| Practical Philosophy » Plato's City and the American establishment » 4/17/2016 4:47 am |
- Timotheos
- Replies: 19
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DanielCC wrote:Timotheos wrote:Greg wrote:Well, it is not self-evident, even if it is evident, that man has a Creator. There is also a question of how "equality" and "Liberty" are to be taken--and, I suppose, "Happiness."
Idk, it seems to me that one could justifiably say that, for instance, it is self-evident that man has a Creator; I guess it depends on how strictly one is treating the term "self-evident".
Is it not, for instance, self-evident that there is no greatest prime number, or that the Pythagorean theorem is true, or even that Fermat's Last theorem is true?
All of these are necessary truths, but are not obviously true just by looking at the terms; typically, people have to be shown a proof to know for sure that they always hold, and sometimes these proofs, like in the last case, can be so hard and tricky, that few people can ever even evaluate their veracity.
Hence, why can't we treat, say, a cosmological argument in a similar light; if we accept that the principle of causality is self-evident, and that infinite regresses of causality are similarly self-evidently ruled out, then why can't we accept that there self-evidently exists some Creator?
One might worry that this would imply that some Ontological argument must work, but if we allow that there is at least some broad sense in which it is self-evident that at least something exists, then why would the conclusion of a cosmological argument not inherit this self-evident quality?
Maybe we cannot axiomatically say that something exists, from the very idea of existence, but why can't we treat such a premise as a postulate, which happens all the time in geometry?I think we need to be careful here. One of the greatest mistakes in modern philosophy was confuting the necessary with the self-evident (two marks of the dreaded 'A Priori', according to five generations of mistaken Empiricists, Kantians, Intuitionists and not a few Neo-Scholastics).
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Likewise why should one 'worry' if som
| Practical Philosophy » Plato's City and the American establishment » 4/17/2016 4:07 am |
- Timotheos
- Replies: 19
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And in honor of Spinoza, and because I’m a little nerdy and thought it might be kinda fun, here’s what such a thing might look like (in a quick, tongue-in-cheek sort of way); this is all perfectly in line with (at least Euclidian) geometric standards, so I’m willing to accept God’s existence to be at least as self-evident as any mathematical theorem, at least if one accepts the axioms and postulate as such.
And yes, the postulate is okay; many of Euclid's postulates were stated as exercises for the reader to perform. For instance, Euclid never said that between any two points, there is a straight line; rather, he said that, between any two points, draw a straight line.
Axioms (for our purposes here at least):
I. Everything which is contingent, has a cause
II. Not everything has a cause
III. Everything is either contingent or necessary
Postulates:
I. Note that you exist
Propositions:
PROP. I. Something exists.
Proof. — This is evident by generalizing postulate i.
PROP. II. There is either some contingent being, or there is some necessary being.
Proof. — Something exists (by Prop. i), and it is either contingent or necessary (Ax. iii). Q.E.D.
PROP. III. Some necessary being exists.
Proof. — There is either some contingent being, or there is some necessary being (Prop. ii). If there is a necessary being, then some necessary being exists, by definition. If there is a contingent being, then there must be some necessary being besides this thing, because if all things were contingent, then everything would have a cause (by Ax. i), and this is impossible (by. Ax ii). Either way, some necessary exists. Q.E.D.
| Practical Philosophy » Plato's City and the American establishment » 4/17/2016 2:48 am |
- Timotheos
- Replies: 19
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Greg wrote:
Well, it is not self-evident, even if it is evident, that man has a Creator. There is also a question of how "equality" and "Liberty" are to be taken--and, I suppose, "Happiness."
Idk, it seems to me that one could justifiably say that, for instance, it is self-evident that man has a Creator; I guess it depends on how strictly one is treating the term "self-evident".
Is it not, for instance, self-evident that there is no greatest prime number, or that the Pythagorean theorem is true, or even that Fermat's Last theorem is true?
All of these are necessary truths, but are not obviously true just by looking at the terms; typically, people have to be shown a proof to know for sure that they always hold, and sometimes these proofs, like in the last case, can be so hard and tricky, that few people can ever even evaluate their veracity.
Hence, why can't we treat, say, a cosmological argument in a similar light; if we accept that the principle of causality is self-evident, and that infinite regresses of causality are similarly self-evidently ruled out, then why can't we accept that there self-evidently exists some Creator?
One might worry that this would imply that some Ontological argument must work, but if we allow that there is at least some broad sense in which it is self-evident that at least something exists, then why would the conclusion of a cosmological argument not inherit this self-evident quality?
Maybe we cannot axiomatically say that something exists, from the very idea of existence, but why can't we treat such a premise as a postulate, which happens all the time in geometry?
| Theoretical Philosophy » William Lane Craig and Kevin Scharp | Is There Evidence for God? » 4/15/2016 12:27 am |
- Timotheos
- Replies: 337
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Greg, just for the record, this is Timotheos, not Timocrates; I've been here as long as he has, but don't post nearly as much...
| Theoretical Philosophy » William Lane Craig and Kevin Scharp | Is There Evidence for God? » 4/14/2016 11:49 pm |
- Timotheos
- Replies: 337
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KevinScharp wrote:
I'm not interested in being Hume -- I think miracles are conceivable. I just don't think we have any good reasons to believe that any have occurred.
Well that was Hume's position as well; he explicitly allows that there could be miracles. His argument revolves around the idea, which requires his weak conception of the laws of nature to be mere regularities to be a strong argument, that there is no way for us to have enough evidence that a punitive miracle exists to break the evidence we have for the event not happening; we see, everyday and in all circumstances we have seen, that people once dead stay dead, and hence, this is a very strong regularity; an exception to this would be fantastic.
But he does allow that there could be enough evidence to overcome this observation; it would have to be so strong however, that it would have to be a very rare state of affairs. And on Hume's view, religion always adds so much of people's irrational passions to the picture that we can basically just rule out their testimony as ever being able to provide enough evidence for their claims to miracles.
Hence, miracles are not impossible, but for us to ever have solid evidence of them, and especially religious ones, would require such a high level of evidence that we can just dismiss them as, at best, unverifiable.
| Theoretical Philosophy » William Lane Craig and Kevin Scharp | Is There Evidence for God? » 4/14/2016 11:36 pm |
- Timotheos
- Replies: 337
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KevinScharp wrote:
Thanks, it's great to do this. I sort of live and breath this stuff right now, so it's nice to have an outlet.
General relativity predicts that the gravitational field around the Earth and all the other objects in the vicinity would be a certain way. If that prediction is right, then the spacetime around Jesus would be warped in a way that would result in him falling into the water. Yes, God could bend spacetime in some way that prevented Jesus from falling. But then spacetime wouldn't be the way predicted by general relativity. And so Jesus not falling would be incompatible with general relativity.
If God were adding mass/energy to the system, then the mass/energy after God's intervention would not be what is predicted by the conservation theory (given what the mass/energy was before the intervention). So the conservation theory would predict the wrong answer for after the intervention. So God's intervention would be incompatible with the conservation theory.I'm not seeing the asymmetry to the Newtonian theory here. Newton's 1st law states, for instance, that every object at rest stays at rest unless a force acts upon it. Hence, Newton's laws don't predict one way or another whether, say, a orange basketball at rest is going to move or not; what it does predict, however, is that if a force does not act upon it, then it will stay at rest.
Similarly, doesn't relativity just say that as long as their are no other factors bending space-time, this is how it's going to be distributed? You allow that God could do so, hence, why is this not compatible with the theory's predictions?
| Theoretical Philosophy » William Lane Craig and Kevin Scharp | Is There Evidence for God? » 4/14/2016 7:46 pm |
- Timotheos
- Replies: 337
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KevinScharp wrote:
Let's look at the last point -- resurrection is incompatible with our best scientific theories. I really like your Jesus/gravity example. I think you're right that Jesus walking on water is not a violation of the classical theory of gravity (Newton). That's a very nice point. Is it yours or do you have a reference for it? Still, it won't help you much because there are other scientific theories that cause more problems for you. For example, is Jesus walking on water consistent with general relativity? I don't think so. If Jesus had walked on water then the spacetime around him would not have been warped in the way predicted by general relativity. And general relativity does not have any exception for supernatural causes. Another example is that the resurrection violates the conservation of mass/energy. Many scientific theories are formulated in terms of symmetries or conservation principles, and these require certain physical quantities to be distributed in a certain way throughout the universe and to change in certain ways over time. God intervening by lifting Jesus to heaven in the resurrection would violate some of these principles.
AFAIK, the walking on water example is my own, although I'm sure somebody else has used it before.
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I don't think I understand what you're getting at with the general relativity business; black holes are allowed to bend space-time, so why not God? Sure, general relativity doesn't predict such an action, but neither does it predict black holes either; it only implies details about what they would be like if we found them, and what to look for to verify their existence.
As for the conservation of energy, how does God's adding energy to a system, from outside the system at it were, violate the principle? Presumably, since we are going to have to look outside the universe to explain its origins, which is the creation of all sorts of energy, why can't we do so again at some time later on? How does this "v
| Theoretical Philosophy » William Lane Craig and Kevin Scharp | Is There Evidence for God? » 4/14/2016 7:05 pm |
- Timotheos
- Replies: 337
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rjonesx wrote:
First post :-)
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1. Weak Theism, Belief and Epistemology
I don't think that Dr. Scharp's position on epistemology amounts to a meaningful critique of Craig's apologetic, even if we take at face value his numbers (which he selected for the purpose of discussion and not specifically to defend).
Let's presume weak-belief/knowledge is in the 51%-80% range and 81%+ range would be strong-belief/knowledge.
Craig's case, as he describes many times is a "cumulative case". Let's imagine a different scenario, where a person is investigating a crime scene. In the crime scene we find 5 pieces of evidence. The first is a fingerprint, but it is only a 60% partial print. The second is a hat, but it is missing 40% of it. The third is camera footage, but the right 1/3 is blurred out, revealing only 67% of the assailant's face. The fourth is a mole on the assailant's arm, but only 53% of it is viewable. And finally, the fifth is a footprint, but only 57% of it remains. Suspect A matches all of these, being seen in pictures with a hat in the past resembling the portion they found, having a footprint consistent with the portion they found, so on and so forth.
All of these, under Dr. Scharp's assessment, would be "weak beliefs" (which I think is correct), but would it not be right of us to think that 5 weak beliefs might combine in a cumulative case to fairly strong belief that Suspect A is the culprit? As long as the evidence is independent of one another, this seems intuitively right.
I think this is because we make a big mistake when we think of the probabilities behind belief in something like the LCA. A 30% confidence in the LCA is a 30% confidence that it shows God exists, not a 70% confidence God does not exist. To that effect, we should actually consider any confidence in the arguments to be points, so to speak, on a scoreboard which keeps the balance between reasons for God's existence and reasons against God's existence. On one side of the boar
| Theoretical Philosophy » William Lane Craig and Kevin Scharp | Is There Evidence for God? » 4/14/2016 6:25 pm |
- Timotheos
- Replies: 337
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KevinScharp wrote:Timotheos wrote:
And some of the attacks were almost obviously calculated political moves to discredit him with the audience (I'm looking at you completely off topic same-sex adoption criticism, as well as, to a lesser degree, Craig stated skepticism on macro-evolution)
Actually, Veritas asked us to explicitly say why the debate mattered for practical issues. I followed those instructions. Craig did not. Moreover, my criticism of intelligent design was part of an objection to his uses of scientific results in his arguments (e.g., Kalam) while at the same time rejecting entire sciences (e.g., Biology). That's just cherry-picking at its worst.
I can understand the evolution attack, because you're right that Craig needs to give a principled reason why he thinks he can accept mainstream physics, but reject mainstream biology; that was why I qualified it with "to a lesser degree".
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The same-sex adoption one was the one that really struck me, since it only very remotely connects with Craig's arguments and principles; even if you are a Theist, and even if you are a Christian, even a Southern Baptist like Craig, one would still have to determine whether or not they might permit such an activity, so it only very remote part of Craig's world-view, and is a position that a non-Christian, and even a Athiest, could hold.
I don't really want to push this point too much more though, since it's a minor thing, and I would rather deal with more substantitive criticisms in this forum; I just mention it because there is a significant percentage of the especially young population, both pro and con, whose minds just shut down when they hear the words same-sex marriage, and I would rather those people keep their minds turned on for such an educative debate.
| Religion » Anglican Works » 4/13/2016 9:05 pm |
- Timotheos
- Replies: 3
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Hey, Jeremy Taylor, you made it onto your own list!
As an ex-Methodist with an eye towards Wesley's influences (you noted the most important one in fact, which was the work by William Law), I've always had and retain a fondness for a lot of the old high church authors, even now as a Catholic; it's tragic what the Church of England has become, compared to some of its brightest lights and moments.