My hypothesis, based on a memetic understanding of religious thought: In order to survive, irrational religious thought benefits from crippling anything that could defeat it. Enemy number 1 would be logic itself. By corrupting logic; by putting it perfectly backwards, with 'god' as its basis; by inserting a primal, axiomatic contradiction at its core, from which anything can be 'proven', including 'god' itself; presuppositionalism has (by whatever means of mutation, it's not important what, though that's a worthy research topic) hit upon an adaptation where logic is so fundamentally corrupted and crippled, that the theists who fall prey to this meme are inherently prevented from applying logical thinking to get out of it. And so the meme thrives.

It's like an immunodeficiency virus of the mind. Cripple rational thought so that the meme can't be countered by rational thought itself. Maybe we should call it a rationodeficiency meme, an RM, and the human form of it would be HRM. And the syndrome it causes could be Acquired Rational Deficiency Syndrome, or ARDS. As in, "I'm not quite sure what to make of this new forum member. His latest post is just fu--wait a minute. Hrm... I think he's got ARDS."

We are desperately working on a vaccine. But in the meantime, we're trying out different therapies to deal with the symptoms, suppress the mental activity of the meme, and/or prevent the spread of it as best we can.

There is another aspect that Kapkao is missing, to distinguish between statements about objective reality, ie the existence and attributes of actual entities/objects, of the progress of events, etc, which don't raise any such issues, and statements which refer to knowledge itself, which are in a different category, and should be more carefully phrased, as riskng serious self-reference.

And of course, as you say, I was not specifically claiming absolute knowledge - to assume I was would mean that K completely missed the point of the rest of my post, and would have been explicitly in contradiction to what I stated in the quote itself.

But he has a point, only to the extent that statements about knowledge itself need to be examined more carefully than straightforward claims of what exists or not, etc. In this case, particularly since I was making claims of the practical impossibility of certainty in general, there really isn't a problem.

Loaded suggestion, and irrelevant.

How about this?

Insofar as we understand knowledge and knowing the concept of absolute knowledge is neither attainable, identifiable or necessary?

Unless of course you have something that you know absolutely that you'd like to share...

I think faster than I proofread. I als0 hit send faster than I proofread. My apologies and thanks.

Just a side note:

In contrast to the annoyingly pedantic mode of my previous post, here is how I attempted to say basically the same thing, without the pedantry:

"There is no paradox in Bob's post, only yours, because you put words into Bob's mouth. He didn't say "We absolutely know that...". Paradox resolved."

It's short, perhaps comes off with a bit of 'indignant cat', but it only took me 30 seconds to write, as opposed to several minutes. So, it's a trade-off, I would suggest.

Bob, I started using pragmatism around 2000 or so, but I was more vague about it then. Since then it has become more and more clear to me that it requires making predictions.

And when I finally got around to learning about Bayesian probability, my idea of pragmatism has begun to conform more and more to probability theory.

The only reason I don't formulate pragmatism as probability theory (don't even think I could if I tried), is that I treat it as 'more basic' than any culturally learned thing. If it were to depend on probability theory, I would be engaging in circular logic.

So, I would say that, yes, pragmatism is roughly, approximately, choosing a conceptual model (or hypothesis) that has the highest likelihood of (is best at, most useful for) matching/predicting reality. *

And I would also say that Bayesian probability is why pragmatism works in our reality. In other words, the success of Bayesian probability vindicates (not to say 'justifies' though) pragmatism.

I also have a quite straightforward argument for pragmatism based on evolution (of the brain). This would also be after-the-fact (a vindication, not justification) observation.

As for justifying pragmatism, I think the best way is by retortion, which is itself a pragmatic argument: We all have to use it anyway, and we all just have that ability (intuition), so we might as well use it. I'm not 100% sure it avoids circularity, but it's as close to self-bootstrapping as I've been able to work out so far. It's a 'good enough' argument, for me. Fewest assumptions, works fine for day to day life, nobody's got anything better that I know of, so I'm going with it.

* The reason I don't go with correspondence theory is that it seems circular to me. How do you know which model most closely 'corresponds to reality'? I don't think correspondence can self-bootstrap the way pragmatism can. So, I figure you start with self-bootstrapped pragmatism, and then you justify correspondence theory with pragmatism because it is useful. From that point on, the two are basically indistinguishable.

You missed the point.

How we individually interpret 'gravity' doesn't affect the nature of gravity. It behaves consistently. Because it behaves consistently, we can make accurate predictions.

It's these 'universal constants' that constrain and limit everything into only 1 possible outcome, no matter how many times you repeat the exact same experiment.

The 'absolute certainty' of the 'universal constants' is characterized as a 'logical' outcome.

 

Now WTF does this have to do with the 'mind' of baby Jesus?

 

 

The Laws of Logic are our descriptions of a couple of elementary aspects of reality, namely that it reality is subdividable into relatively consistently identifiable elements, and when we refer to any given entity A, we should be careful to distinguish it from those elements which it are not part of A.

That is all.

The concepts are stored in the chemical state of parts of the brain, but that does not mean they are chemicals, any more than the data stored in a computer chip is silicon.

Different chips, magnetic disks, printed text, can all store the same information, so different chemical reactions does not mean different information.

Not accepting the supernatural does not require excluding the immaterial, eg concepts, ideas, relationships, etc.

The laws of logic are a description of a way of perceiving the universe. The fact that the Universe changes does not mean that the laws must change, since they are by definition aspects of the universe which are common to, apply to, all the changing configutarions of the components of the Universe.The fact is that the Universe is a mix of random aspects and more ordered parts.

A god is totally unnecessary to explain any of this, and represents a grossly, wildy, unjustified assumption. Whereas the Laws of Logic are at the other extreme, an minimal set of assumptions to help us organize our thoughts about the Universe.

Yes we need to make basic assumptions about reality, but we do not need anything absolute or eternal or fixed, just adequately consistent and stable to allow us to go about our lives. We start with the most minimal. We also should be prepared to adjust them as we accumulate more observations and correlations between those observations.

It is entirely reasonable that our senses have a useful correlation with external reality, they do not need to be perfect.

OTOH even if there is a God, you have no way to know anything about such a being's attributes and motives. You are making stuff up.

In fact, if there really were a being of such power, we could have NO certain knowledge of anything, since such a being could change all laws at any time, at a whim.

I understand your definitions on the laws of logic and the role of contradiction. However, I am not questioning your definitions of the laws of logic Mr. Spence.  I am asking you how you account for them?  If they dont need to be accounted for then how can you be sure of anything?  Without accounting for these laws we are reduced to arbitrary circular assumptions.

Indeed an athiest may be quite comfortable using these immaterial laws in his naturalistic world view. Of this I have no doubt, but without account it is like a man arguing against the existance of air while breathing in to make his case.

 

You said, "A god is totally unnecessary to explain any of this, and represents a grossly, wildy, unjustified assumption." 

On the contrary, there is no other way to account for the laws of logic.  Logically and initially I must posit one.  Furthermore I have found no other supernature being that will work other than the Christian God.  Perhaps you can? I would also note that your sentence is also an arbitrary assumption.

 

You also said, "Yes we need to make basic assumptions about reality, but we do not need anything absolute or eternal or fixed, just adequately consistent and stable to allow us to go about our lives. "

But if the laws of logic are not absolute then why would we need to make basic assumptions in the first place?

 

Furthermore you say,"It is entirely reasonable that our senses have a useful correlation with external reality, they do not need to be perfect."    Why do you assume this and how can you know for certain?  Do our senses NEED to be accurate?

 

You said."OTOH even if there is a God, you have no way to know anything about such a being's attributes and motives. You are making stuff up."  I didnt make up the Bible, and it does give account of his attributes and motives.

 

Finally you say,"In fact, if there really were a being of such power, we could have NO certain knowledge of anything, since such a being could change all laws at any time, at a whim."        Interesting, why do you assume he would have whims?  This is not a problem for me since I start with the presupposition of the Christian God who gives accounts for his nature.

How do I account for the fact that I can identify or associate aspects of what I observe and imagine into distinct groups? And that to think coherently about them I must not conflate one 'entity' with another when they are composed of different bits of reality? Evolution would explain why we deevlop that ability, since it is clearly useful in understanding what is happening out there, what might be signs of a predator, what might be food, ets. I don't need to 'account' for anything - I find by trial and error which rules and guidelines 'work' best. We don't need to highly certain of anything for it be useful.

Or are you asking how do I account for the observation that reality is not a formless chaos? How do you account for a God, if you insist he exists? A non-chaotic reality, ie one with at least some consistency and order would be a pre-requisite for the existence of anything non-trivial in structure, such as a God thing.

Your example makes absolutely no sense. We are not arguing against the existence of abstract concepts, just against certain categories of them, such as those related to immaterial beings, which is really close to being a contradiction - an actual being is not an abstraction.

The existence of order and regularity, ie "Laws", seems to follow from reality being composed of a small number of types of fundamental particles, present in enormous numbers. such a reality also provides the element of randomness to drive versions of creative evolution that allow complex structures to form.

Many computer simulations show how a large number of identical elements following simple rules, such as Conway's game of "Life", can, left to themselves, genererate all kinds of interesting active structures. People have also produced self-replicating patterns. This all points to the idea that order and complex behaviour are emergent phenomena. Dennett does this in "Freedom Evolves".

No intervening intelligence required.

Even in your example, we don't have to be able to explain the existence of something to be able to use it. And a lack of a current detail explanation does not default to 'GodDidIt", since that is not an ultimate explanation unless you can explain God. And as long as we have a plausible framework for an emergent explanation, ie from something simpler, we have justification for not taking a non-emergent "explanation" seriously, with its built-in infinite regress problem.

No 'being' can account for the Laws of Logic. They are derived from the fact that Reality is not purely formless and chaotic.

Another incoherent question. Making basic assumptions is necessary starting point for any reasoning process. 'Absolutes' have nothing to do with it. I explained in what you quoted - reality merely has to be a minimal degree of consistency.

Again, irrelevant - we don't require certainty. You last question is again not reading what you just quoted -  they do not need to be perfect or highly accurate, merely sufficienrtly correlated with reality. Once we developed measuring instruments of all kinds, the requirement for accuracy in our physical senses dropped a lot further.

Someone did, and you still need to justify your assumption that whoever wrote those descriptions of what they believed to be the attributes of their imagined God had some real basis for those beliefs. The words in the Bible, of themselves, prove nothing.

I did not assume he would have whims, but you have no reason to be confident he would not.

Starting with such a presupposition is a logical fallacy, if you think it somehow gives you some certainty about what IS. All you are doing is picking one version of a belief system you have come across. Sort of like making a hypothesis, a speculation, a guess. Without actual empirical justification, it remains just that. You still need to demonstrate that it provides the best explanatory framework for what we experience in life.

In my experience over 50 years, the Bible is a massive fail. It is increasingly being shown to be highly inaccurate about claimed historical events, its moral/ethical 'rules' are mostly extremely questionable, in may cases deeply flawed. Nothing in it provides even strong evidence, let alone 'proof', of the claimed God. At best it reports a number of what were inexplicable happenings, inexplicable to the purported witnesses. Human history, right up to the present day, is replete with extraordinary claims, many of which have been shown to be now quite explicable in terms of what we now know of the failings of human senses, reasoning, and memory.

A presupposition is the LEAST certain basis for any further reasoning, in the absence of empirically verification.

Empirical reasoning does not lead to certainty about everything (apart from certain categories of statement such as "since at least one test of A has lead to B, A is not always followed by B", or "A can lead to B" ). But it does have a estimable degree of likelihood of being true, since it references reality beyond our fallible minds.

The only 'absolutes' we 'need' are the empirically determinable ones such the absolute zero of temperature,  the speed of light in a vacuum, and so on.

 

 

as rational or logical without discarding the entire apparatus of the Bible and Koran - based as they are on totally unsupported assertions - is an act of towering inconsistency. Do you believe in the bible based solely on its own authority?

Given you are a logician of extreme profundity, waka, how do you rationalise your belief in invisible beings that exist outside this space time? Or does the 'immateriality' of concepts of logic free you up to embrace any fairy story that drifts by?

 

 

All we need is a reality with a minmal level of consistent 'laws' or attriibutes, to be able to derive by observation the basics of coherent discourse, ie 'logic' of some form.

A God-style being would be just as dependent on reality having some basic stability and consistent attributes for it to exist. To claim 'God' as necessary for reality to have the basic properties necessary for His own existence is true circular fallacy. Yet another version of the fallacy of claiming God as necessary to create reality - not answering what created Him? Or the fallacy of the ontological argument claiming that everything needs a 'cause' and then positing a being that doesn't need a cause.

That basic level of order is the minimum requirement for a complex reality to emerge.

Claiming an 'absolute' of some form as a necessity for meaningful 'knowledge' is a total non-sequiter. The fallacy-ridden nature of your arguments are far stronger proof of their error than your naked claim that our ability to reason proves God.

On what absolute do you base your judgement of what is the 'absolute' we need for knowledge? Proof you have no basis for your 'knowledge'.

You have either an infinite regress or pure circularity by that approach. That is the failure of the medieval approach, which has been incorporated into follies such as Theology.

Whereas all we need for useful, practical, knowledge is that reality have some stability, soem consistency, which we can identify by trial-and-error, and build from there by taking our basic criterion for acceptable level of 'truth' to be the degree of consistency any new proposition has with everything else we have already identified.

Have you heard of 'iteration'? It is a repetitive process which can lead to a progressive refinement of knowledge, and the process of observation, hypothesis formulation, testing by new observations and or experiment, leading to confirmation of a successful hypothesis as a new theory, suggesting new areas to investigate and observe, and around we go again. 

We need to be able to detect when we are stuck in a possible blind alley, with progress stalled, in the circularity you allude to, suggesting it is time to step back and re-examine our assumptions, try different ideas. It's called a 'paradigm shift'. IOW, it is detectable and addressable, not an ultimate problem for empirical reasoning.

This process is completely incompatible with the idea of absolute knowledge, which is not to be confused with empirically discovered physical constants of nature.

We should be prepared to re-examine all our assumptions, including possible refinements of the 'laws' of logic. Which we have effectively done in going on to put inductive reasoning and probability-based arguments on a firm and rigorous footing, with the help of tools such as Bayes Theorem.

 

'Accounting for the Laws of Logic" only requires trial-and-error to establish what basic assumptions are needed to lead to consistent statements.

The fact that Reality as perceived lends itself to being able to identify different objects reasonably consistently, and that if we assume that A both exists and doesn't exist at the same time, we are lead to clearly erroneous conclusions, has zero dependence on whether or not an imagined supernatural exists or not. 

In fact the existence of any coherent non-trivial entity would itself be dependent on a Reality which was sufficiently ordered to allow the Laws of Logic to be applied to it.

God is a primitive, illogical, superstition.

 

 

No, you are the one with the fallacies.

We don't "test for certainty", we look for a degree of correlation, consistency, with all the other observations available to us. Reasoning is NOT "accounted for by the laws of logic". The Laws of Logic, as expressed are simply descriptions of the absolute minimum requirements to be able to discuss anything coherenly. Namely, that there are identifiably distinct entities in what we observe, which persist with sufficient stability to be registered in our memory as such, and be compared with other entities in our mind, and that there is a clear problem if our reasoning comes up with contradicting conclusions.

The Law of Identity only requires that the Universe not be either a total chaos or a uniform featureless fog. That is all taht is needed to account for that one.

The Law of Non-Contradiction becomes quickly obvious as soon as you try any kind of manipulation of data to draw some conclusion. That is all that is required to account for it. Reasoning does not actually depend on either, informal reasoning is simply associative, it doesn't really use logic as a discipline.

We don't require total certainty, merely degrees of correlation, of likelihood, of 'best fit' explanations. 

Accepting contradictions would make no sense. It would prevent any coherent conclusion. It does not need rocket science or theology to see this.

If your reasoning is showing that either of two mutually incompatible conclusions could be true, we don't need metaphysics or formal logic to realize we need more data, and to conclude simply that we have no basis on which to decide in the absence of more information.

Your argument itself depends on that simple observation.

The Laws of Logic are human formulations which encode the fundamental experience of trying to deduce conclusions from our observations.

The existence of a supernatural all-powerful entity would negate any confidence in any conclusions, since such an entity would be inherently beyond our comprehension, its ultimate motives and intent utterly inscrutable to us, able to completely change ALL 'laws' at its whim. We could have no ultimate certainty that any Laws would hold.

Only a reality in which some minimum basic coherence ant structure could support a complex universe. That implies the Laws of Logic.

Laws of such kind, and the Laws of Physics, only make sense as based on the fundamental structure of reality, not the existence or pronouncements of a magic being.

They are completely unlike human laws, which are promulgated to regulate society, which are the pronouncements of Authority. Theism seems to conflate these two very different kindo 'Law'. Legailstic law can be flouted, ignored.

Existential Laws cannot be so ignored. I cannot ignore the Law of Gravity. Having an argument lead to a contradiction immediately and incontrovertibly falsifies it. It is immediately obvious, at a level way more fundamental than 'reasoning', that I cannot simultaneously travel down two separate pathways.

Circularity and contradiction are directly observable problems when they crop up in any argument. They are not in any way dependent on anything outside the context.

FWIW, the traditional arguments claimed to 'prove' God are the biggest offenders against logical principles, because strict application of logic destroys their coherence, into circularity, infinite regress, naked assertions, etc.

It takes a deep commitment to belief in God above reason to 'justify' and devise special modes of logic and assumptions to skirt around the fundamental problems of Theology.

We can 'account for' the Laws of Logic.

Far more simply than your task, wkawaka, which would next be to 'account for' God.

 

Mr. Spence you said:

All we need is a reality with a minmal level of consistent 'laws' or attriibutes, to be able to derive by observation the basics of coherent discourse, ie 'logic' of some form.

First account for those laws then derive.

You also state:

A God-style being would be just as dependent on reality having some basic stability and consistent attributes for it to exist. To claim 'God' as necessary for reality to have the basic properties necessary for His own existence is true circular fallacy. Yet another version of the fallacy of claiming God as necessary to create reality - not answering what created Him? Or the fallacy of the ontological argument claiming that everything needs a 'cause' and then positing a being that doesn't need a cause.

That basic level of order is the minimum requirement for a complex reality to emerge.

Claiming an 'absolute' of some form as a necessity for meaningful 'knowledge' is a total non-sequiter. The fallacy-ridden nature of your arguments are far stronger proof of their error than your naked claim that our ability to reason proves God.

On what absolute do you base your judgement of what is the 'absolute' we need for knowledge? Proof you have no basis for your 'knowledge'.

You have either an infinite regress or pure circularity by that approach. That is the failure of the medieval approach, which has been incorporated into follies such as Theology

Eventually Mr. Spence all arguments reduce to a form of circularity.  z happens because of y which is caused by x due to w and so forth until we reach our ultimate authority or standard A.  Both sides must contend with this.  But once we reach point A, because it is an ultimate standard, you are simply left with no where else to go.  Nothing precedes it or else it wouldnt be an ultimate standard.  It is at this point that the ultimate standard must attest to itself.  Otherwise the circular argument reaches absudity.  There is no infinte regression nor have I made any such claims.

Then you say:

Whereas all we need for useful, practical, knowledge is that reality have some stability, soem consistency, which we can identify by trial-and-error, and build from there by taking our basic criterion for acceptable level of 'truth' to be the degree of consistency any new proposition has with everything else we have already identified.

The uniformity of nature argument is well known and a precondition of intelligibilty. We live our lives without giving thought to the uniformity of nature yet without it science is not possible. We all succumb to it without choice. By what rational can you say that tomorrow will be like yesterday and how do account for these laws?

 

 

 

There is no uniformity of nature that conforms always to a universal law. There is only an expectation that a past observation that led to an association between 2 things will occur again in the future. But there is no way we can judge that such things will always be the way they are and thus there is no absolute certainty that could be ascribed to a universal law. For that you'd have to know all the futures and this cannot be. Instead we have expectations based on the past. What you are doing by insisting there is a universal law underpinning the nature of all human reasoning is assuming your question is proven.  

Can you explain why you think that is?

This is like arguing that you cannot define a triangle having 3 sides unless you can 'account' for it.

What constitues 'having reason' in your opinion?
Are you basing these arguments of yours on the TAG argument? Like the law of indentity?
Isn't the law of identity the sound conclusion of what the argument for 'a' is?
Are you trying to say simply defining 'a' as not anything but 'a' is not 'rational' unless we can explain why that should be considered the best way of distinguishing 'a' as itself?

An explanation of the explanation is required, according to you?

How do you know this is the case? Are you claiming that we reach a point where there can be no more questions asked, or no more explanations that can be given?

Are you asserting that the law of identity is contingent, instead of necessarily so?
Is the reason why 'a' is 'a' and not 'not a' contingent instead of necessarily so?

I don't know how you think we got to this level of science and technology then, but I'm interested to hear how you claim we did.

The preconditions are in how we distinguish 1 thing from another. It isn't difficult. We label things and isolate them from each other so as not to mix them up. We do it everyday.

That's how we preserve 'identities'.

In your estimation, are the 'preconditions of intelligibility' just another way of labelling the law of identity and the law of non contradiction? Because I don't even know what you're talking about , nor do I think you know what you're talking about when you say that nothing we test, observe remember of see matters if we can't account for the laws of 'logic'.
These 'tests, observations etc, etc, matter 'plenty' in the context of 'for all intents and purposes'.

It appears that you're claiming that if something (a) cannot be attributed to something else (b) then (a) isn't useful, or worth considering. If that's what you're arguing, then I'd say the levels of science and technology we've achieved prove otherwise, using 'universal constants' that we can't attribute to something, or 'account for'.

I never argued that we won't find out that our observations were flawed, or innacurate. The salient point is that for 'all intents and purposes' they are accurate enough to make incredibly reliable predictions, and there's no reason to throw the baby out with thebath water in our methodology, because in practice our methods not only produce very strong yields, but they lead to better future methods. There's a strong 'snowball' effect, even when we find out we were wrong, it teaches us how to avoid errors in calculations and predictions by not repeating flaws in procedure.

Justifyibly so. We engineer and build things based on the stability and uniform nature of our reality. But that 'uniformity and stability' is not always linear and predictable. It has to be mapped out by testing, and which lead to complex equations needed to reconcile and properly scale how 'nature' behaves. The one place where this is very evident is in fluid dynamics. I've seen engineers and pilots who have lots of formal training in principles of flight arguing on forums that a bumble bee's flight defies the laws of physics, when it doesn't actually.

At this point, you're just droning on and on, and I don't think you even understood my statement.
You talked right past the statement of mine that you quoted. If you disagree with what I stated, explain why it's fallacious, instead of talking right past it.
 

I never argued for a knowledge without 'reason'. You're strawmanning. I explained that our degrees of certainty and accuracy are sufficient for 'all intents and purposes' because of how they're applicable. Just because things can fluctuate or deviate to varying degrees does not prevent us from 'knowing' things, or justifying why we adhere to determination levels of what we consider 'certainty', 'perfection', or 'absolute'.
Machinist blocks are considered 'absolutely, perfectly flat'. They are ground so flat and smooth that when you place one on top of another you can lift both of them by lifting the top one because of the vacuum between them. That far exceeds my personal needs for 'absolutely, perfectly flat', and I'm in aerospace level engineering.

1- Even if that were the case, it wouldn't matter to me. It's not a personal requirement of mine.
2-You haven't given an argument to support your assertion that demonstrates why I (or anyone) should believe what you say is true, or why anybody should concern themselves with this 'truth' even if it were true.

Wrong. Necessity dictates that it's not practical to use anything but the most stable platform to build from.

No. Knowledge is relative. Measurements are relative. It's relative to sample rate, bit depth, and non linearities, to use 'binary' terminology. By this token, everything we 'build', beit knowledge, or an aircraft, is based on a limited sample rate and bit depth.

This is how we function in our day to day lives, and the evidence of our level of science and technology at present demonstrates that in many instances we can eschew many 'bits' of knowledge and accuracy without sacrificing degrees of 'certainty'.
There used to be a saying in the aviation industry that once the drawings and plans for an aircraft weighed as much as the aircraft, it was good enough to fly. So, I don't think many people in this world would even give you half as much of an ear for your philosophical arguments as you are getting here. The only reason I even debate these kinds of obsessive compulsive thought experiments is to demonstrate how utterly absurd and impractical it is to waste the energy to extend arguments to these extremes.

You're strawmanning. Gravity is not constant because of 'worldviews'. It is constant according to the timescales that we've been observing it, and to the accuracy of our instruments used to measure it.
The 'truth' of gravity is the force that it exerts upon particles. We measure it with instruments.
Instruments that detect and measure do not have a worldview.

That's an opinion. Not a fact.
So is the notion that 'logic supersedes science', which is why you don't see many 'help wanted' ads for philosophers.

Even if that were the case, my response would be 'And??'
And what?

This is the 'wrong' method?

I understand what you're claiming. I simply see no reason to feel the same way you do about it. You have this notion that I should 'account' for them, and my question is why do you feel that that is the case?
I have yet to see you do anything but assert the laws of logic are something that we should agree to personally desire to account for.
If you think it's something you can argue, then be my guest. If you're just going to keep going in circles and asserting that it's not 'rational' to not account for them, it's because you can't make a sound argument for why it's not 'rational'.

No. If I meant that, I would have stated that.

With that kind of a low standard for accuracy, I'd be inclined to believe every claim that I couldn't test for accuracy. That wouldn't be practical, it would be moronic. You'd be operating at the same level as a person with a severe mental handicap.

What specifically would I need to 'research'. Do you mean there is 'data' to evaluate? 

How so?
Are you going to attempt to get behind Matt Slick's TAG argument to back your claim?
If so, can your god make 'a' be 'a' and 'not a' at that same time and in the same way? And if he cannot, why is he limited and constrained in such a way that he cannot 'redefine' things without any problems?

And?
Is it your contention that this simply cannot be the case in reality?

So, are you going to attempt the simple ad hoc claim that a causal loop cannot exist as an argument that everything is derived from an uncaused 'causer', and then claim that that in and of itself is not an absurd?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wakawaka sounds like a Matt Slick disciple who's bought his TAG argument hook, line, and sinker.

If you've never read his TAG drivel, it's a 'must' read. Calling it pseudo intellectual would be insulting to pseudo intellectuals.

His treatise on why something is what it is, and why it's not what it is not, or why it's not something in between what it is and what it is not (AKA Logical Absolutes) is pure POE material.

It's like reading a child's diary about his mental struggle with trying to reconcile how one thing is not some other thing...

 

 

Wow, this is the frist time I've visited this forum in ages and this topic almost made me late for work!

Great work BobSpence and RedneF.   I dunno how much simpler you can explain yourselves and still not be understood.   I'm no expert in logic and you've pretty much nailed that anyway I'd just like to chuck in a little bit about what Wakawaka said regarding the following:

Falsifiability and the attribute of 'falsness' are not one in the same thing.   The principle of falsifiability merely allows the possibility that a given statement can conceivably be proved false under certain circumstances.   Thus, the statement "There is no God" is easily falsifiable by producing said God.  The statement "There is a God" is unfalsifiable because as many examples as you can provide for there not being a God there can always be the response that you're not looking in the right place/way/whatever.   These are examples of singular existential statements regarding a particular thing.

 

There are also universal statements about whole categories of thing such as "all swans are white" or "all objects attract each other with a force proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them".   Such statements for the basis for most scientific investigation as they can easily be falsified by simple observation.  e.g. we know now that the statement about swans is false due to the discovery of black swans in Australia.   Statements such as the second, and most other scientific 'Laws' continue to be useful to us precisely becuase no observation has been made that renders them false, although it is conceivable that situations could arise in which they are shown to be so.    In which case the 'Law' is refined or modified or thrown out altogether and a new, more accurate 'Law' is used in its place.   This kind of thing happens a lot and is one of the wonders of the scientific method.   You only have to look at the history books to see some of the theories that were once held to be 'universally true' that we now know were wrong - think flat Earth, geocentricity, phlogiston, ether, etc.   What we call 'universal laws' are merely those that appear to make the best predictions over the widest range of conditions that we have yet experienced.   Likewise, 'universal constants' are just those that we've so far measured to be constant at every place in the observable universe although there are some that believe that these laws and constants do not hold for certain conditions such as black holes and the very early universe.

 

One tiny OT comment to make as well to Rednef:

I thought that was due to the van der Waal's forces of attraction acting between the atoms in the two blocks as they are brought so close together.  It's the same principle as Gecko's feet and blu-tack.   There simply isn;t room for anything between them, even vacuum. 

 

^{Are you saved? The reason I ask is because you seem to be very ignorant. So that leads me to believe that you really have no understanding of the Lord. To someone who believes the Lord well enough to tell you about the free gift you can receive, called SALVATION. Salvation is the only way you will enter the kingdom of heaven. You have to believe with all your heart that God sacrificed his only begotten Son Jesus Christ for all our sins. You also must believe that Jesus died on the cross, was buried and resurrected in 3 days. I will pray for you that you allow yourself this gift and become a true Christian in the army of the Lord. If you choose to remain ignorant lost soul, enjoy your life in hell}

 

 

:facepalm:

I don't have do anything you say thankyouverymuch.   If heaven's going to be full of people like you then I'm sure I will be much happier wherever you are not. 

Hey snafu, great post. Hope to see you around more often.

In response to your comments, machinist blocks need to be 'wrung' together in order to 'bond' well. Last I read, which admittedly was decades ago, the jury was still out on what exactly makes the bond between them so strong.

 

 

 

Lol. I could write a short novel on all the flaws in that one post by truechristian. Instead I'll just let it sit as yet another perfect example of theist stupidity. Even if poe, which is sadly not a certainty by any stretch of the imagination, it serves such a purpose perfectly.