally? The past does not really cease to exist, only our perspective of the present does.
And isn’t the whole of space-time itself eternal, a solid unit, so to speak? Or perhaps the singularity of the Big Band was itself, in a way, eternal?
At least these examples of eternity seem so obvious to me that I cannot conceive of nothing being eternal. Hence I cannot offer a counterargument.
I’m not saying it’s nonsensical, but I think a lot of verbal content (ie. an explanation) would have to accompany it in order for the argument your teacher was making to be made.
I’m not a philosopher, and here’s hoping one comes along soon. However:
The square of opposites is a diagram illustrating four types of categorical statements and the implications for each if any one of them is true or false. It does not provide any mechanism for determining which is true, except that at least one particular statement is true and at least one universal statement is false.
Your instructor defined P but not S. Some what is/are eternal? Aristotelian analytics requires that S actually exist, though later versions dispense with this rule. If it turns out, for example, that disposable diapers and that orange dye they put in Chee-tos are eternal, and nothing else is, what does that say about the existence of God? That he looks like a traffic cone filled with baby poop?
If you postulate an eternal being(s) that we cannot experience, why not an entire universe full of eternal things that we simply experience for relatively brief intervals? What happens to reason and meaningfulness if the universal affirmative is true and everything is eternal?
If I am to believe that either some things are eternal or there is no such thing as reason or meaning, I’ll need something besides your instructor’s word for it. I assert that the postulate “some S is eternal” without defining S defies reason or meaning. Heck, as a thought experiment, substitute any adjective – beautiful, wise, choco-licious, for “eternal” in her argument and it makes as much sense. Why does reason exclude the temporal?
Everything is eternal. Matter can’t be created or destroyed. E=mc2. Given this, do we now need to prove some things are not eternal to demonstrate the existence of God?
The Aristotelian square implies that reason still does exist outside the particular affirmative. If it did not, her argument based on the square is invalid to begin with. That’s sophistry, but it’s not nearly as bad as her leaps and bounds.
The Aristotelian square has nothing to do with her argument, which is, we need to postulate God to find reason and meaning in our lives. Her counter for the millions of counterexamples living meaningful, reasoned, agnostic lives is sure to be that they simply call God by the wrong name – metaphysics, for example, or pornography, whatever gives life meaning is God, at which point she’s defined her terms so broadly as to be meaningless.
Or just cheerfully agree that life is meaningless and chaotic. I mean, I believe in God, but people who try to logically prove that which is explicit about depending on faith make my head hurt.
How (in as simple terms as possible) is ‘Being from non-being is impossible’ implied by ‘Nothing is eternal’? - Am I even understanding the meaning of this sentence properly? It sounds like it is saying that something can’t begin to ‘be’, which seems contrary to the two statements directly above it (‘All had a beginning’ and ‘All came into being’).
It’s been years since I’ve taken a philosophy class so bear with me with this question…
Why is purpose needed for something to be eternal? (Which goes down the hole even further to ask, why is purpose needed at all? as GSV pointed out earlier.)
It seems like two seperate arguments that you’d have to require bases for both and then build up a philosophy from. Or at least say this is what my philosophy is based on (a false premise or at least a debatable one).
Moreover, there are temporary things with beginnings and ends that have a lot of purpose. For one example, The Bible. It begins in Genesis and ends in Revelations and for some that has a lot of purpose in their lives. Hmm, kind of a bad example there.
(I feel like I really should have used the “talking out of my ass” brackets here)
What exactly is the argument? The four corners of the square are inclusive: Either all things, some things, or no things are eternal; however, if you can provide a state that is neither eternal nor transient, you can claim that she is making a false dichotomy.
The graph per se isn’t an argument at all, it’s more of a tautology, I guess. It can’t be false. A fellow once said of Joe McCarthey, “If he was 40% wrong, then he was 60% right.” True, but that doesn’t prove McCarthey was right or wrong and does nothing more than suggest that I can’t subtract 40 from 100.
So, if in reality the “Nothing is Eternal” corner obtains, then nothing has meaning. Why? That’s not an argument! Why is it that if nothing is eternal, then nothing has meaning? That linkage is not obvious to me at all and there should be an actual argument in between the premise and the conclusion.
So, here’s what I’m seeing: You prof. states a tautology, and says that if one possible event in the tautology obtains, then nothing has any meaning. You simply cannot counter such an “argument” because there is no argument to counter.
With all due respect, I can’t help but think that you either are missing the point, or didn’t make the leap she was hoping she could lead you to. As an example of the first case, she may have been using an extant argument to explain logical concepts such as sub-contraries, etc., but by miscommunication of some sort the message you heard was that if nothing is eternal, then nothing has meaning. In the other case, perhaps she was leading you to the realization that this square was really a red herring (sp?) to distract you from the fact that she had no actual argument for her conclusion, and the leap was, unfortunately, not made. (I’ve had many such experiences from both sides of the exercise.)
As was mentioned above, a fuller explanation of what she was going on about might be helpful.
Funny thing, AFAICR on the Day the universe changed, James Burke used the triangle to show one of the points renaissance philosophers had about God:
Essentially, not even God can change the eternal rules of the triangle (trigonometry) Ergo, there goes God’s omnipotence. In other words, god (if he/she/it exists) is also bound and limited to the laws of this universe. The wise men of the renaissance were finding more rules than chaos, (or finding explanations for things that officially were mysterious in their lifetime) so god was in essence fading out, or he is not much of a factor, or it doesn’t exist.
Well, the argument goes something like this: Matter is not eternal.
What is eternal is independent, self-existing, self-maintaining, and self-explaining.
If matter were eternal it would be self-maintaining.
Matter is not self-maintaining.
Therefore matter is not eternal.
Reasons for the minor premise (Matter is not self-maintaining):
i. In general (the universe is entropic - tends to randomness and sameness)
ii. In its parts (the stars will burn out)
The sun is finite
The sun is giving off heat
Therefore the sun will burn out
iii. As a whole (the big bang cannot occur again)
There is not enough mass (it needs nine times as much mass for gravity to pull it back in)
The force in will equal the force out (at some point in the process of oscillation)
The theory of a change from a true vacuum (no matter and no energy) to a false vacuum (no matter) involves an appeal to being coming into existence from non-being, which is impossible.
There must be something eternal
i. Contradictory statements cannot both be true and both be false at the same time and in the same respect.
ii. A self-contradictory statement cannot be true (there are no square-circles)
iii. The contradiction of ‘some is eternal’ is ‘none is eternal’
iv. ‘None is eternal’ implies a contradiction since it implies:
a. all is temporal, which implies
b. all had a beginning, which implies
c. all came into being, which implies
d. all came into being from non-being
v. Being from non-being cannot be true, so d, c, b, and a, and the original iv ‘none is eternal’ cannot be true, since they all mean the same thing.
vi. So the contradictory of iv, ‘some is eternal’, must be true.
So she’s saying something is eternal, and it’s not matter. Does that answer your question Mangetout?
It sounds like her premise is that being cannot come from nothingness, which implies that something must be eternal. The way you wrote it makes it sound that you can derive that being cannot come from nothingness from the premise that nothing is eternal. Your description of her argument for this sounds like the first cause argument (and I assume the next step is to say that the eternal thing is god.)
What I don’t get is this. Say that something (an atom, a steel ball, whatever) is eternal in the positive time direction. Why does this give a meaning to life? If the steady bang theory were true, then all matter would be eternal, but I still don’t see how this gives meaning to life. If it were true, all information would be lost in the crunch, so it would be effectively equivalent to things not being eternal.
That’s not what she’s saying. She says reason gives us meaning and makes us human. To give up reason is to give up meaning. To deny this argument is to give up reason.
I don’t necessarily agree with her argument, partly because I’m not too keen on the word impossible, and partly for other reasons, but she says this is an appeal to ignorance and my life has no meaning.
The requirement that life must have “meaning” (whatever that is), and the connection thereof to “reason” (whatever that is), is an artificial imposition by the instructor.
Seems to me that she’s trying to say that “meaning” is necessary, and therefore (as an abstraction) eternal. In other words, she’s proving her point by (implied) definition.
Now, if she can say what exactly meaning is, well, she gets a cookie.
:mad:
