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Hambydammit
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Venk, As I said before,

Venk,

As I said before, Deludedgod did a marvelous job of refuting you, so there's no need for me to get into this argument. At this point, I'm faced with an option. I can't decide if you're being a stubborn jerk and just preaching without reading or comprehending rebuttals, or if you simply don't understand the rebuttals. In either case, I'm tired of this.

Your last post didn't address, or even attempt to answer the arguments deludedgod has made. I don't know if you realize that you're just preaching at this point, so you tell me. I really want to be fair to you.

Here's the thing, Venk. Pretty much all of the mods think you're a troll. In other words, they think you don't give a damn about debate. It seems that you think that by repeating the same things enough times, somebody will believe you.

So, one of three things is going to happen now.

1) You're going to drop this argument and learn how to post your opinion one time, and either answer objections directly and logically or remain silent.

2) You're going to post again, repeating the same things, and be banned.

3) You're going to accuse me of censoring you or being unfair, and be banned.

Trust me, Venk. I'm going out of my way to give you the benefit of the doubt. I'm the only reason you're not banned now. Are you capable of following the forum rules or not?

 

Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin

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deludedgod
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It's obvious that Venk did

It's obvious that Venk did not even read my post, since had he he would have known that actual issues with Zeno were that since Achilles did catch up with the tortoise eventually (the lines converge), that would represent physical finite divisibilty, whose derivation I simply demonstrated, since Zeno was assuming that mathematical infnite divisibility could be conflated with physical divisibility. VEnk's "issue" with my refutation shows merely that he does not comprehend Reinmann's reformation of the concept of limits from Leibniz's original. If I have to go through secord-order derivatives and integration to do this I will. Yet mathematical indivisibility clearly cannot function accross physical infinitesamal quantities, which has been confirmed by experiments in quantum mechanics where a device can test the inverse square law at infinitemsally small quantities of length, albeit that our equipment is not satisfactory to test the motion of matter accros Planck length distances, aside from general issues with quantum foam, it is all but certain that motion accross the Planck length will be characterized by "jumps" because it is the final length of finite divisibility. Just as it is nonsense to speak of something being "hotter" than Planck temperature since matter breaks down and interchanges with energy at the temperature. So, He also shows ghastly ignorance of basic physics. At the Planck Temperature, General Relativity breaks down, but at the Planck length Furthermore, he is near-impossible to comprehend, and makes an assertion which I just spent the last 10,000 words refuting! That consciousness is always the same! Yet consciousness is not always the same, because it is not substratum! It is a fluid process, due its reciprocal result from the action between neurotransmitters, overturn and potentials. The whole point of the refutation was that consciousness is not substratum, because of its continuum nature between the actions of VGIC and transmitters and overturn rates associated with synaptogenesis and its result

His assertion pertaining to sleep and REM patterns was bizarre, not least because it indicates delusional gradeur regarding the soft problem of consciousness. There is a reason that nothing hurts when I am in surgery. There is nothing to percieve the pain, and the LeDoux model never covered that, albeit the Greenfield model did due to neuronal network formation associated with synapotogenesis.

And hell yes I need to reference Descartes. You know why? Because you are making the same error as him, even if it is not dualistic. The Cartesian error is rheification, transposing something ot a higher ontological category. THat is why the notion of "pure consciosuness" is so meaningless. From the perspective of neuroscientists and philosophers, it is extremely unsatsifying for a damn good reason. It is comparably problematic to qualia, as per David Chalmers experiment. It is childish and naive but at the end of the day, thousands of experiments will concur with analytical philosophers: Consciousness is not a higher ontological category, and cannot be filtered from the substance, as it is not a substance per se. Talking about "pure consciousness" is rather like talking of "wetness" without liquid or "squishiness" without a squishy object, or "tiredness" without a tired person, but instead there being an actual substance of "tiredness". You can see how your position is cut in half by reductio ad absurdum.

On his issue with the fact that consciousness is subjective, haven't I already pointed out that making it a higher ontological category is circular reasoning? Why, why, why do I have to always repeat myself in this debate.

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However the one and only thing that is in the absolute present of time is your pure consciousness which is the intuitive self awareness of yourself.

But this is the whole issue under consideration, because consciousness and self-perception is directly alterable, and is anything but unchanging, in fact ,it is constantly changing, that was the whole bloody point! The idea of "pure consciousness" is exactly the same error as the notion of qualia, breaks down once we consider the numerous prerequisites for consciousness, which are numerous and which I have already detailing. Experience and empiricism antecede consciousness, not vice-versa, which is why a baby born with no sense input will die (the brain won't form neuronal networks) It, I reiterate, is rather like saying "pure wetness without liquid" as if wetness was actually a component waiting to be discovered. Furthermore, your "experience" is not entirely simultaneous with "reality" (a) this has no meaning since time is not a substrate but a component of one for which all observers measure slightly different due to position and velocity. At any rate, your experience is not simultaneous with "reality" because it is unclear what is meant in that regard, because it is directly alterable hence meaningless to speak of it as unchanging reality. The perception of reality's speed is correlated with metabolism. An entity with a much, much faster  metabolism percieves time much faster than we do. For it, a few hours of our consciousness might represent several of our "seconds", and the reason for this is because there is a speed that we must consider pertaining to consciouness: The speed at which nerves conduct electricity. It is the changing of this effect that has pronounced effects on consciousness. Consciousness is dynamic, fluid changing and emergent, and everything in philosophy and science will support that notion. Nothing whatsoever supports the notion that it is fixed, substantial, unchanging substratum. It sounds warm and fuzzy, but it is quite frankly gibberish, it can be destroyed by reductio ad absurdum because it is not a substratum, if it were, it would be meaningless to speak of "consciousness". It would rather akin to asking for the world line of time, which is meaningless since "time" doesn't really exist anyway (only space-time) but more specifically, it is gibberish to speak of time having a world line. Similiarly, it is gibberish to have consciousness as substratum, and in this respect, your error is identical to the Cartesian. It seems that all you did wasa read the word "Descartes" and assume thence the objection was not applicable to you. Well, it is. Reading. It does people good.

.It reminds me of that Christian fellow who defended the COsmological argument from the paradox by the idea of "Simultaneous causation", which of course, is nonsense (makes the same error as Zeno. THe point you fail to understand is that if spacetime can be mathematically divided as per the system prior to calculus, then the argument would obviously be completely worthless since motion would not exist! Aren't you familiar with this really basic quandry? You accuse us of being ignorant of Eastern Philosophy, so can I accuse you of knowing nothing of Science and Western philosophy?

If you still don't understand this, please read my post this time.

I really, really don't have time for this. I just repeated myself.

"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.

-Me

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Hambydammit
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Shame on me for not

Shame on me for not researching thoroughly enough.  Venk, you had previously been given a final warning about repeatedly posting the same arguments.  I'm going to uphold that warning.  Your subsequent reposting of the same arguments has earned you an indefinite ban.

You're blocked for a minimum of three months.  If, after that time, you want to make a case for reinstatement of posting priviledges, you can PM me or another high level mod, and we'll review your request.

 

 

Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin

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Does anyone else smell

Does anyone else smell burnt curry?


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One virtual martyrdom with

One virtual martyrdom with a side of pretended persecution for Venk.

 Order up!


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I hope everyone realizes

I hope everyone realizes the issue at hand here. By speaking of "pure consciousness", or that consciousness is the "ultimate substance" such that such that consciousness is the "ultimate reality" commits an error that can be taken down by reductio ad absurdum. Although it postulates monoism, it makes the same error as Descartes and Leibniz.

Descartes and Leibniz came up with the "Identity of Indescribles", an ontological principle stating that objects X and Y are identical if all of their properties are, and thus it was different to speak of Descartes and "Descartes body", because of the their difference in property.

But the identity of indescernibles can be reduced to the absurd in many ways, and the Cartesian error is confuse property with substance. That is, if by Descartes we mean Descartes mind then it would be similar to arguing a dualism between water and wetness. Whilst physicalism is often conflated with the Identity of Mind Theory, non-reductive physicalism is a very important step forward in Philosophy of Mind because it recognized that physicalism does not necessary postulate no distinction between mind and brain. They have different properties, but are not the same entity. This is a critical break from the Identity of Indescernibles, because it recognizes what Descartes did not: Mental things are not entities unto themselves. This is the Cartesian error, since mental entities have different properties from the physical, they are considered wholly extant. Venk makes a similar error, attempting to solve the Problem of Consciousness by considering it the monoistic substratum. But this is not helpful, in fact it is completely absurd. Any requisites we find would immediately cut the legs out from under a proposition. If there were any properties of consciousness that are not universal, the position is eliminated by reductio ad absurdum. Fortunately, there are such properties. Consciosuness requires sense organs as a requisite. WIthout sense organs, there is nothing to experience, and without experience, there is no consciousness. An entity can have experience but not consciousness, yet this relationship is not reciprocal. So, by extension we can conclude that consciousness has a neurologically complex brain as a requisite, and it is not helpful to the discussion to call it an entity per se, because this makes a fallacy of reification. There is a reason why Philosophers of Mind overwhelmingly reject the hypothesis in question, especially given its similarity to the hated qualia notion.

Invariably, the conflation between property and substance is found in Venk's argument as well, confusing substratum with emergentism. Calling consciousness substratum breaks down because we can consider the prerequisites as bottom-up, not top-down, so consciousness requires certain prerequisites which exist as substratum which give rise to property. I cannot have wetness without liquid. "Wetness" does not exist as a thing unto itself. Similarily, I cannot have consciousness without preexisting attributes. Consciousness is not a substrate. In fact, speaking of consciousness as a substrate is deeply, deeply unsatisfying, roughly as unsatisfying as Chalmer's qualia. For an obvious reason: It solves nothing. We want to know how the subjective experience arises, do we not? This is the most pressing question we can formulate. For a while I contemplated becoming a neuroscientist until I switched to molecular biology.

As I mentioned before, it is necessary to consider consciousness an emergent property of the brain, even if not equivocant to the brain per se. For one, consciousness is a bottom-up process, which means that it is generated by structures which are not conscious per se, but can arise by the coalescance of these non-conscios structures into an emergent whole. Atoms are not conscious, neurons are not conscious, but brains do appear to generate some sort of being which is conscious. Furthermore, the degree to which this being is conscious depends on the complexity of the neuronal netowrks. But consciousness is not generally reciprocal. I can speak of worms having some primitive version of "thoughts", but it is dubious to suggest they have consciousness. Furthermore, consciousness is in an ontogenic continuum, that means it develops as the human foetus develops. If consciousness does depend on experience, then by definition experience of something, where that "something" is non-consious, ie the external world, is necessary, which would indicate the top-down nature of consciousness. I cannot speak of consciosuness without experience, and memory as well (as per the Greenfield model). Emergence not substratum. If we take this idea and run with it, since consciousness has experience of non-consciousness as a prerequisite, consciousness is extrinsic. That means that instead of being a property of the conscious entity per se, it is a property that is associated with the interaction between the entity and the non-conscious world. When we think about it, this is obvious. Consciousness is not extant. If I am born with no sense input whatsoever, the congential defects associated with all external and introperceptive senses, will I be born conscious? No. There is nothing to be conscious of. The brain will unravel quickly with no immediate input (see my paper on neuronal networks for a further discussion). Two cloned brains will not be having the same consciousness because they cannot, by definition, be experiencing the same thing. I cannot be in your body, unless part of my body necessary for consciousness (my brain) was somehow transplanted into your body without a brain. But I cannot be amputated from my body (and when I say "my body" I mean my brain as well), just as you can't either. The reasons for this are those I have just cited. Consciousness is necessarily extrinsic and emergent, with prerequisites that arise from non-conscious entities (there is a difference between "non" and "un" in this case), which requires expereince of an external world, which hence cannot be conscious by definition, cannot be amputated from the body (there is no such thing as a "whole body amputation" because there is nothing to amputate). The reason it cannot be amputated is for those just discussed. It is not a thing. 

As I said before, consciousness is discernable. I am having my conscious experience. Not someone or something elses. Furthermore, someone else or something cannot have my conscious experience. The paperweight on my desk is not having my conscious experience, nor are other people, or that tree outside. 

On this particular issue, I am fortunate to have the strong arm of most of contemporary Western Philosophy behind me. The nature of consciousness, whilst very poorly understood, is at least clarified by the fact that we can discern some salient facts about its prerequisites. 

Now, as per the driving point of my thesis, if consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, not an extant substratum, , then this punches a whole in two concepts simultaneously, killing two birds with a single shotgun shell:

a) The traditionally religious dualistic idea. There is God, and God has a mind, but not a body. That's impossible.

b) The unusual inversion of monoism, where consciousness is the ultimate substrate. That's impossible. Consciousness has requisites which this cannot fulfill. Furthermore, consciousness has not identity because it is not an entity. Just as Quine said one cannot have an entity without an identity, so too, if what we are describing is not an an entity, but a property, then it doesn't have identity, but rather, is an attribute of something which is an entity hence has identity. So, the fundamental linchpin of this argument is that the postulation of the theistic God would necessarily require one to make an error of conflation between property and substance. Just as I cannot amputate "wetness" from water, so too I cannot amputate the "mind" from the "brain". The mind is not a thing unto itself, indeed, the mind is not a 'thing" at all, and such talk is inherently unhelpful. The consequences of this for the theistic postulation are truly irrevocable, because the theistic position necessitates the transcription of emergent properties onto fundamental substratum. 

b) is the fundamental confusion over dualism and monoism, whereby we speak of property dualism versus substance dualism (the latter is Cartesian). Is the mind the same thing as the brain? No. Does that mean that the mind is extant and dualistic? Hell no. Is the brain absolutely necessary by definition for a mind the same way that a tired person is necessary for tiredness? Hell yes. When I say the mind is not the same thing as the brain, I mean that in the same sense that The positon of consciousness being some sort of underlying substance is particularly unhelpful when it comes to solving the problem of consciousness, because it generates a rhetoric tautology. Consciousness is consciousness. Yes, well, that's great. So, what is consciousness? 

This was where venk's confusion over my accusation of him employing Homonuculus erred. The reason he erred was because his answer to the arisal of subjective existence was, quite literally, consciousness, or consciouenss unto itself. This is called a rhetoric tautology. THe proposition offers us nothing. The very issue under consideration is how subjective events arise, aka consciousness. Replying "consciousness" as an answer unto itself is worthless as a proposition, it adds nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge, contributes nothing to philosophy of mind or neuroscience of consciousness. The issue under consideration is how subjective mental events arise. Appealling to synonyms such as "experience", "consciousness" and "perception" are unhelpful because they mean the same goddamn thing! It is their working that we are trying to discover, and thus, Venk's postulation, collapses.

Now, as I said before, consciousness is defined by change. Consciousness is directly alterable, changeable, fluid and continuum, Venk cannot possibly say there is no difference between conscious and unconscious, certainly given he has no neuroscience training and probably could not tell me how circadian rythms work. But the fluid nature of consciousness is not hte only way it changes. Perception is NOT an underlying entity because it is extrinsic. That is why it is completely individual to single entities, in other words, therefore, consciousness is discernable, we can speak of certain things being conscious, and others not. Furthermore, the experience of consciosness emerges from the interaction of brain and sense data. This is why my conscsiouness is different from that of you, or your friend, and my experience different from a bat, and furthermore, it is meaningless to speak of consciousness as remaining the same for an entity between any moments t1 and t2. Consciousness is defined by change, and the most obvious change is the most universal: People die.

I've only said this eighteen times in a row, and been given the same meaningless response, eighteen times in a row. Why must I be burdened with this?

If Venk is reading this (can he read this?) and wants to know why Hamby put a temporary block on, it is because the nature of the discussion is such that it amounts to trolling. I have had this same discussion with you for months. In that time, I haven't thought of any new points that are original or clever, I haven't come up with a stroke of genius, I've been making the same points, and over and over again, in response to Venk repeating the same thing. He hasn't backed up his position, I have, and I haven't had to alter my position to respond to new arguments because he hasn't put any forth! So unless you are willing to respond to your interlocutor's points, why are you here? If you have a change of heart and think you have a valid point to make in response to my post, PM (private message) me with it, but don't waste my time on my book page if you aren't going to come up with arguments.

"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.

-Me

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A curiously deep thread to

A curiously deep thread to be finding in the 'General Conversation and Humour" forum...
For the most part I agree. There were just a couple of issues that I wanted to tackle as they relate to debates that I've been having elsewhere on the site. Some of my replies here have been written with Hamby in mind, who directed me here due our disagreements in another thread.

deludedgod wrote:

Misunderstanding 1: Logic is a “way of knowing” just like senses, language and emotions etc.

In reality, this is not the case. Logic is not, repeat, not a way of knowing. It is a construct which is necessary for ways of knowing. As todangst pointed out, little axioms are not running around existing in some extant mind, or waiting to be discovered the way we do empirical propositions!


While I don't disagree, I don't think that language should have gone in the other category. Maybe it's because not all 'rule-based-thought' can be considered linguistic?
So some rules of logic will be tied to our language but not all.
I think that all logic relevent to debate will be tied to language, but it might be possible to observe logic in non-linguistic behaviour.

Quote:
we find that all of our ways of knowing, including emotion, language and empiricism necessarily only make sense because of these tautologies.

Again, I disagree.
On a nit-picky note, I think that by emotion you meant intuition, and I think there's a large different between the two. Intuition is using your mind's unconscious processing power while using emotion tends to involve considering factors that aren't relevent to the conclusion.

My main beef here was with language.
I don't think that you can 'base a language' on logic.
Language tends to be a set of rules, rules that we follow in thinking. So they themselves are a foundation for a discourse. In such a discourse, the applicable laws of logic will be the ones that cohere with the rules of that language. It will be the rules of the 'language game' that determine what the axioms are, etc.
(For now I'll just state my position. So far I'm not sure I've attacked your beliefs so much as your wording, so I'll wait to find out to see what you genuinely disagree with before I back up my case.)

Quote:

To say that they could apply or not apply in certain situations fundamentally breaks down at the lowest level.


While I sort of agree, I think an alternative interpretation on 'does not apply' might be worth looking at.

The law of non-contradiction declares that "P & ¬P" where P is a proposition, & is disjuction and ¬ is negation.
We would say that this rule is applicable to sentences like:
"It both bright and not bright"
Yet, people don't tend to make such obvious contradictions so if we heard this sentence in real life, we'd be justified in suspecting that this sentence meant something different.
Maybe "It is both bright [outside] and dark [in the cellar]" is what the above sentence is referring to, in which case it is no longer a contradiction - it is now "P & ¬Q" rather than "P & ¬P"

The changing of '¬P' to 'Q' was one way of understanding the sentence in a way that wasn't a contradiction. Perhaps another was to understand the word 'and' in a way that wasn't synonymous with disjunction, or '¬' which wasn't synonymous with negation.
So if someone was to say "the law of non-contradiction doesn't apply", maybe they were simply pointing out that the sentence that looks like a contradiction isn't really a contradiction.
I think Textom once claimed that we do use the word 'and' in a way that isn't synonymous with disjunction, so in those contexts, sentences that usually looked like a contradiction would not be so.

I can't really think of such uses of the word 'and' off the top of my head, but I accept the possibility of such uses.

Quote:
It is a whole different kettle of fish when we turn to this idea the way people employ it in the vernacular.

I read this bit and a question came to mind.
Here you notice that people are using the word 'logic' in different ways. I might've mis-interpreted, but I got the feeling that you were implying that this common usage was erroneous compared to the way you are using it.
If so, could such an implication be rationally justified?
(note: I recommend that you read the next quote and rebuttal before you type your reply to this)

(This question relates a little to that debate we had over Philosophy of Mind, where we seemed to get deadlocked as we didn't have agreed method of debating the meanings of words. The aim of this question is to bring up the topic so we can work on a way of settling of disputes of meaning, which would help future debates run a bit more smoothly.)

Quote:
But there is a gaping chasm of difference between this vernacular employment and denying the logical construct underlying your experience of reality!

I read this after I typed the paragraph above.
It appears to answer my question as it shows you picked out the vernacular usage to say "Don't confuse this alternative usage with what I'm trying to say here"
Still, I kept the paragraph above in as I thought it might spark an interesting debate on language, if you're interested.

My next point doesn't debate the conclusion of your topic, it's more of a reaction to the way I feel that you underestimate the intuition in general:

Quote:

b) They are critically evaluating a belief that was not reached by critical evaluation ie they are applying reasoned argument to a belief that people have because it makes them feel good


There's more to intuition than just 'feeling good'.
It's the computational power of the unconscious.
Yes, it is prone to error. But it is also capable of tackling problems that are more conscious/explicit/rational approaches aren't capable of. There are various possible reasons for this:
1) The knowledge in question is based on subtle patterns of a mass of experience that our conscious methods just cannot make use of. The unconscious mind is continually processing the mass of our experience and sometimes shares the results with the conscious mind - that's an example of intuition.
2) When we use reason, we rely on certain assumptions beind in place. We are working with a question we have already conceptualized. If this conceptualization is correct then it's the most efficient way to come to the answer, but if the conceptualization is flawed then an answer is impossible.
The unconscious questions every and can therefore give us insight where our reason fails us.

Those are the only two reasons I can think of the top of my head.
If you're interested in a more scholarly defense of the points I've made about the intuition, I recommend Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind by Guy Claxton.
His argument make use of psychological experiements, real life examples, common sense, even some neuroscience to defend his claims. It's worth looking into if you ever get the time.

Quote:
Really, when someone appeals to “beyond logic” what they are actually doing is trying to defend hopeless propositions, and if someone actually appeals to that phrase, they are revealing

I think what it really shows is that they are using a structure of discourse where the usual laws of logic aren't so applicable.
I mean, take the concept 'love'.
By the definition of logic that we use then some kind of logic applies.
For example, I consider:
"God would not damn people for eternity if he loved them"
to be a logical argument. If you understand the concept love and how to apply it, you know that to apply it to someone who condemns people to eternity is plain wrong.

However, although we can apply some kind of logic to the concept of 'love' as we did above, it's not something we can generally use logic for. 'Love' is a concept we use very loosely, and has a more poetic meaning rather than an absolute literal meaning.
Trying to apply logic to questions of love is unlikely to be successful, and is possibly missing the entire point of the question altogether. That's what someone might mean by saying that "love is beyond logic."
There are more 'language games' out there rather than the literalistic ones that we use for debate. While the more poetic ones are less suited to literalistic debates, they deal with topics that literalistic language cannot really deal with, topics that are still of interest to us as human beings.

Quote:
as Wittgenstein showed us in Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus, the idea of "outside logic" is incoherent.

Curiously, Tractatus Wittgenstein would've fully supported the phrase "beyond logic".
He believed that the most important things in life, like God, ethics and religion were transcendent - beyond sense and reason. So meaningless in the literal sense yet meaningful in a way beyond it.

Quote:
The philosopher Ronald de Sousa once memorably described philosophical theology as 'intellectual tennis without a net,' and I readily allow that I have indeed been assuming without comment or question up to now that the net of rational judgment was up. But we can lower it if you really want to. It's your serve. Whatever you serve, suppose I return service rudely as follows: 'What you say implies that God is a ham sandwich wrapped in tin foil. That's not much of a God to worship!' If you then volley back, demanding to know how I can logically justify my claim that your serve has such a preposterous implication, I will reply: 'Oh, do you want the net up for my returns, but not for your serves? Either the net stays up, or it stays down. If the net is down, there are no rules and anybody can say anything, a mug's game if there ever was one. I have been giving you the benefit of the assumption that you would not waste your own time or mine by playing with the net down.'"[/i]

This is an important answer to the other facet of the discussion, that reasoning and critical thinking should not apply to certain propositions, such as religious faith.


Firstly, I'd like to say that I love analogy.
I'd also like to expand on it in a way that might show how religion could be defensibly excused from some of the epistemological restraints we have on science.
Some religious preachers do seem to have double standards at every corner, demanding the net to be down when they serve but demanding that you return over it.
However, some religious believers are playing badmington and which you'd just stop demanding that they follow the rules of tennis while they do so.

Are they really playing a different game or just using that as excuse to not follow the rules? I guess that's the billion dollar question and one I'll be discussing at some point in another topic.
Your 'reducios' against denying logic showed that if we were using the language we tend to when dealing with literalistic issues, avoiding the rules of logic is incoherent.
But as I showed, rules like the law of non-contradiction are rules for dealing with concepts like 'negation' and 'conjunction' and such concepts might not be involved in the statement that we are evaluating at that moment in time.

So if theology is playing a different language game altogether then it would follow the rules of logic that apply to that language game rather than necessarily follow the rules that apply to others.
If theology is to be judged, we must atleast be open to the possibility that it is grounded in a different language game.
I think that such an argument would vindicate liberalistic religion while condemning fundamentalistic religion as liberal beliefs might appear to be 'nonsensical' but that is merely them playing a different game.
The fundamentalists, on the other hand, try and conflate the games and therefore fail at both. They are irrational in their literalistic beliefs and they screw up their religious practice by idolizing literalistic statements, thereby missing the point of religion too.


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Bloody hell, I had deleted

Bloody hell, I had deleted your double post, and then typed my reply to your prior post (in which I cordially agreed with most everything), and then I in turn was politely informed by the server, in ugly red lettering, that the post to which I was replying did not exist, and now my reply has been lost in the void of e-junk.

No good deed goes unpunished.  

"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.

-Me

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Ouch!! I've been meaning to

Ouch!!
I've been meaning to work out how to access the POSTDATA in the cache, so if a topic fails to post I can access what I originally wrote for a Copy and Paste job.

A topic I tried to post in Atheist Vs Theist went wrong a minute ago, but luckily most of it was saved on a txt file.


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OK, let me see if I can

OK, let me see if I can recall it from memory. One of the things I noticed was the issue with Wittgenstein. But it would seem that the criticism reflects the very issue under discussion. Wittgeinstein, as a postivist, says certain things have cognitive meaning. I reject his criterion for "cognitive meaning" along with the analytical tradition, but the point about the divisory nature of language games is still taken. At any rate, the issue under consideration is that Wittgenstein's reference to such things is explitcly making a distinction between reasoning in the vernacular sense.

On the other hand, my argument was that the a priori construct would underly all schemas, even those Wittgeinstein would say, with which I would agree, "reason" is not being applied. This is the issue under consideration, how that may be abused by theists who are wishing to drill a hole in epistemology to defend propositions, which, for example, have an internal contradiction. An excellent example of that which I am arguing against can be found in the thread which this links to in the essay. The issue at hand is that

a) It is necessary to acknowledge that "reason" in the sense being employed, is not always used or applied, and as Hume showed, many of our beliefs are not believed because of the schema of reason that Wittgeinstein would say certian concepts and language games do not apply to

b) On the other hand, the explicit set of a priori truths are derivable from any sensible statement, and all empirical schemas can derive them. In pyschology, "schemas" are empirical learning constructs that accumulate complexity until perhaps overthrown by paradigm shifts (don't you just despise Kuhn for that damned phrase), that would otherwise lead to disequilibrium. My argument was that all schemas, unless to collapse into nonsense, would derive from thse wholly intuitive, experience-not-necessary-to-know a priori truths. 

people who argue (a) as a justification for something not requiring to conform to (b) are shooting themselves in the foot. It's an epistemic vortex, and a dishonest method of trying to appeal to quasi-theological pandering to avoid having to defend a belief having, say, an internal contradiction. The difference between alogical and illogical in these senses is gaping huge. Juxtaposing them in this sense is like trying to justify the proposition that an elephant is a species of toothpaste because it has green fur.

"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.

-Me

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Quote: On the other hand,

Quote:
On the other hand, my argument was that the a priori construct would underly all schemas, even those Wittgeinstein would say, with which I would agree, "reason" is not being applied.

Ok.  You and I appear to be on pretty much the same page.  This is the core of my rebuttal to Strafio's argument that theism is not necessarily irrational.  Essentially, I can only see that thesis having meaning as:

"Within certain constructs of language, the term "irrational" may not necessarily apply to beliefs which seem contingent to those who hold them."

 

Quote:
(don't you just despise Kuhn for that damned phrase)

I also hate whoever it was who decided that reductionism is synonymous with a composition error.  My proposed rewording of Strafio's thesis can be reduced significantly, and my contention is that at the bottom of the stack will be a priori logic, and theism will be irrational.

 

Quote:
people who argue (a) as a justification for something not requiring to conform to (b) are shooting themselves in the foot. It's an epistemic vortex, and a dishonest method of trying to appeal to quasi-theological pandering to avoid having to defend a belief having, say, an internal contradiction.

Hmm... Instead of typing so much, I could have just said, "Yeah... what you said."

 

Quote:
The difference between alogical and illogical in these senses is gaping huge. Juxtaposing them in this sense is like trying to justify the proposition that an elephant is a species of toothpaste because it has green fur.

I'm going to try to wrap my brain around this.  Could you be more specific about what alogical statements you're referring to, and what, precisesly, you mean by alogical?  Maybe I needed to read Strafio's deleted post to understand.

 

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Edit: Reading back, I think

Edit: Reading back, I think I waffled a bit in this essay.
I could sum it up by saying:

Your claim that all schemata involve the classical laws of logic can only be a posteriori rather than a priori. This is because we can atleast imagine language games that don't have terms that correlate to negation, disjunction etc, and because they might not have a boolean evaluation. e.g. true or false might be a false dichotomy in certain language games.

If you've read Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, he creates that example language of a building tribe. ("Slab!" etc...)
You might expand by saying that all language games that involve the 'truth' and 'false' evalutions but I contend that we don't always use 'true' in this boolean fashion.

A third approach might be to claim that all significant areas of discourse and interest have these rules underlying these foundations, but surely that would be an a posteriori claim?
If so, it still leaves the dissenter with the burden of proof that they have a significant language game with different rules.

(I left my original replies below as I didn't feel like deleting all that typing I'd just done! Smiling They also involved some points I missed out here.)

deludedgod wrote:
On the other hand, my argument was that the a priori construct would underly all schemas, even those Wittgeinstein would say, with which I would agree, "reason" is not being applied.

Right. Where I disagree here will be extremely pedantic, and won't even be of value to my argument in favour of theism. It's just an extreme technicality that I feel might be worth acknolwedging.

The laws of logic involve the operatives negation, conjunction and disjunction. It also uses a binary system of evaluation where something is either true or false.
My claim is that these laws of logic are applicable to a language game iff there are corresponding words to negation, conjunction and disjunction, (e.g. not, and, or) and iff it's evaluation is also binary (e.g. there's a dichotomy between 'true' and 'false')
Contemporary logicians recognise various Non-Classical Logics that follow different rules.

So I still hold that the laws of logic will depend on the rules language game at hand. Nevertheless, you might well be right that this schema does underlie all language games to a degree and that the deviants are just possibilities that don't crop up in real life. But that would still make your justification a posteriori rather than a priori, because it depends on your not having come across a schema without these characteristics, rather than an a priori argument that all schemata must use them.

Quote:
This is the issue under consideration, how that may be abused by theists who are wishing to drill a hole in epistemology to defend propositions, which, for example, have an internal contradiction.

This makes my statements look un-attractive at the moment as it appears to give theists an excuse to contradict themselves freely - "I am playing a different language game"
There are ways to combat this though.
If they claim that they are playing a different language game then you can ask them to explain it to you so that you can understand where they are coming from.
If they cannot do this then you can point out that they will have difficulty in communicating their ideas if they are the only ones who speak their language!

So all I am arguing for is the opportunity for the theist, if they wish to use obscure logic, to justify their use of this logic by showing how it can relate to an everyday practice.
What I mean to say, is that the theists who abuse logic are out to convince people. Once they admit that their langauge isn't following the usual rules, the ones that we follow for our significant activities in life, they kind of lose relevence until they justify their language in terms of our language and once again they must follow the same rules of logic as us.

The liberal theists, on the other hand, can simply say "That's okay if you don't understand... it's just something that makes sense to me personally."

Quote:
On the other hand, the explicit set of a priori truths are derivable from any sensible statement, and all empirical schemas can derive them.

The characteristics that I noted above appear to be features that scientific languages favour. However, I think our language in general might be a bit more diverse. There's atleast potential for deviation for language games that we consider meaningful in our everyday life.
I personally believe that our scientific language has those characteristics for specific reasons, and these reasons don't always apply to our other areas of discourse.

Quote:
My argument was that all schemas, unless to collapse into nonsense, would derive from thse wholly intuitive, experience-not-necessary-to-know a priori truths.

My disagreement is slight, and you might not feel it to be a major concession.
I have pointed out that a language game that rejects some of the characteristics necessary for these 'a priori truths' would not follow the same constraints, and that such uses of language are atleast possible.

In the contemporary study of non-standard logics there seem to be alternatives that support my position.
The slightness of my argument is that I admit that our usual languages, especially those of science and debate, tend to abide by them so if someone is deviating then the burden of proof is on them to justify so.
I think that the fallacy of the dishonest theist is that in the same sentence where they claim to be following a different language game, they are also trying to imply that their statement has the same relevence as if it was a statement within our language game.

That's another reason why I respect the moderate - they take their "alternate langauge game" concession properly, denying things like absolute truth in such a context as their language game doesn't provide the conditions for absoluteness, and things like that.

Quote:
The difference between alogical and illogical in these senses is gaping huge. Juxtaposing them in this sense is like trying to justify the proposition that an elephant is a species of toothpaste because it has green fur.

Yeah. I'd better be careful about that.
I'll trust you to let me know if I mix them up a bit.


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Quote: Quote: The

Quote:
Quote:
The difference between alogical and illogical in these senses is gaping huge. Juxtaposing them in this sense is like trying to justify the proposition that an elephant is a species of toothpaste because it has green fur.

Yeah. I'd better be careful about that.
I'll trust you to let me know if I mix them up a bit.

Perhaps this is why we're having such a hard time.  I'm awaiting DG's clarification, if only because I'm not sure I understand.

If you'll grant me some leeway, I can sum up my objection to your last post with an analogy.  Obviously you've heard the argument that the concept of a god proves the existence of one.  If such a thing as the infinite is not truly possible, then how could we conceive of it?  Of course, you know that this is not a valid argument, and you know why.

In a similar sense, granting the possibility of alternate constructs of language in which a theist might rationally hold onto their theism does nothing to prove the rationality of theism.  I submit that it is granting the positive claimant territory which they have not won.  I am not very familiar with nonstandard logic, so I can't claim to speak authoritatively on it.  However, from what little I do know, I can't think of any justification for real world abdication of the authority of the burden of proof.

 

 

Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin

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Quote: I'm going to try to

Quote:

I'm going to try to wrap my brain around this.  Could you be more specific about what alogical statements you're referring to, and what, precisesly, you mean by alogical?  Maybe I needed to read Strafio's deleted post to understand.

Strafio's deleted post was not exactly insightful. It reads:

"Meh! (Double Post)" 

Well, it goes back to the essay "alogical" refers to "logic" in the vernacular sense, and alogical decisions underlie the bulk of our everyday behaviour

on the other and "logical" in the "illogical" refers to the underlying construct, and underlies all of our everyday behaviour

"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.

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Quote: Well, it goes back

Quote:
Well, it goes back to the essay "alogical" refers to "logic" in the vernacular sense,

Ok.  My brain is wrapped around, and touching on both ends.  Thanks.

 

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Hambydammit wrote: In a

Hambydammit wrote:
In a similar sense, granting the possibility of alternate constructs of language in which a theist might rationally hold onto their theism does nothing to prove the rationality of theism. I submit that it is granting the positive claimant territory which they have not won.

Absolutely.
Essay 6, the next one in the series, tries to show how theism can be treated as a practice in it's own right. The language of theism has been adapted to suit this practice.
Even where it makes claims that sounds like they are literal (e.g. they say that the rising of Jesus is a fact/truth), the way that they treat these 'facts' and 'truths' is different to how they treat 'normal' facts and truth.

When you read it, it might sound like a massive dodge of the question, but the truth is that it will accurately represent more of faith than you realise. Especially moderate/liberal faith. Anyway, I'll try and post it this weekend.


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Quote: Essay 6, the next

Quote:
Essay 6, the next one in the series, tries to show how theism can be treated as a practice in it's own right. The language of theism has been adapted to suit this practice.
Even where it makes claims that sounds like they are literal (e.g. they say that the rising of Jesus is a fact/truth), the way that they treat these 'facts' and 'truths' is different to how they treat 'normal' facts and truth.

When you read it, it might sound like a massive dodge of the question, but the truth is that it will accurately represent more of faith than you realise. Especially moderate/liberal faith. Anyway, I'll try and post it this weekend.

Well, yeah.  It does sound like a massive dodge.  I'm not making a promise, but I feel relatively certain that I'm just going to accuse you of the same kind of equivocation -- practice with belief this time, instead of logical with Logical.

 I don't think there's any self respecting psychologist who discounts the effectiveness of ritual, regardless of the content of the words spoken during rituals.  This is true of many things including religion.  I'll stop now because I haven't read part six, but I'm feeling less than optimistic.

 

Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin

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Haha. You're not as far away

Haha. You're not as far away as you think.
I'm actually going to be the one accusing you guys of equivocating 'belief' in the context of literalistic worldviews and 'belief' in terms of religious practice.
I'll be pointing out that although the word is the same, people treat the two types of belief in a subtly different way.


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Hmm.. Now I'm having so

Hmm.. Now I'm having so much fun speculating, I am putting off reading it.

It sounds to me like you're going to be heading towards something like "Liberal theology, defined as ritualistic practice without literal belief, is valid because of the real, quantifiable cultural benefit to having ritual."  You're going to back it up with the evidence that many rituals have sayings in them that cannot possibly be taken literally, or that nobody really believes.  Many of these rituals are practiced by atheists, so where do we get off calling theists irrational?

Is that it? 

Hint:  You aren't going to get too far with that.  You're still going to end up in the same place re: local/universal logic(constructs) vs. a priori logic (the description of how we think).

Furthermore, you're going to be equivocating theism with religion, and the two are distinctly different.

 

 

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Hambydammit wrote:

Hambydammit wrote:

Hmm.. Now I'm having so much fun speculating, I am putting off reading it.

It sounds to me like you're going to be heading towards something like "Liberal theology, defined as ritualistic practice without literal belief, is valid because of the real, quantifiable cultural benefit to having ritual."


More or less.
It's more than just ritual though, it's your very outlook on life and stuff.

Quote:
You're going to back it up with the evidence that many rituals have sayings in them that cannot possibly be taken literally, or that nobody really believes. Many of these rituals are practiced by atheists, so where do we get off calling theists irrational?

Is that it?


Nope.
It'll be a tad more sophisticated than that! Eye-wink

Quote:
Hint: You aren't going to get too far with that. You're still going to end up in the same place re: local/universal logic(constructs) vs. a priori logic (the description of how we think).

Yep. This is the other half of the argument.
I like to think I'm making progress here.
We'll see how it goes.

Quote:
Furthermore, you're going to be equivocating theism with religion, and the two are distinctly different.

This point has actually crossed my mind once or twice.
George Smith pays special attention to those who try to re-define theism in either the first or second chapter in his "Case Against God."
However, having looked at the history of belief and how such metaphysical beliefs develloped out of mythology and culture rather than observation, I think that theism has always been 'non-literal' at heart.

I'd write more but I feel like I'm already re-writing my next essay and need to go to bed. If we've sorted out the technical issues around posting new threads I ought to have this new essay up on Sunday.


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Strafio wrote: That's

Strafio wrote:
That's another reason why I respect the moderate - they take their "alternate langauge game" concession properly, denying things like absolute truth in such a context as their language game doesn't provide the conditions for absoluteness, and things like that.

I'm not sure I'd agree here. Many liberal/moderate theists will hold to absolute truths. They might not assert them in the same manner as fundamentalist nor will the belief tend be as horrible/stupid, but that doesn't mean they do not hold them as absolute. And while they might be more easier to persuade them to change their mind, that doesn't means they are not true believers. TBers doesn't neccesarily entail a fundamentalist belief (although I agree that there'd be more true believers of the fundamentalist kind than the moderate).

Strafio wrote:
If we've sorted out the technical issues around posting new threads I ought to have this new essay up on Sunday.


You've already posted all six essays though - three weesk ago.
http://www.rationalresponders.com/6_real_religion_why_literalists_on_both_side_have_missed_the_entire_point 

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Strafio, have you ever been

Strafio, have you ever been Christian?  If not, have you ever been theist?

 

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Haha! You might not have

Haha! You might not have realised this at the time but your question was interpretable as "Strafio, please ramble a long essay giving me half your life story!"
Well, since you asked! Smiling

I was raised Roman Catholic but didn't really believe it.
My parents are very liberal (such is the norm for England), both are teachers (Maths + Physics) so free-thinking was more encouraged than obedience.

My first appreciation for religion came through the New Scientist magazine where it talked about how they'd used brain scans to show how practiced meditationers had re-wired their brains to naturally respond in a more positive manner to situations. This interested me so I bought a book on Buddhism.
The book was great. It appealed to you on a common sense basis and I still think the arguments hold. The key theme was the world is as it is, and whether you are happy depends on your reaction to it, and it sold me the benefits of 'spirituality' - learning to meld and mold your personality to become less angry, stressed, etc.
What's more, Buddhism was associated with all the cool Kung Fu characters like Kwai Chang Caine.

I considered myself an agnostic with no opinion either way, but figured that if there was a God with the characteristics of love etc. then this wouldn't really matter as he'd be cool no matter what you believed. I believed that if there was any worth to the Bible at all it would be through a Buddhist-like interpretation rather than literal interpretations of myths.

This actually fitted the Catholic upbringing I'd had at home, church and through the Catholic Schools I went to. Although there we were taught about God/the Bible, the emphasis was always on the parables and how God was loving. There tended to be a focus on stories like the good Samaritan and that parable that said "whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do unto me."
I saw that as the message that believing in the absolute truth of the Bible wasn't really the important message at hand. (Incidently, I'd gotten an interest in Dinosaurs when I was 3-4 years old, before I first heard the story of Adam and Eve. So when I first heard the story at the age of 4/5 my question was to the teachers was "What about the Dinosaurs?"
When they said "They came afterwards", I didn't know the word 'bullshit' but I think I'd certainly grasped the concept.
(That makes my teachers sound bad - they were just reading us the story like any other - there was no indication that we ought to believe this one or anything like that!)

So anyway... by the time I leave university I have an interest in spirituality and a strong dislike for fundamentalism. I joined the local Christian Union group for debate. I was surprised in two ways. I wasn't expecting the group to be based around fundamentalism or even to be organised to push a fundamentalist message. I'd originally gone in thinking that it would be fairly open rather than pushing an agenda. The other surprise was that despite these guys having the word fundamentalist beliefs possible, they were also some of the most amazing people I'd met too.

So I was confused. They appealed and appalled me both at the same time. They believed in the absolute authority of this ancient book and that everyone (including themselves) deserved to burn in hell. At the same time, I saw the role their faith played in their lifestyle. When people used to give speeches about the life being transformed through believing, I actually found it quite believable rather than it setting off my BS detector.
In freethinking England, these evangelicals don't have the control or social influence they have in the US. If they appeal to someone, they appeal to a freethinking person on their terms. By Darwinian evolution, only an extremely appealing religion will attract followers and survive in this climate. They didn't butter up their message to get followers and took pride that they would tell the truth as unpleasant or offensive as it may be and loved to challenge people.

So what attracted people to them?
The way I see it, they were selling a lifestyle.
People saw the kind of person that their faith made them and wanted in. One or two converts actually said that exactly.
Read any generic conversion story and you'll hear the same thing.
To cut a long story short, from what I've seen of religion I saw that there was something to it, just not sure what. That 'spirituality' that these Christians have would be great for everyone if we could detach it from the strings of Christian dogma.

So I've grown up with people of religion and seen what's important to them and drives them. I'd hung around with religion fanatics and seen similar things around them. Sometimes they try and defend their beliefs as though they would a fact, especially fundamentalists, but these facts are never what convinces people. The 'truth' in religion, is the way it transforms their life. I've yet to come across a conversion story that doesn't back this up.

Back to the story, these fundamentalists at university drove me nuts with their theology, especially as it was coming from people I admired so much as people, so I kind of made a mission of refuting the fundamentalism from a moral/spiritual/theological perspective, starting with the damn doctrine of eternal damnation. That got me debating with Christians on a Martial Arts Planet forum.
Some atheists were also in this forum and said that belief in God was irrational, which didn't sound right to me either, so I debated them too. Topher was one of these guys and brought the debate over to Reggie's site...
You probably know the rest.
I'll just finish this with a quote from Joseph Campbell from his "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" book:

"The truths contained in religious doctrines are after all so distorted and systematically disguised", write Sigmund Freud, "that the mass of humanity cannot recognise them as truth."

Strafio wrote:
That's another reason why I respect the moderate - they take their "alternate langauge game" concession properly, denying things like absolute truth in such a context as their language game doesn't provide the conditions for absoluteness, and things like that.

Topher wrote:
I'm not sure I'd agree here. Many liberal/moderate theists will hold to absolute truths. They might not assert them in the same manner as fundamentalist nor will the belief tend be as horrible/stupid, but that doesn't mean they do not hold them as absolute.

I'd actually take Ckava's line and claim that religious belief is a subtly different concept to belief in literal facts. It plays a different purpose in a person's life. You've heard this defense from me before.
I might make up a fancy name like "The Literalistic Fallacy" when someone misses the fact that we use the word belief with subtle variations and not all 'beliefs' are the same as 'literal beliefs'.
It would be a form of equivocation.

Sometimes when we face problems in life we need to make use of literalistic facts. If I am looking for my keys, I need to know where I left them last and how they might've moved from that position. It's problems like this where we make use of accurate facts.
As we are all familiar with, the moderate's theology has enough clauses to why we shouldn't make use of 'religious beliefs' in the same way.
"Thou shalt not put the lord to the test" etc...
It's the way the game works.

The fundamentalist religious belief is essentially the same, but as they also make this 'literalistic fallacy' they feel that unless they treat it as fact the same way they treat other facts then they're not doing it right, hence the determined effort to treat theology in a literalistic way, even though it breaks every bone of common sense in their body!!
That's why they prefer to just 'live' faith without thinking rather than debating it, as living it is where the truth lies.

Quote:
You've already posted all six essays though - three weesk ago.
I renamed this link as it was stretching the entire page!!


Yep. That's the one. You'll notice that link no longer works. Smiling
It turns out that they reserve that area for people they especially invite and would rather I kept it on the forums instead. As it was on the forums, I figured that it was a lot to discuss in one go so I've released them one at a time. All are up except the number 7 that concludes and summarises everything that went before.

Have you tried them out?
If you listed your disagreements, would they fit on just one page? Laughing out loud


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Quote: Haha! You might not

Quote:

Haha! You might not have realised this at the time but your question was interpretable as "Strafio, please ramble a long essay giving me half your life story!"

Maybe he should have said "Strafio and HAmby, please continue discussing something which has nothing to do with my thread". 

"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.

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Strafio wrote: I'd actually

Strafio wrote:
I'd actually take Ckava's line and claim that religious belief is a subtly different concept to belief in literal facts.

But often, religious belief entails [perceived] facts as if they are literal and historical. Believing that Jesus performed miracles and then resurrected is a historical fact is an example of a liberal - yet still literal - belief. I think you tend to sometimes create a false dichotomy between literal belief and purely spiritual belief, as if they are mutually exclusive. (Or at least that is how your argument often comes across... in that whenever we refer to a theists literal and historical claims you jump to their defense and try to suggest their belief is some kind of non-historical, non-literal belief even when they themselves state or imply their belief is historical and literal!)

As for your essays... that link still works for me (they all do).
I've briefly read them although I'm not gonna seriously debate them. LJoll's weird ideas about induction and empiricism has made me tired of philosophy at the moment. I'm sure you can guess where I'd disagree anyway!

Deludedgod,

Sorry to send the thread further off course, didn't know of another location for this. I'd be happy to continue discussing this elsewhere if and when Strafio/Hamby point me to the suitable place.

"It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring" -- Carl Sagan


Hambydammit
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Damn... I was just looking

Damn... I was just looking for a yes or no, actually...

Sorry for the derail.   In my addled brain, this ongoing conversation about "outside of logic" and Strafio's speculation of um... "Illogical within logic without being illogical" are sort of the same discussion.  Nevertheless, it's probably much better addressed in Strafio's threads.

 

Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin

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lol! Sorry DG. If you want

lol! Sorry DG.
If you want to get back on topic there's a post of mine waiting for you on the previous page. It argued against your claim that all language games must involve those basic logical rules.

Topher, I've got a reply to that post if you're interested, but I don't think we should de-rail this topic any further. If you copy and paste that as a reply in the Atheist Vs Theist topic (essay 6, remember! Eye-wink) then I'll address it there. Smiling