I never fail to be impressed with Stanford’s philosphy pages. They are really well-done, and I eagerly await all the additions they have outlined in the future.
So can we quit beating around the bush and take the bible as your theology and conception of supernatural?
**
I don’t have a faith in “Nogod”, whatever that is. Not believing in god is different from believing there is no god. If I see weird lights in the sky and every prosaic explanation I can come up with can be shown false, I am not justified in concluding that they were UFOs piloted by aliens from a distant planet. The only conclusion I can draw is that I don’t know what those lights were. In the case of god, not only has no one offered proof of what the “strange lights” are, but I haven’t even seen any “strange lights” to begin with. Is there a god? I don’t believe in one. I haven’t seen one. I haven’t seen anything that would lead me to conclude one.
My tendency for concluding that there is no god does not arise from faith. It arises from the fact that no argument, evidence, or proof has even remotely succeeded in establishing a god. Not to mention that his alleged earthly record is filled with inconsistencies and that he is logically inconsistent.
The god of the ontological proof does not prove the god you believe in. Being necessary in all possible worlds is not equivalent to creating the universe, creating life, appearing as a burning bush, being a trinity, or rewarding or punishing with heaven or hell, repsectively. None of the christian theology is backed up by the necessary existence of some being.
Look at the link you offered in another thread.
Here’s premise #1 and its justification:
“Necessary existence is the greatest possible form of existence…”
Here’s premise #2 and its justification:
So god can’t create a square circle, because that’s impossible. God can only be as great as possible. Why should we accept that existing in all possible worlds is possible? The justification given is that “necessary existence is the greatest possible form of existence because it is existence in all possible worlds.” The possibility of necessary existence is just being taken as a given.
You could argue that necessary existence is possible, though the article you provided hasn’t. You could say that, in agreement with Merriam-Webster, a being can be “something that actually exists”. You could then argue that “twoness”, that is the number two would exist in any possible world, so long as there is more than one thing in all possible worlds. So we might choose the empty set instead, that way in the possible world where nothing exists, the empty set will exist as well. But then the empty set will exist and that possible world will be impossible. Well, that’s going to get ugly. However, it doesn’t matter.
Suppose you can establish that some thing is able to exist in all possible worlds. That does not imply a god with any meaningful qualities. The proof is useless. It only proves that some entity, perhaps sentient, exists in all possible worlds. And that’s only if it can be proven that existence in all possible worlds is not itself impossible.
Since premise #1 is not acceptable as it stands, the argument, even if it is valid, is not sound. It proves nothing.
If premise #1 is acceptable, the argument is still meaningless because necessary existence is not theologically meaningful. You could quite literally be proving that the number 1 is god, because that may be the only thing that can possibly exist in all possible worlds. At no point does this argument establish your theology. In fact, since christian theology is logically inconsistent, it follows that the modal ontological argument proves the existence of a necessarily non-christian god!
I honestly can’t see what is so great about this modal argument. Graham Oppy, in his article Modal Theistic Arguments, originally published in Sophia, concludes that
Sorry, but the proof has no weight. I’m also sorry to have offended you with the use of the word superstitious. But what should I have used? I don’t see how religion is really much different from fear of the number thirteen, opening umbrellas indoors, astrology, or talking with the dead. There are lots of scientists who are religious. Seeing their religion as a supertition hardly makes them any less intelligent. And what’s wrong with taking religion on faith? That makes more sense to me, quite frankly. But to each his own. I would have thought someone who refers to Jesus’s teachings would have eschewed proofs simply because of the Doubting Thomas story.
Js_africanus wrote:
You can stop beating around the bush if you like, but I do not and never have taken the Bible as my theology. Some portions of the Gospels (mainly John) and a couple of portions of John’s letters, maybe, but certainly not the Bible as a whole. In fact, Kahlil Gibran’s Jesus the Son of Man is as meaningful or more so to my theology. My theology and conception of the supernatural is derived directly from teachings of the Holy Spirit. The epistemological connection is immediate, not mediate.
But that is not the case as I have already shown here. Unless you can refute this argument, as I stated it to Hawthorne, there is no difference between “not believing” and “believing not”:
The Doxastic Axiom states ~Bp -> B~Bp; that is, lack of belief that p is true implies belief in a lack of belief that p is true. You at least believe that you lack belief. Applying the preservation principle of neutral epistemologies, your belief in your lack of belief in p preserves your lack of belief in p. That’s why you behave as though ~p were true, since p -> Bp and therefore ~Bp -> ~p by modus tollens — lack of belief in p implies that p is false.
That contradicts what you just said. If you have concluded that there is Nogod, then you believe in Nogod.
Demonstrably false. It has succeeded fabulously with me and with billions of other people — in fact, with most of the people on the planet. Of course, that doesn’t make it true. But neither does your failure to establish what you consider to be sufficient evidence prove it false. You are merely denying the antecedant. You are saying that since God has not appeared to you, He must not exist. That is a fundamental logical fallacy.
Citing the editorial opinions of other materialists contributes nothing to your argument. All it is saying is that you have formed your opinions from the opinions of someone else.
Who said anything to the contrary? Ontology speaks only to the nature of existence. It does not speak to attributes or events. There is no pretense at describing God particulately.
I have given the proof of necessary existence existing in your offshoot thread. It is a common proof that you can find practically anywhere, including at the Stanford site, and that forms the very basis of S5 modality.
Again, existence in all possible worlds is not only not impossible, it is necessary. Otherwise, you couldn’t assign X to any value except a single value, such as 5. You couldn’t have algebra at all.
The quality of the existence covered by the proof is that it is ubiquitous. You seem merely to be expressing a frustration of vague origin having to do with thinking that you had swatted down Anselm’s ontological proof (and subsequent variants) only to find that when his third premise is corrected and restated properly, the proof holds. That is understandable. You were comfortable in dismissing it and had begun to sit on your laurels.
Uh huh. I don’t know why you’re bothering with stating that since you’ve already stated that, in your opinion, the conclusion itself is trivial. Why would it matter to you if every inference is true and the whole argument is not only valid but sound? Your mind is already made up and closed. There’s no point in even talking about premise #1.
You have not established that Christian theology is logically inconsistent. In fact, you have not established what Christian theology is. A link to editorials by atheists does not constitute proof of anything other than that atheists don’t believe in God.
And once again, the topic of this thread is materialism and faith. There is no attempt here to establish my theology.
And you quoted Oppy from the atheist site:
Well, good heavens! The entire deductive system of logic itself is petitio principii (question begging). That’s the nature of axiomatic systems. If they could prove their own axioms, they would not be consistent. (See Godel’s On Formally Undecidable Propositions.) In fact, the whole universe is question begging. You believe what your senses tell you, and yet your senses are themselves a part of the material universe.
I would recommend that you use what I use when I speak of Spiritus or Xeno or Sentient: we have reviewed the same data and have come to different conclusions. If you must call me something, call me reasonable. Believe it or not, it is possible to hold an opinion or viewpoint different from yours that is reasonably held.
Lib, I’ve had enough of your attitude. You’re perpetually offended by the slightest remark, yet can’t seem to shake your arrogant and condescending tone. If you want to believe that existing in imaginary worlds qualifies as a meaningful definition of a god, so be it. If you want to argue on an axiomatic system that you haven’t bothered to connect to the real world, fine. If you want to fall for the Swedish Civil Defense Paradox, well it’s your dime. If you want to dismiss the arguments of published professional philosophers of religion as “materialistic editorials”, that’s your right.
I won’t be bothering with you anymore.
Incredible. I have cited professional atheist philosophers who have said that the modal ontological argument is sound. I only dismissed your atheist cites when they dealt with Christian theology. It is ridiculous to use them as authorities on that. I addressed Oppy’s remark directly.
I have no idea why you consider my “tone” to be arrogant and condescending especially since I have repeatedly requested nothing more than equality of integrity between the two of us. Since this is the written word, any “tone” is supplied by the reader. Jesus was right. People do find exactly what it is they search for.
A sound argument isn’t necessarily meaningful.
You’re claiming that your beliefs are derived directly from the teachings of the Holy Spirit?
You reject the Bible (and other traditional theological works) but claim that billions of people accept your position?
And you keep insisting that things can exist in possible worlds. The concept of possibility does not imply existence.
The “tone” of speech has as much to do with word choice and conceptualization as acoustics, and is the entirety of implied meaning when in writing.
Can’t you perceive your own arrogance?
Sorry, I’m late in replying to your post Lib. I was at a wedding in the bush.
I don’t deny what you say about the “Doxastic Axiom”, but I do deny that it captures what I meant by belief in my earlier posts. Furthermore, I think it is not what you must have meant in your OP:
When I make a guess or a stab or a judgement or return a verdict of not proven, I express something less than a belief, or at least less than a belief with conviction. Tritely, I don’t believe in life after death, but I believe there is no tooth fairy.
I think that the possibility of slippage between terms in everyday use and their use as terms of art in a discipline is something that can lead to misunderstanding.
I freely admit - as I hope my earlier posts suggest - that at the boundaries of what I think I can comprehend my intellectual and decision-making procedures are suspect. I don’t pretend that my rationality is unbounded. The work of serious philosophers may shed light on these matters. But I don’t expect answers, I expect provocative results which will make me examine the axioms for what is lurking unexpectedly behind concepts previously thought to be well-understood.
Who can begrudge a man such a quest for knowledge and understanding? Though we differ quite much in how we look at many things, we are bretheren in that we both continue to look. I’m proud to call you a peer, Hawthorne. As you know, I have learned much from you. It was you whose compelling argument caused me to re-examine my understanding of macroeconomics. I love walking the path of learning with men like you. Thanks for sharing your views in this thread.
I find it incredibly doubtful that you do not give serious weight to possibility all throughout your day, and in fact that your primary concerns are ever about actual events and things, rather than considerations of possible events and things.
Frankly, I would imagine the English word “possible” is a real good start. If you want more, I would argue that the testing of theories is a much better one. Possibility plays a huge role in all human endeavors. I would be quite interested to hear your dismissal of it.
Granted, many of us here have been around that Mulberry bush with Lib regarding modalities and their interpretations, but I am not going to casually dismiss possibility as having no weight worth mentioning.
So bother with me, js_africanus.
Excessive bolding aside, I won’t have guaranteed computer access until Wednesday night. Any delays in response are due to that.
I guess I’m not sure what you’re saying here. A quick glance at my profile should assuage any fears that I don’t spend an unhealthy amount of time pondering and hoping for a world that has unfolded in a fashion at least slightly different from our own. Yet I don’t see how those worlds would be possible. What’s done is done. If X happened in 1950 instead of Y, the world would be different, but we can’t exchange X for Y, so that world isn’t possible.
Inasmuch as free will exists, multiple future worlds are possible. I certainly think about those. I think about how much better it would be if the anti-free traders would see the error of their cause. Or if the lotto would rack up to half-a-billion dollars and I would win it. Or that I might get a good job. Or any of the other more-or-less infinite ways the world can unfold. While there is a probabilistic potential for those possibilities to exist, they do not, and, at the appropriate time, only one will obtain.
What other types of possibilities should I be considering? What other possibilities are extant right now?
I didn’t think I did. It’s a tight argument and it took me quite a bit of time to really consider it. At first it seemed like an attempt to produce god by way of logical fiat, much like the older ontological arguments. However, I am familiar with existence proofs and if a median voter can be proven, then why not something else? I offered most of my reasonings, I had to abandon a few of them because they were clearly losing, and over all, I don’t think the rebuttals carried the day.
But why should be consider possibilities to exist?
I think we should consider the possibility that the concept of probability is merely an artifact of our ignorance.
As per the Empirical Philosophy thread, I forward the position that things which do not interact with us aren’t real to us. The concept of “alternate worlds” then becomes meaningless.
I dont see how this proves anything. It seems to me what you’re trying to show is that ~Bp->B~p. If you seriously think this is the case, I dare you to claim this is true for all p. I, personally, have no problem with ~Bp without B~p, in more instances than where p=existence of God.
**
where has js concluded that there is Nogod?
I’ve never concluded anything about Nogod, whatever that is.
I said that while I don’t believe in any god, I do tend to conclude there aren’t any because of what appears to be a paucity of evidence*. (Figuring that ghosts or gods or constellations that interfere with our lives should leave a pretty big footprint, so to speak, and assuming, perhaps incorrectly, that lack of predicted/expected evidence is itself evidentiary. Though I didn’t phrase it that way before.) I generally see that conclusion as quite provisional and not elevated to the point of belief, for lack of a better word. To put another way, while I’m generally in the “I don’t know one way or the other” stage, I’m leaning toward the “there’s nothing supernatural out there” postion.
I can’t tell you off hand where I wrote it, though it was in a single post.
*And some seeming contradictions in Christian theology.
I just have to point out that I love the Brain:Consciousness::God:Universe analogy, simply because I like to imagine what would happen if God got high.
On second thought, that concept should make us question the ability of our brains to establish logical order, in that we know that all the rules change when we mix up the chemicals in there, and who’s to say that our blend is right, or that we’ve ever experienced the correct blend. Logic is based on observed patterns, and goes on the assumption that things will continue in those observed patterns. But what if you’re observing for patterns with the wrong brain? Oww. Stupid philosophy.
LC
LC
There’s an old joke about this of which the punchline is, “Where did you think the duck-billed platypus came from?”
But yeah, “thinking” for humans is affected by blood and brain chemistry, fatigue, what we’re able to work with from sensory data – “Can you conceive of an absolutely empty universe?” “Yeah.” “What’s it look like?” “I can’t see anything in it – that’s the point.” “No, the point is that you can’t conceive of one, because your viewpoint was present in it for you to have visualized it, so it wasn’t absolutely empty.” – and lots of other stuff.
One of the things about God as many of us conceive Him is that He’s able to comprehend things as they really are – from Jupiter’s kilometer-wavelength radio-wave radiation to what is the big burden on the heart of the guy who walked by you at 8:03 yesterday morning with a smile on his face – and how to relieve that burden (in about three months, he’ll meet jarbaby’s best friend’s cousin, and she’ll be the medicine he needs).
Lib, I’ve been remiss in not sharing with you, and others, something I wrote a month ago, and used privately a few times. That something follows; I hope you like it:
I still don’t understand how there can be beauty in the view of a strict materialist. It can’t even be skin deep. It has only imagined existence. You are not beautiful until I see you. After that you can be beautiful even after you die, because I remember your beauty. But it isn’t real. It has no material reality. No force. Well, maybe one millihelen. Heck, maybe an entire Helen.
And what of the beauty of an entirely non-existent thing? Or the love of things that never were, but were loved no less for the lack of reality? There is no true freedom. Yet nations have raised up, and been thrown down for the love of freedom. Love? Love itself cannot be said to exist, in a material sense. It has no force, no substance. It is not real. But it can make the real world change. It can move objects, and throw down walls. Ich bin ein Berliner.
You don’t have to look all the way to God to find superstitions to sneer at. Loyalty, honor, and even the precious logic itself are not real. They have no substance, no force, and no existence save in the minds of those who believe in them. Why does one thing exist, which must exist only in the hearts of men, yet another thing cannot exist, because it must live there as well?
Minds? Show me these minds. I know no such thing as minds. Brain and brain, what is brain?
Tris
Beauty, honor, and loyalty all exist in the thoughts of thinking beings. If there were not thinking beings–which, so far as we yet know, means if there were no human beings–those things would not exist. On the other hand, electrons or rocks existed for billions of years before there were humans (yes, I know, no one called them electrons or rocks, but they were still there); if we all died tomorrow, even if there are no other thinking, language-using, symbol-assigning beings anywhere in the Universe, there would still be electrons and rocks.
No atheist would deny that God (and the gods and unicorns and fairies and Santa Claus) exists in the same sense as beauty or honor–or for that matter, Superman, the Starship Enterprise, Sherlock Holmes, or Horatio Hornblower–as something inside the minds of human beings. However, theists contend that God exists in the same way electrons or rocks exist–externally to us, and even if God had never made us or decided to annihilate us all tomorrow. At least, I thought that’s what theists contended.
Ludovic wrote:
I don’t know what advice to give you to help you avoid such random perceptions in the future, other than perhaps to read the lines themselves rather than the interstices.
Poly
A beautiful essay! Thank you.
Buck wrote:
That speaks to phenomenal and noumenal existence. Interestingly, whatever truth-value might be assigned to your argument is itself noumenal. The very point you’re making would not be true without a perceptive being and so is objectively moot unless, of course, noumenal existence is the reality and phenomenal existence is the illusion, in which case your point is objectively false — beauty and honor (just like the reasoning you used) exist in a real sense, while rocks and electrons are merely perceptions of electrochemical discharges in your brain.
In other words, since truth is noumenal, there is no way that both your argument is true and rocks are real.
A handy hint for those of us fighting above our weight:http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=noumenal
I agree with this bit:
but then I trail off a bit. Isn’t the “objectively” in “objectively moot” otiose [yes, it is my favorite word]?
Isn’t the point of this thread that the rocks might be real and the argument might be true but that materialists have no business making the argument?
On the other hand, will you grant us that in the absence of what we think is any case for any non-materialist world [i.e please take that on board for the purposes of argument], adopting a supposition of the prior and continuing existence of rocks is an understandable (sensible? reasonable?) “default assumption”? Whilst it is unjustified (since it’s unjustifiable), what would you have us do, absent a personal supernatural revelation?
The retort “but your stance leaves many - possibly important - questions unanswered” is not as such, to me, a criticism. I just don’t know enough to have a position. I’m not entirely comfortable that that leaves me acting as if I believe nothing immaterial exists, but that’s the way it seems to go.