Atheism/Existence of God Debates (Please Read OP)

CerebralCortex

Fanny Cradock wrote: »

Rationalists don't argue. They conduct emotionally detached "inter-atheist dialogue".

The fifth virtue of rationality is argument, so sayeth the CC.

Morbert

CerebralCortex wrote: »

I'm not assuming a temporal dimension. In fact I fail to see how it has any relevance to omniscience?

What do you mean by "relevance to omniscience"?

CerebralCortex

Morbert wrote: »

What do you mean by "relevance to omniscience"?

Are time and omniscience inextricable?

Morbert

CerebralCortex wrote: »

Are time and omniscience inextricable?

No

CerebralCortex

Morbert wrote: »

No

I agree.

Turtwig

Those crafty Christians. This was meant to be thread with Christians arguing discussing their views with atheists. Not atheists debating their views with themselves. Well played...well played...

Morbert

I demand a pro-free-will-and-omniscience-are-consistent forum!

CerebralCortex

Morbert wrote: »

I demand a pro-free-will-and-omniscience-are-consistent forum!

I demand the opposite!

lmaopml

I think the jury is still out on this one, both sides have very interesting and convincing arguements ( This topic goes back milennia) It causes some heated discussion in the Christian domain too, not everybody agrees we have free will, but 'justice' and how we perceive 'justice' is warranted in an ethical sense demands at the very least modicum of it....indeed our very perception too, otherwise we are ALL irrational.

....so it's worth talking about whether you are atheist or no..:)

ISAW

CerebralCortex wrote: »

You're not going far enough back up the chain to realise the paradox ISAW. I wonder did you ever watch this video and what you though of it?

How does it show knowing the future is a logical contradiction of free will?

ISAW

-JammyDodger- wrote: »

It seems as if there's a paradox in there somewhere. I just can't put my finger on it.

You're given a choice between A and B. God knows that you're going to choose A. Supposedly you have free will, so you could choose either A or B. But, you can't really choose B, can you? If God knows which choice you're going to make, then free will seems nothing more than an illusion.

How so? If I know you are going to say "there is no God" how is knowing that in advance removing your free choice to believe or not?

lmaopml

It doesn't Isaw, it is a study of the 'brain'. It not only presumes that freewill is being proposed as a 'natural' characterisic of the brain, that can somehow be studied, but it also presumes that only everything can be arrived at through natural charactersistics. So it avoids the soul completely.

...the irony is that it is actually 'self' defeating.

ISAW

ISAW wrote: »

How so? If I know you are going to say "there is no God" how is knowing that in advance removing your free choice to believe or not?

You're getting a bit too complicated there: conflating my saying "there is no God" with my choice to believe or to not believe. Let's simplify the argument.

Let's say that you have foreknowledge--which cannot be wrong--that I'm going to choose option A from a choice of option A and option B. You know that I'm going to choose option A, yes? That means I couldn't choose option B, even if the choice was given to me; if I could somehow choose option B it would mean either your knowledge was wrong, or your knowledge was incomplete.

You have to get into the argument that Morbert and Wicknight have been having: that God's knowledge is contingent on our decision. So the argument becomes can an omniscient being's knowledge depend on factors he doesn't necessarily control. That's the argument which Morbert and Wick have been having. (If I haven't misunderstood it completely!)

CerebralCortex

ISAW wrote: »

How does it show knowing the future is a logical contradiction of free will?

Well with that video I was trying to address a different topic before we got rat holed. That brain and the mind are the same thing. I believe that the mind, brain and I are all the same thing and for a reason based in evidence.

CerebralCortex

lmaopml wrote: »

It doesn't Isaw, it is a study of the 'brain'. It not only presumes that freewill is being proposed as a 'natural' characterisic of the brain, that can somehow be studied, but it also presumes that only everything can be arrived at through natural charactersistics. So it avoids the soul completely.

...the irony is that it is actually 'self' defeating.

Irony how? Self defeating how?

CerebralCortex

-JammyDodger- wrote: »

You're getting a bit too complicated there: conflating my saying "there is no God" with my choice to believe or to not believe. Let's simplify the argument.

Let's say that you have foreknowledge--which cannot be wrong--that I'm going to choose option A from a choice of option A and option B. You know that I'm going to choose option A, yes? That means I couldn't choose option B, even if the choice was given to me; if I could somehow choose option B it would mean either your knowledge was wrong, or your knowledge was incomplete.

You have to get into the argument that Morbert and Wicknight have been having: that God's knowledge is contingent on our decision. So the argument becomes can an omniscient being's knowledge depend on factors he doesn't necessarily control. That's the argument which Morbert and Wick have been having. (If I haven't misunderstood it completely!)

Which would mean he is not omnipotent or omniscient further compounding the illogic of the God posited by Xtianity.

lmaopml

CerebralCortex wrote: »

Irony how? Self defeating how?

How can you condemn somebody and support law order and society without acknowledging free will? Where is 'justice'? Is there a 'justice' to speak of?

CerebralCortex

lmaopml wrote: »

How can you condemn somebody and support law order and society without acknowledging free will? Where is 'justice'? Is there a 'justice' to speak of?

That's an appeal to consequences. Reality exists regardless of your desires.

ISAW

Wicknight wrote: »

It is not absolutely true. To be absolutely true requires something to compare it to, it requires objective standard.

But something may be compared to something else and be relative

The only truth is that it is absolutely my moral opinion which I apply absolutely.

As I already said - subjective/objective where the morals come from

relativist/absolute how they are applied.

Let us take your definition above of "absolute" = applying in all cases.

I asked you to provide an example where you would differ from Christians.
You provided the example of sex outside marriage.

Are you saying that sex outside marriage is acceptable in all cases?
I am not suggesting "sex" being "legally permissible sex between consenting adults" and not what the State would regard as abusive.
Do you think that if adults have sex like that outside marriage that it is always acceptable i.e it is an "absolute" by your definition and subjective because you believe it to be right and not wrong?

By the way when you apply your subjective morals to all people and claim this is what "absolute" means ( I on the other hand claim that is just bigotry) how do you know the difference between objective and absolute?

I would argue that objective measurements are those agreed with other people, or having several fixed points, and not dependent on one's view alone. So objective scales are by their nature absolute. Ones depending on a strictly personal point of view or single points are relative scales.

ISAW

Malty_T wrote: »

Something I've been meaning to ask now with ages. ISAW what are your religious views, or lack of them?

Not for this thread

Turtwig

ISAW wrote: »

Not for this thread

It's a simple question which for some reason you always seem reluctant to answer? You're not Barrack Obama are you?

ISAW

CerebralCortex wrote: »

False dichotomy by misrepresentation.

Read the message to which you were replying please.

"moral principles are human constructs" = social constructivism = relativity

what dichotomy and what misrepresentation?

Essentially I think it's a fallacy to attribute omniscience and omnipotence to a being and then say we're responsible for anything which Christianity certainly does. It's a paradox to me.

Now "God can not be omnipotent omniscient and people have free will " is a false dichotomy.

"A being that knows its choices in advance has no free will, and therefore has no free will". By assuming what it is trying to prove, that point undermines the entire argument.
The truth value of some proposition cannot be used to infer that the same proposition is necessarily true.

There is a marked distinction between the statement "It is impossible (for God to know a future action to be true and for that action to not occur)" and the statement "If God knows that a future action is true, then it is impossible for that action to not occur."While the two statements may seem to say the same thing, they are not logically equivalent. The second sentence is false because it commits the modal fallacy of saying that a certain action is impossible, instead of saying that the two propositions (God knows a future action to be true, and that action does not occur) are jointly impossible. Simply asserting that God knows a future action does not make it impossible for that action not to occur. The confusion comes in mistaking a semantic relation between two events for a causal relation between two events.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/foreknow/#section6
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_free_will

ISAW

Malty_T wrote: »

It's a simple question which for some reason you always seem reluctant to answer? You're not Barrack Obama are you?

Can you prove i have never answered it? No? Well then your assertion is unproven. I have no interest in turning this thread into "What does ISAW believe" because the thread is about objective arguments about God.

If you have problems with a discussion do you always resort to attacking the person? Please keep your ad hominem to other fora and avoid mixing my comments on logic and objective standards with what I may or may not personally believe.

ISAW

CerebralCortex wrote: »

That's an appeal to consequences. Reality exists regardless of your desires.

It is an appeal to natural Law. Let me clarify earlier when you stated science studied the laws of nature as if that was the same thing. I was referring to natural Law as in objective moral standards as opposed to say the so called "laws" of physics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law
as opposed to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_law

Turtwig

Curious, the internet is full of anonymity and yet even here you revel in being mysterious. Also there was no ad hom attack in there.

I said
"You seem reluctant to answer"
I did not say
"You never answered the question"

Yet from your post you seem to be implying that I meant the latter. Which I did not. I was merely stating the observation that you always appear reluctant to answer the question. Since when is asking someone what is their own personal belief on a thread that debates atheism/free will/ethics/morality an attack?

Also, had you merely answered the question in one sentence tacked into another post we wouldn't be dragging this thread off topic. Anyways, if you want to keep you beliefs personal that's fine but please don't see it as an attack on you when someone just wants to know where you stand on an issue.

ISAW

CerebralCortex wrote: »

Well with that video I was trying to address a different topic before we got rat holed. That brain and the mind are the same thing. I believe that the mind, brain and I are all the same thing and for a reason based in evidence.

By "belief" your source puts instrumentalism empiricism and falsification into the mix
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism

Instrumentalism denies that theories are truth-evaluable; instead, they should be treated like a black box into which you feed observed data, and through which you produce observable predictions. This requires a distinction between theory and observation, and within each type a distinction between terms and statements.

But it draws strongly on pragmatism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatism

Bertrand Russell was especially known for his vituperative attacks on what he considered little more than epistemological relativism and short-sighted practicalism. Realists in general often could not fathom how pragmatists could seriously call themselves empirical or realist thinkers and thought pragmatist epistemology was only a disguised manifestation of idealism. (Hildebrand 2003)

Louis Menand argues[45] that during the Cold War, the intellectual life of the United States became dominated by ideologies. Since pragmatism seeks "to avoid the violence inherent in abstraction," it was not very popular at the time.

Neopragmatism as represented by Richard Rorty has been criticized as relativistic both by neoclassical pragmatists such as Susan Haack (Haack 1997) and by many analytic philosophers (Dennett 1998). Rorty's early analytical work, however, differs notably from his later work which some, including Rorty himself, consider to be closer to literary criticism than to philosophy - most criticism is aimed at this latter phase of Rorty's thought.

ISAW

Malty_T wrote: »

Curious, the internet is full of anonymity and yet even here you revel in being mysterious. Also there was no ad hom attack in there.

Claiming I "revel in being mysterious" is a personal comment and nothing to do with the thread!

I said
"You seem reluctant to answer"
I did not say
"You never answered the question"

Yet from your post you seem to be implying that I meant the latter. Which I did not.

So you accept I have answered the question before and you do not believe i never answered it. Why then are you asking it if you believe I have already answered it?

I was merely stating the observation that you always appear reluctant to answer the question.

I already answered that - this isn't about me and I don't want to go into a "what does ISAW believe" thread. since you believe I already have stated my beliefs elsewhere you can avoid hijacking this thread with that discussion.

Since when is asking someone what is their own personal belief on a thread that debates atheism/free will/ethics/morality an attack?

since the day discussion on objective subjects were turned into hijacking discussions and turning them into discussions about the other persons personal beliefs when the other person specifically pointed this out and stated they were not the subject of the thread and to go elsewhere for that.

Also, had you merely answered the question in one sentence tacked into another post we wouldn't be dragging this thread off topic.

WE aren't! YOU are!

Anyways, if you want to keep you beliefs personal that's fine but please don't see it as an attack on you when someone just wants to know where you stand on an issue.

Again, please deal with the objective issues at hand and the arguments i raise and the evidence i supply and if you want to question my personal beliefs or motivation go elsewhere for that and not in this thread.

Turtwig

ISAW wrote: »

Claiming I "revel in being mysterious" is a personal comment and nothing to do with the thread!

So you accept I have answered the question before and you do not believe i never answered it. Why then are you asking it if you believe I have already answered it?

Ok let's just think about this for a second.
My observation was that you always seem RELUCTANT to answer the question. At no point did I claim that you did answer the question. Nor am I now accepting that you answered the question. I don't know, hence why I asked you the question in the first place.

So let's recap.

Malty_T wrote: »

It's a simple question which for some reason you always seem reluctant to answer? You're not Barrack Obama are you?

Here is what I meant :
ISAW appears (note : I did not say "is" or any term that would convey I was certain) to always be reluctant to answer the question. Then I put in Barrack Obama in jest.

Here's what you replied.

ISAW wrote: »

Can you prove i have never answered it? No? Well then your assertion is unproven.

Here's what I think you meant.
Malty made the wild accusation that I never answered the question about my personal beliefs. I require Malty to prove this assertion. Of course he can't prove it, it's a ludicrous assertion to make!

Only, the thing is I never made such an assertion in the first place. So I replied :

Malty_T wrote: »

I said
"You seem reluctant to answer"
I did not say
"You never answered the question"

Yet from your post you seem to be implying that I meant the latter. Which I did not. I was merely stating the observation that you always appear reluctant to answer the question.

Here's what I meant :
I meant ISAW is reluctant to answer the question on his personal beliefs. I did not mean that he never answers the question on his personal beliefs. I do not know that. ISAW appears to think I meant the latter though. I didn't. I was merely stating my observation that he always seems reluctant to answer the question on his personal beliefs.

Here is what you replied with.

ISAW wrote: »

So you accept I have answered the question before and you do not believe i never answered it. Why then are you asking it if you believe I have already answered it?

Here is what I think you mean :

Malty accepted his assertion about ISAW never answering the question was wrong. So why did he ask question to ISAW in the first place? Weird...

The post you quoted claimed you made the wrong assertion. Yet you interpreted this as me acknowledging I falsely accused you of never answering the question. So to summarise :

I stated you always seem/appear reluctant to answer the question.
You accused me of accusing you of never answering the question.
I stated I never accused you of never answering the question and I restate my original observation.
You take that as me admitting I made the false accusation of you never answering the question.

Now, I know that the mods may be thinking this is all going a little off track, but there's something very subtle here. ISAW is missing the point of something so simple and it's a common characteristic in his posting : he doesn't read what others write; he just's out to prove them wrong, or catch them out on some mislabelling of some concept or another. I was once taught, and I firmly believe it, knowing the label or word doesn't matter, the word itself is arbitrary; it's knowing the concept that counts. If you get the term wrong you can easily correct that but the concept, oh no! that requires much more work but what's hardest of all is the communication : Communicating the concept to others and much more importantly grasping what concept they are speaking about to you.

How can you expect to talk about something complex, when you can't even listen to something so simple? Read my post again, read your reply, read it again, read your reply, hopefully someday you will realise that your initial assertion of me saying you never answered the beliefs questions never existed. Until you realise that, there's no point in anyone really posting to you. You frequently keep missing their respective points and proving them wrong in something they never actually claim.

Anyways, I'm done with this derailment, apologies for it but I had to point this out.

CerebralCortex

ISAW wrote: »

By "belief" your source puts instrumentalism empiricism and falsification into the mix
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism

Instrumentalism denies that theories are truth-evaluable; instead, they should be treated like a black box into which you feed observed data, and through which you produce observable predictions. This requires a distinction between theory and observation, and within each type a distinction between terms and statements.

But it draws strongly on pragmatism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatism

I'm expecting a yes or no answer here. Are you going to give me your opinion on the video or not?

Morbert

ISAW wrote: »

Morbert wrote:

Well it really depends on how you talk about morals. I believe morals are objective in the sense that, what is true under a given moral system, is true for everyone.

that is a form of moral relativism if the "given system" can change.

Not if we don't make any claim about whether or not the foundation of a moral system is true.

Morbert wrote:

Similarly, if a scientific theory makes accurate predictions, it does so for everybody. If a theorem is true under a given set of mathematical axioms, it is true for everybody.

But that isn't anything to do with science. It is because mathematics is a formal language - an extension of logic. It has to be true by definition.

I was using both mathematical theorems and scientific theories as separate examples of objective statements.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_nihilism

Fair enough but it still means one can't be a nihilist and believe in objective/absolute morals if they are human creations.

What we can't do is believe moral principle are natural laws. We don't.