Are you a truth seeker?

nozzferrahhtoo wrote: »

False equivalence fallacy there. You are assigning the word "purpose" to two entirely different things, and hoping your equating them will be simply missed under the carpet.

"Purpose" assumes a mind and intention. You can do that with a table, for we know the tablemaker and we know that the table was indeed made with purpose. But an acorn is just doing what it does, there is no indication of a mind or "purpose" behind it.

Basically you are equating "purpose" with anything that happens the way it happens as if they are the same thing. What something does, and what it was intended to do, are not the same thing. The acorn will make a tree because that is simply what it does. Your table will rot and decay because that is what it does. It's use as a table, that is US giving it "purpose". Not the universe, and not a god.

Put another way, you are mistaking the word "purpose" for the word "narrative".

1) I think that life must have a meaning. Aristotle would say everything has an end. The end of an acorn is to be an oak tree. The end of a table is to hold stuff up. If we think along these lines, since everything in the universe has an end (genuinely, show me something that doesn't), then logically, life must have an end too.

That assertion is baseless, we can not know it to be true. Whether or not infinity is possible is an open question. But you can not answer that question just by virtue of the fact it gives questions WE can not answer. You are using our limitations as humans as evidence for a conclusion you have simply made up. That is not logic, that is narrative and hubris. "Not possible" and "Not something I/we understand" are two entirely different things. You conflate them in order to define your god into existence.

You can define anything any way you want. You do not get to pretend that defining it into existence means it's exists. Further as great as god is, something even greater would be a being that can do all the things this god does, despite suffering the limitation of not existing. So by that definition a god that does not exist is even greater than a god that does because the god that does exist is hampered by a limitation the other is not.

See I can write meaningless word salad too.

nozzferrahhtoo wrote: »

Except yes it does. Read the definition again. An "end to be attained" infers intentionality. Intentionality infers a mind. The reason your conflation failed is there is intentionality behind a table, but not behind an acorn.

Changing your phrasing to use the word "end" does not bypass that. The conflation still fails. The table might have a "purpose" because we give it one, but the acorn does not. It is just doing what it does. The "end" of the table and the acorn is to rot away over time and entropy. The "holding things up" is a narrative a human mind puts on it, and an intentional use it is put to.

Two very different things.

but as usual, Aristotle used it in a more specific and subtle sense—the inherent purpose of each thing, the ultimate reason for each thing being the way it is, whether created that way by human beings or nature."

Again your statement was essentially that "X is impossible because it raises unanswerable questions". That is not logical thinking. Just because you/I/we can not answer a question, that does not mean the thing that caused the question is impossible. It just means that you/we/I can not answer the question.

As for the question of whether infinity - infinity is actually impossible or not however, you will have to take that up with a mathematician which neither of us appear to be. I just googled the question and none of the first 20 results suggested it was impossible however. In fact 13 of the 20 results all merely said that it is "undefined. Not impossible, undefined.

Again two very different things.

That remains irrelevant however for the same reason I gave before and you did not reply to. Merely defining something, whatever way you wish to define it, does not at all mean it exists. You can define god as the above if you wish, as something greater than which you can not conceive, but that does not mean the thing defined exists. Actually all the definition does is define the limitations on what you can conceive. Rather than define "god" it is defining human limitation. Which I am ok with.

However if you want to take up a debate with someone using that definition, then by all means do. I do not. My definition of "god" is "A non-human, intentional, intelligent, agent responsible for the creation and/or subsequent maintenance of our universe". And to use your words I think that is what is "generally meant by god".

And I have yet to see any evidence, least of all from you, that such an agent exists.

The "something can not come from nothing" argument you mention is also irrelevant to me because it contains an unverifiable assumption that "nothing" is the default and that therefore the "something" has to be explained or justified. For all we know the opposite is true, that the default is always that there would be "something" and you would have to justify the concept of there ever being "nothing". But this is not within the grasp of any human I know of, past, future, and certainly present.

Everything and anything that comes before me usually. Though I know where my limitations lie. I am relatively ignorant about mathematics and about law for example. I defer to my betters on those subjects for the most part

So you are bugging out of the conversation based on two things I never actually said?

To correct both of your misrepresentative straw men above what I ACTUALLY said was:

1) That I exist is the one thing I consider the ONLY axiom I can be "sure" of and

To that end I think the axiom of "I think, therefore I am" is the axiom I can be most certain about. Not 100%. But there is no axiom other than that one I have found that I can be most certain about. It therefore defines the extreme of my credibility continuum, and is the certainty against which every other claim I evaluate is measured.

So sure, I can "doubt my existence" but doing so is functionally irrelevant to me.

2) I never said something can come from nothing, what I said is that theists who moan about something from nothing have never proven there ever was, or even could be "nothing" in the first place.

What I am saying is, that the theists who pedal the "Something from nothing" narrative are merely assuming "nothing" is the default and therefore something must have come from nothing. And they use a god to explain that assumption and how it came to be.

The "something can not come from nothing" argument you mention is also irrelevant to me because it contains an unverifiable assumption that "nothing" is the default and that therefore the "something" has to be explained or justified. For all we know the opposite is true, that the default is always that there would be "something" and you would have to justify the concept of there ever being "nothing". But this is not within the grasp of any human I know of, past, future, and certainly present.

The first is that the figures in the link, including the ones you cited, appear to be plucked out of nowhere. The author did not show any of their workings. Where did the denominators come from?

The second is the top half over the denominator. When someone says that the probability of something happening is "1 in a billion" it sounds highly unlikely. The important question is.... how many times have we tried? The play set is important. The probability of winning the Irish Lotto is 1 in 10.7 million. So it is incredibly unlikely any person will win it. However if 5 million people play 2 or three times every week then in fact it is quite likely SOMEONE will win it. Similarly in a universe with countless billions of galaxies each with countless billions of planets..... the play set over the denominator becomes relatively meaningless.

The third is that it is backwards thinking. You are starting from a result and working backwards on the probability that that exact result might have occurred. Without seeing that any number of result sets could result in a sentient entity looking back marvelling at the probabilities of it's existence. You need to look up the phrases "Inverse Gambler Fallacy" and "carbon chauvinism" and "anthropic principle" to see how this nonsense has been rebutted multiple times before.

The fourth is the idea floated (pun intended) by Douglas Adams with his sentient puddle argument. The idea here is you imagine a puddle that becomes sentient. It marvels the the hole it finds itself in is amazingly JUST the right shape to hold the shape of the puddle. How remarkable.... thinks the puddle.... that this hole is exactly the shape it needs to be for me to fit it. The hole must have been formed intentionally by a designer to be this perfect! What the puddle fails to see is that the hole was not formed to fit it's shape.... but the puddle itself formed to fit the hole. Similarly while we sit on earth marvelling that the planet is JUST right to support life, so it must have been designed for our life..... we miss the idea of life evolving to fit the planet, not the other way around.