Arguments for god from a former atheist

(Sep 5, 2018 04:11 AM)C C Wrote:

(Sep 4, 2018 08:45 PM)Yazata Wrote: I haven't watched the video, since it apparently goes on for an hour.

Sounds like you also prefer having a transcript or something to glance over first, or to be able to look at and reference later on, in contrast to searching back and forth through a video again and manually writing down bits of it to quote. I don't know whether this exchanging of blows below between New Atheist blogger Richard Carrier and Edward Feser would be useful for anything or not. At first glance it might seem perverse to expect clarification to be extracted from a mêlée already in progress.

Feser’s Five Proofs of the Existence of God: Debunked!
https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/13752

Carrier on Five Proofs (response)
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2018/02/...roofs.html

I still view "proof" on paper (as opposed to, say, the perceptual and feeling confirmation of having fingers chopped off by a piece of machinery) as being a formal demonstration of an abstract construct either being internally consistent with itself or being commensurable with an already existing system which it is applying for approval / membership in (so to speak).

Rather than "proof" (in using the rules for manipulating the symbols and/or word nomenclature of an "intellectual game") meaning that a "proposal" corresponds to something that has been verified as the case, or exists, or has useful application in a concrete context. Similar to pure mathematics lacking concern over its abstract residents corresponding to "real" or "effective" items, though the door was not closed to the possibility of many eventually finding correspondence to such.  

~

Here is an excerpt from the author of the debunked arguments:

Ironically, a third option that in fact I’m quite certain is actually true, is the very option described by Aristotle himself. Aristotle took Plato to task for the mistake Feser is making, pointing out that it is not necessary that potential patterns actually exist in some concrete or mental form. They only have to potentially exist. Hence Aristotle said of Plato’s “world of forms” what Laplace said to Napoleon of God: “Sir, I have no need of that hypothesis.” Potential things are by definition not actual. So obviously we don’t need them to be actualized to exist. That’s a self-contradictory request. It’s thus self-contradictory of Feser to insist that potential things must be “actualized” somewhere (a mind; concrete things). Obviously there is no logical sense in which they must be actualized in that way.


This author is leaving room for unrealized potentials. But this argument does not necessarily defeat Feser's position. As he leaves out that change and potential to change are connected. A potential can pre-exist, but not necessarily, as argued. It can also be timeless and spaceless or void. If God exists in reality then He has the potential to exist in reality. An example would be the potential for a universal consciousness to distribute over reality. I am not sure why syne would dismiss my experiences as delusional or drug induced, as he needs all the help he can get. 

The CTMU actually defines unbound telesis as an active medium of pure potential which has pre-existent outcomes. Possibilities such as God are considered inevitable. And in the CTMU God configures Himself as reality. The challenge is to show that God is not merely a figment of the imagination or self. Thus an illusion. But an objective reality. And Feser's arguments are weak in that regard. As he provides no support or evidence that his God was ever witnessed. This is where I and Feser depart. I actually claim that the God that I know to exist can be measured and verified. This is part of the subject of my new book.

(Sep 5, 2018 02:23 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote:

(Sep 5, 2018 04:55 AM)Syne Wrote: Apparently, even among academic atheists, Carrier is a joke: https://historyforatheists.com/2016/07/r...ispleased/

Classic ad hominem.

I don't see you defending him...or even making any arguments at all.
And if you actually read it, there are quite a few facts about the guy in there.

Quote:

(Sep 5, 2018 02:35 AM)Syne Wrote: Not everyone has the endless free time you seem to. That you even had to read a book for such very well-wore arguments is, itself, nothing to be proud of.
That, having read the book, you can't even manage to synthesize an argument, any argument, is telling. You may be wasting your time, deary.

Seriously? You're making fun of me for reading? I like to read. So what?

How you interpreted that as making fun of you for reading is beyond me.

Quote:Many scholars and commenters caution in treating the Five Ways as if they were modern logical proofs. This is not to say that examining them in that light is not academically interesting.

First, you shouldn't plagiarize Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ways_...fs_or_Ways?
Second, you keep talking about Aquinas' Five Ways as if they are synonymous with Feser's Five Proofs. That is an obvious straw man, and you'd know it if you'd actually read his book...and even half understood it.

It is not a book about Aquinas’s Five Ways. I have already treated that topic at some length in my book Aquinas and in several of the essays collected in Neo-Scholastic Essays. Rather, it is a book about what I personally take to be the five most compelling arguments for God’s existence. Naturally, there is some overlap with the Five Ways, but the book largely stakes out new ground.
- http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2017/04/...eview.html

I was able to glean as much just from the interview I posted, but it seems actually reading the book wasn't enough for you to understand. Pity.

(Sep 4, 2018 10:53 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote:

(Sep 4, 2018 08:45 PM)Yazata Wrote: What "argument in that vein"? Feser is evidently arguing against some view that he disagrees with, but I don't know what.

He said he was an atheist but now he believes that the arguments presented in classical theism are correct. He's selling a book.

I’m sure that Yazata is well aware of classical theism, Syne. The guy is just revisiting classical theism and discussing the the five ways

So is that what this thread is supposed to be about? Arguing about the contemporary relevance of Aquinas' natural theology?

I actually wrote a little about that a couple of days ago on another board, where I was opining on what halfway-plausible evidences theists might be able to produce for their theism.

My own opinion is that things like 'unmoved mover', first-cause, necessary being and so on, at best point us towards unanswered metaphysical questions.

There are other other fundamental issues as well, such as ultimate irreducible 'stuff' out of which everything else is composed, source of cosmic order, and so on.

I think that the most intellectually defensible response to these kind of metaphysical questions is agnostic. We don't know the answers, we don't know how to go about discovering the answers, and in some cases we can't even be sure that the questions even make sense.

My view is that insisting that all of these questions have a single monistic answer, and certainly insisting that a single hypothetical monistic answer is somehow identified with the God of Hebrew, Christian, Islamic or Hindu scripture, is an unjustified leap.

By their nature, the metaphysical arguments of natural theology point us towards whatever it is that fulfills metaphysical functions. But whatever it is (single or plural) that fulfills various metaphysical functions need not be a personal psychology, it need not be morally good, it need not be concerned for us individually, it need not be holy and it need not be a suitable object for human religious worship. Nor is there anything that plausibly connects the metaphysical functions with any religious revelations.

So while I do think that these kind of metaphysical arguments do succeed in highlighting outstanding cosmic mysteries. But... I don't think that they are successful arguments for conventional religious theism, unless the theism has already been introduced as a hidden premise somewhere.

That's my opinion anyway.

Again, Yaz is opining without even hearing the arguments...thus not addressing them. If you can't be bothered to hear the arguments, why even try to refute them? O_o
No, SS doesn't seem to have read/understood the book, nor even understood the arguments in the interview. But if you're both happy slugging away at straw men (a point even mentioned in the interview), go right ahead.

Agnostics basically just seem to throw their hands up at difficult questions. They don't seem the least bit concerned that assumptions like infinite regresses are just an endless deferring of explanation...which is completely vacuous. You simply cannot have an intelligible epistemology on that basis...which makes all subsequent arguments self-defeating.

Your views of arguments you haven't heard is preposterous, at best. He lays out the connection (not a hidden premise) quite clearly.

Syne Wrote:First, you shouldn't plagiarize Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ways_...fs_or_Ways?  
Second, you keep talking about Aquinas' Five Ways as if they are synonymous with Feser's Five Proofs. That is an obvious straw man, and you'd know it if you'd actually read his book...and even half understood it.

I forgot the quotes but I already provided the link that you obviously didn't read.

"The book provides a detailed, updated exposition and defense of five of the historically most important (but in recent years largely neglected) philosophical proofs of God’s existence: the Aristotelian, the Neo-Platonic, the Augustinian, the Thomistic, and the Rationalist.

This work provides as ambitious and complete a defense of traditional natural theology as is currently in print.  Its aim is to vindicate the view of the greatest philosophers of the past— thinkers like Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Leibniz, and many others— that the existence of God can be established with certainty by way of purely rational arguments.  It thereby serves as a refutation both of atheism and of the fideism that gives aid and comfort to atheism."

Nice try, faker fox. I already know most of this stuff so it's easy for me, but you, not so much.  

"Leibniz identified two kinds of truth, necessary and contingent truths. Leibniz admitted contingent truths on the basis of infinitary reasons, to which God had access but humans did not:

In contingent truths, even though the predicate is in the subject, this can never be demonstrated, nor can a proposition ever be reduced to an equality or to an identity, but the resolution proceeds to infinity, God alone seeing, not the end of the resolution, of course, which does not exist, but the connection of the terms or the containment of the predicate in the subject, since he sees whatever is in the series."

God isn’t logically necessary, sweetie, and as soon as anyone resorts to metaphysics (rabbit of a hat), once they make that leap, you can’t touch it. Why? Because it's magic, silly boy. Game over, like I said. What do you want me to say?  How 'bout *BAM! You're healed?  

Science is comfortable with uncertainty. It doesn’t deal in absolutes. It isn’t dogmatic. The process is based upon criticism, open-mindedness, gathering new data, and further experimentation and explanations.

I'm not interested in debating God as a necessary cause.

Turtle loo

(Sep 5, 2018 07:03 PM)Syne Wrote: Again, Yaz is opining without even hearing the arguments...thus not addressing them.

Why don't you list Feser's five favorite theistic arguments and if any of them are different from Aquinas' five, write a paragraph (or more) explaining the less familiar ones?

Again, I'm not willing to sit through an hour of video to hear what you could tell us much more easily (for us, anyway). Nor am I willing to get into a back-and-forth personality battle with you.

Quote:If you can't be bothered to hear the arguments, why even try to refute them? O_o

I didn't try to refute them. I just told the board what my view is of the kind of metaphysical arguments one often finds in natural theology. (first cause, ground of being, source of order etc.)

Quote:Agnostics basically just seem to throw their hands up at difficult questions.

When we don't know the answers, the most honest and intellectually defensible thing to do is admit that we don't know. Bluster, sarcasm and insults don't suffice.

Quote:He lays out the connection (not a hidden premise) quite clearly.

Then explain it.

(Sep 5, 2018 07:15 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote:

Syne Wrote:First, you shouldn't plagiarize Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ways_...fs_or_Ways?  
Second, you keep talking about Aquinas' Five Ways as if they are synonymous with Feser's Five Proofs. That is an obvious straw man, and you'd know it if you'd actually read his book...and even half understood it.

I forgot the quotes but I already provided the link that you obviously didn't read.

"The book provides a detailed, updated exposition and defense of five of the historically most important (but in recent years largely neglected) philosophical proofs of God’s existence: the Aristotelian, the Neo-Platonic, the Augustinian, the Thomistic, and the Rationalist.

This work provides as ambitious and complete a defense of traditional natural theology as is currently in print.  Its aim is to vindicate the view of the greatest philosophers of the past— thinkers like Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Leibniz, and many others— that the existence of God can be established with certainty by way of purely rational arguments.  It thereby serves as a refutation both of atheism and of the fideism that gives aid and comfort to atheism."   

Again, you're not citing the source of your quotes. Lazy much? O_o
Those are not Aquinas' Five Ways. Or do you really think Leibniz was a contemporary of Aquinas?  

Quote:Nice try, faker fox. I already know most of this stuff so it's easy for me, but you, not so much.

You're aping me again.  

(Sep 5, 2018 01:07 AM)Syne Wrote: Already familiar with the arguments being made and their counterarguments.

(Sep 5, 2018 05:17 PM)Syne Wrote: I was able to glean as much just from the interview I posted, but it seems actually reading the book wasn't enough for you to understand. Pity.

Quote:"Leibniz identified two kinds of truth, necessary and contingent truths. Leibniz admitted contingent truths on the basis of infinitary reasons, to which God had access but humans did not:

In contingent truths, even though the predicate is in the subject, this can never be demonstrated, nor can a proposition ever be reduced to an equality or to an identity, but the resolution proceeds to infinity, God alone seeing, not the end of the resolution, of course, which does not exist, but the connection of the terms or the containment of the predicate in the subject, since he sees whatever is in the series."

God isn’t logically necessary, sweetie, and as soon as anyone resorts to metaphysics (rabbit of a hat), once they make that leap, you can’t touch it. Why? Because it's magic, silly boy. Game over, like I said. What do you want me to say?  How 'bout *BAM! You're healed?  

Science is comfortable with uncertainty. It doesn’t deal in absolutes. It isn’t dogmatic. The process is based upon criticism, open-mindedness, gathering new data, and further experimentation and explanations.

Wow, you don't even understand things you quote (even when you manage to provide citation).
Necessary truths are metaphysical (the essence of the thing, that cannot be negated without a physical contradiction of the thing itself), while contingent truths include all counterfactual possibilities that could only be known by a supreme being. If there are necessary truths, at all, there must be a necessary substrate to support them, otherwise they are all contingent.

It's not magic; it's basic logic. But I can see why sufficiently rigorous logic may look like magic to the irrational. It is not magic to say that you being negated (nonexistent) is, currently, a very real and physical contradiction. You existing is a metaphysically necessary truth. What you decided to have for lunch is a contingent truth, where you could have chosen otherwise (negated what you did choose) without producing a physical contradiction (like what you did choose not existing).

Science specifically avoids contingent uncertainties, as they are not readily predictable and thus cannot contribute to the scientific method. Science just generally ignores anything outside of its methodology, usually including epistemology and philosophy of science. Since both are necessary to justify science and you demonstrate zero understanding of either, it's clear you only have a blind faith in science. It might as well be revealed truth for all the rigor you, personally, could put into justifying it as truth.

Quote:I'm not interested in debating God as a necessary cause.

Turtle loo

IOW, since it's clear you're out of your depth, and your snark won't help you save face, you're begging off..as usual.  

---

(Sep 5, 2018 07:39 PM)Yazata Wrote:

(Sep 5, 2018 07:03 PM)Syne Wrote: Again, Yaz is opining without even hearing the arguments...thus not addressing them.

Why don't you list Feser's five favorite theistic arguments and if any of them are different from Aquinas' five, write a paragraph (or more) explaining the less familiar ones?

Aristotelian proof, the Neo-Platonic proof, the Augustinian proof, the Thomistic proof, and the Rationalist proof. Here, I'll even do a quick Google search for you: http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2017/04/...eview.html
Otherwise, I'm not here to do your homework for you.

Quote:Again, I'm not willing to sit through an hour of video to hear what you could tell us much more easily (for us, anyway). Nor am I willing to get into a back-and-forth personality battle with you.

If you can't spare the time, just don't opine on it. Easy.
But don't presume that anyone owes you time you won't invest yourself.

Quote:

Quote:If you can't be bothered to hear the arguments, why even try to refute them? O_o

I didn't try to refute them. I just told the board what my view is of the kind of metaphysical arguments one often finds in natural theology. (first cause, ground of being, source of order etc.)  

And as an agnostic, your views are largely vacuous, as in they don't contain anything of substance.

Quote:

Quote:Agnostics basically just seem to throw their hands up at difficult questions.

When we don't know the answers, the most honest and intellectually defensible thing to do is admit that we don't know. Bluster, sarcasm and insults don't suffice.

It's not actually intellectually honest to avoid logical conclusions just because you don't want to commit to them. Defensible is a consideration of ego, not an evaluation of logic.

Quote:

Quote:He lays out the connection (not a hidden premise) quite clearly.

Then explain it.

I'm not here to spoon feed you. If you don't have the time, so be it.

(Sep 5, 2018 08:14 PM)Syne Wrote: He lays out the connection (not a hidden premise) quite clearly.

No, no, he doesn't. It's still all classical theism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_argument

Yazata Wrote:Then explain it.

Syne Wrote:I'm not here to spoon feed you. If you don't have the time, so be it.

And there it is, his usual modus operandi.  No, of course you're not here to spoon feed us. You're here because you want us to spoon feed you. Read the book.

He's written several books. He's referenced in the wiki article on the five ways, and yes, it's not only in his last book, but included in this one as well. The quote was from him.

(Sep 5, 2018 03:39 PM)Ostronomos Wrote:

(Sep 5, 2018 04:11 AM)C C Wrote:

(Sep 4, 2018 08:45 PM)Yazata Wrote: I haven't watched the video, since it apparently goes on for an hour.

Sounds like you also prefer having a transcript or something to glance over first, or to be able to look at and reference later on, in contrast to searching back and forth through a video again and manually writing down bits of it to quote. I don't know whether this exchanging of blows below between New Atheist blogger Richard Carrier and Edward Feser would be useful for anything or not. At first glance it might seem perverse to expect clarification to be extracted from a mêlée already in progress.

Feser’s Five Proofs of the Existence of God: Debunked!
https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/13752

Carrier on Five Proofs (response)
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2018/02/...roofs.html

I still view "proof" on paper (as opposed to, say, the perceptual and feeling confirmation of having fingers chopped off by a piece of machinery) as being a formal demonstration of an abstract construct either being internally consistent with itself or being commensurable with an already existing system which it is applying for approval / membership in (so to speak).

Rather than "proof" (in using the rules for manipulating the symbols and/or word nomenclature of an "intellectual game") meaning that a "proposal" corresponds to something that has been verified as the case, or exists, or has useful application in a concrete context. Similar to pure mathematics lacking concern over its abstract residents corresponding to "real" or "effective" items, though the door was not closed to the possibility of many eventually finding correspondence to such.  

~

Here is an excerpt from the author of the debunked arguments:

Ironically, a third option that in fact I’m quite certain is actually true, is the very option described by Aristotle himself. Aristotle took Plato to task for the mistake Feser is making, pointing out that it is not necessary that potential patterns actually exist in some concrete or mental form. They only have to potentially exist. Hence Aristotle said of Plato’s “world of forms” what Laplace said to Napoleon of God: “Sir, I have no need of that hypothesis.” Potential things are by definition not actual. So obviously we don’t need them to be actualized to exist. That’s a self-contradictory request. It’s thus self-contradictory of Feser to insist that potential things must be “actualized” somewhere (a mind; concrete things). Obviously there is no logical sense in which they must be actualized in that way.


This author is leaving room for unrealized potentials. But this argument does not necessarily defeat Feser's position. As he leaves out that change and potential to change are connected. A potential can pre-exist, but not necessarily, as argued. It can also be timeless and spaceless or void. If God exists in reality then He has the potential to exist in reality. An example would be the potential for a universal consciousness to distribute over reality. I am not sure why syne would dismiss my experiences as delusional or drug induced, as he needs all the help he can get. 

The CTMU actually defines unbound telesis as an active medium of pure potential which has pre-existent outcomes. Possibilities such as God are considered inevitable. And in the CTMU God configures Himself as reality. The challenge is to show that God is not merely a figment of the imagination or self. Thus an illusion. But an objective reality. And Feser's arguments are weak in that regard. As he provides no support or evidence that his God was ever witnessed. This is where I and Feser depart. I actually claim that the God that I know to exist can be measured and verified. This is part of the subject of my new book.

If definitions for "God" were loosened, one might not need a personal revelation (vulnerable to hallucinatory classification) to become a routine public manifestation. Like if the word referenced a concept or information entity that spreads from one thinking agent to another and can influence those individuals and "cause" things to happen via them which otherwise would not occur... Then many could believe it references some manner of potent pattern or transmitted, viral be-ing. (Even atheists are doing things which they otherwise would not because of the informorph, including designating themselves with such a label or counter-identity. Sam Harris perhaps being an exception who gets that.)

~

Here's a good review of his book and I agree. It sounds like a lot of unnecessary chatter to me. Way more annoying than my verbal diarrhea.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2166074553

OMG! I have to stop myself. It's like watching those damn reality shows just because you want to be annoyed. 

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/9R3BXJVjwKI