Comments by "MC116" (@angelmendez-rivera351) on "Rationality Rules"
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@davidgould9431 Ancient philosophers were justified in making the mistake, though: axiomatic set theory did not exist in their day, so it was quite literally impossible to have known that their understanding of infinity, which is based on intuition, was actually inaccurate. WLC, on the other hand, is certainly not justified in making this mistake, as he lives in the 21st century, during an era where we have a better understanding of infinity, and of set theory, than we ever did before.
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@AShaif ...but suddenly we go all skeptic when it comes to the cause of the universe, because there is 1% chance there is no cause, despite arguments from fine-tuning, irreducible complexity, contingency, truth, language origin, the evolutionary argument against naturalism, and other cosmological, teleological arguments for the first cause.
You have an idiosyncratic usage of the word "despite." Why would you use the word "despite" only to proceed to mention a crap ton of extremely bad arguments that are straight up just much worse than the Kalam cosmological argument in terms of validity and soundness? You can present 100 bad arguments for the existence of God if you want. Present 1000. A million. Hell, you can present an infinite amount of bad arguments, if you want to. It will not change a thing. 0·ω is still equal to 0. What we need is a good argument, not a trillion extremely poor ones.
So if induction is a problem, why don't we act skeptical with things that are far more taken-for-granted.
Whatever do you mean? I cannot think of anything more taken for granted than the existence of God. There is more evidence for the existence of UFOs than there is for the existence of God. And this is really saying a lot. The 100 bad arguments you listed above do not make it less taken-for-granted. All they do is demonstrate that not only is the belief taken-for-granted, but it is also indefensible.
But my favorite is the contingency argument and the argument from language origin.
Seriously? Your favorite arguments are the worst of the bunch? Well,... you are a creationist, so I guess this makes sense.
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Are some of these questions unanswerable?
A better answer is "are these questions meaningful and coherent?" Typically, if a question has no answer, then it is because the question itself is nonsensical. The fact that you can throw words together to form a grammatical correct interrogative sentence does not imply that the sentence itself is meaningful. "Why is the Sun equal to the number 5?" This sentece is grammatically correct and mechanically correct too, but the question is literally nonsensical. It is meaningless. Is it unanswerable? Yes, it is unanswerable, but not because there is some fundamental flaw in human reasoning; rather, it is because the question is, in a sense, not even really a question at all, just a nonsensical string of words that happens to be grammatically correct. It is because the person who asked the question is not very bright and does not have the best understanding of how questions are supposed to work. Questions like "Why is there something rather than nothing?" seem, superficially, like they deserve an answer, because they appeal to the very flawed and unreliable thing that we call "common sense", but upon further and careful inspection, such questions are equally as nonsensical as the example I gave. There is nothing to answer, because the question is meaningless: ultimately, it is not asking anything at all.
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This is exactly right, and it explains why Christianity is currently (though not for long) most popular religion in the world. Christianity is such an ill-defined, ambiguous-or-incoherent mess of a belief system, that it is very malleable, and thus, very easy to reinterpret in a way that agrees with your already pre-existing intuitions and conceptions of the world. It can easily adapt to any culture, and most mindsets. Other religions are a lot more rigid with what exactly defines their belief system, so they are not as malleable, and so, not as easy for people to adopt as a way of justifying their pre-existing intuitions and conceptions. Virtually no Christian is actually willing, or capable, of aligning their beliefs in accordance to the actual history of how Christianity evolved from Judaism. Christianity functions as nothing more than a tool for confirmation bias.
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@ruaraidh74 The result of throwing a die is a digit from the set {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6}. Therefore, the result of throwing a die is a 10^120-tuple from the set {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6}^(10^120). A 10^120-tuple of digits is not an epistemically meaningful message, so what you describe is impossible. Also, what is this supposed to be analogous to? Although we tend to model dice throws with probability theory, the reality is, the physics of a die throw are deterministic. With sufficiently precise control of the initial conditions of the throw, one can control the outcome of the throw, and accurately predict it, with the accuracy improving as the amount of throws increases. As such, in principle, one could throw a die 10^(10^(100)) times, and have it always come out a 6. Dice throws are not random. The reason we often have to model them as if they are random is because, under most circumstances, it is not possible to determine the initial conditions with sufficient precision, and as dice are examples of chaotic systems, any predictions you end up making on the basis of the initial conditions is redundant. Instead, we assume a uniform distribution for the initial conditions, and provided that there are no irregular forces acting on the die during the throw, as is usually the case, the uniformity is preserved by the physics, so we can model the outcome of a die as a random variable distributed uniformly. Therefore, in practice, we have sufficient justification to state that the outcome of a die is approximately probabilistic, and that the outcome of each digit during a single throw is approximately 1/6. This is analogous to what can be said for all other physical interactions in the universe.
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@karlwinkler4223 Of course, this does seem to be in conflict with "Love your neighbour,"...
How so? The Greek word translated as "neighbour" has essentially a meaning equivalent to today's "fellow Jew" phrase. The person who suggested that this was not meant to be about Jewish people, but all humans, was the apostle Paul, but Paul never met Jesus, and all of the other leading proto-Christian preachers of the time clearly disagreed with Paul, since Paul said so himself in the letters that he wrote to those leaders. The apostle Peter, in particular, who Paul claimed to have met, and who was presumably one of the 12 Disciples, was described as having believed that Christianity was only for the Jews, and that you still needed to observe the Torah (i.e., be a religious Jew) to be Christian. This was a different religious sect from the one Paul started, and the only reason Paul's sect won was because Roman theologians and political leaders liked that Paul was antagonizing Jewish people, so they began to subscribe to his belief system, and they weaponized it to justify persecuting the Jews. It eventually became the Church of Roman Empire, and the preachers were all Roman priests who persecuted the Jewish Christian sects that still persisted. It was a very openly anti-Semitic view, and they treated Jewish people as "Christ-killers," all in view of the Gospels, which portray the Roman government as essentially being innocent and having "washed" their "hands," since the Jews were the ones who asked for Jesus' crucifixion.
Does this mean Jesus himself was racist? No. No one knows what Jesus actually preached, but it seems that Jesus was still some type of Messianic, apocalyptic Second Temple preacher, so solely from a socio-cultural viewpoint, it is unlikely that he was spreading any message of universal salvation like Christians today would have you believe.
...but I would think it would be foolish to say that those ideas align with the spirit of Christianity.
Do they? Slavery was openly endorsed in the New Testament by Paul. Even Jesus said nothing against slavery, not according to the Bibles, anyway. Besides, what do you mean by "the spirit of Christianity"? What exactly makes you think we get to define what that is? As soon as 15 years after the death and crucifixion of Jesus, there were dozens of Christian sects competing with each other, some more universalist and less ethnocentric than others. All sects of modern Christianity are descended from only one of those sects: Paul's sect. Does Paul get to define "the spirit of Christianity," solely because his sect is the only one that did not get persecuted into evolution or extinction? That is a pretty ridiculous standard, I would say. Moreover, at the end of the day: no one actually knows what is it that Jesus taught or believed. We do not know even the general gist, much less the details. Pretending that we can know or define "the spirit of Christianity," especially in light of the history of Christianity as a whole, is very arrogant, and I would say, naïve.
Either way, if anything is undeniable, it is that slavery has always been a part of the history of Christianity. Jesus himself was never said to oppose slavery, and evidently, no Christian leader had the motivation to use their "Christian values" to oppose slavery, so, trying to pretend that Christianity can be meaingfully construed as somehow being "anti-slavery" is dishonest at best. Let's not give credit to Christianity that it does not deserve. I am tired of irreligious people trying to defend indefensible things that religion has been directly involved with.
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Also, we DO have enough information. You are just personally ignorant about the information. For example, the I.O.C. is, as far as is currently known, far more reliable a source than the I.B.A. Additionally, we can corroborate by realizing that Imane Khelif is an Algerian athlete. In Algeria, being transgender is illegal, and if she had been born intersex with male genitalia and a propensity for high testosterone production, she simply would have been raised as a man and her birth certificate and passport would reflect this, because the government would have dictated for this to be the case. The only reason she has female in her birth certificate, female in her passport, and female in any other legal document used for her to be allowed to compete in Algeria's women's sports is because she is biologically female. The government knows she is biologically female, and this is about as strong confirmation as you can get from a country like Algeria. So there is no significant risk of the I.O.C. having made a mistake when most of the screening and testing simply would have occurred long before she was even allowed to be a boxer in her country of residence.
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@youwillwin7107 For many, the regularity of the universe and the precision with which the universe exploded ( expands ) into being provides even more evidences for the existence of God.
I have no clue why you present "exploded" and "expanded" as being synonymous. They are not synonymous. Also, the universe did not "expand into being." This is nonsense.
The Teleological argument goes like this: 1. Every design has a designer 2. The universe has high- complex design 3. Therefore, the universe has a designer.
Premise 2 is false. The universe is not a design, and does not exhibit signs of being a design.
Scientists are finding the universe is like that watch ( anology of William Paley ), except even more precisely designed.
Citation needed.
These highly-precise and interdependent environmental conditions (called "anthropic constants") make up what is known as the "Anthropic Principle"-- a title for the mounting evidence that has many scientists believing the universe is extremely fine tuned (designed) to support human CONSCIOUSNESS on earth.
No, this is a misrepresentation of what the anthropic principle is.
Thats why some notorious atheists including Antony Flew later believed in God.
Antony Flew converted right as he developed a severe case of dementia.
Some Anthropic constants example include: birth date of the star-planetary system if too early: quantity of heavy elements would be too low for large rocky planets to form if too late: star would not yet have reached stable burning phase; ratios of potassium-40, uranium-235, -238, and thorium-232 to iron would be too low for long-lived plate tectonics to be sustained on a rocky planet flux of cosmic-ray protons (one way cloud droplets are seeded) if too small: inadequate cloud formation in planet’s troposphere if too large: too much cloud formation in planet’s troposphere rotation period if longer: diurnal temperature differences would be too great if shorter: atmospheric jet streams would become too laminar and average wind speeds would increase too much fine structure constant (a number, 0.0073, used to describe the fine structure splitting of spectral lines) if larger: DNA would be unable to function; no stars more than 0.7 solar masses _if larger than 0.06: matter would be unstable in large magnetic fields _ if smaller: DNA would be unable to function; no stars less than 1.8 solar masses oxygen to nitrogen ratio in atmosphere if larger: advanced life functions would proceed too quickly if smaller: advanced life functions would proceed too slowly Jupiter’s mass if greater: Earth’s orbit would become unstable; Jupiter’s presence would too radically disturb or prevent the formation of Earth if less: too many asteroid and comet collisions would occur on Earth.
This is all mere speculation. We have no way of knowing what the universe would be like if the universe were different. These claims are unscientific, as they are unfalsifiable.
For more evidence: https://reasons.org/explore/blogs/tag/fine-tuning/page/2 https://reasons.org/explore/publications/articles/rtb-design-compendium-2009
This is not a scientific source, so this is dismissed at hand.
What are the chances? It's not there just a few broadly defined constants that may have resulted by chance. There are more than 100 very narrowly defined constants that strongly point to an Intelligent Designer.
No, there are not. Currently, per quantum field theory, there are only 20 degrees of freedom in the constants of the universe. Also, it is impossible to know how narrowly defined these constants are, since it is impossible to measure them with infinite precision. Also, determining the width of definition is not sufficient for determining the probability of these constants occurring.
Astrophysicist, Hugh Ross, calculated the probability these and other constants would exist for any planet in the universe by chance (i.e, without divine design). To meet all conditions, there is 1 chance in 10^1038 (one chance in one with 1038 zeroes after it)-- essentially 0% chance. According to probability theory, odds of less than 1 in 10^50 equals " zero probability".
Citation, or it did not happen.
Check:https://reasons.org/explore/publications/articles/probability-for-life-on-earth
Not a citation, so dismissed at hand. I doubt Hugh Ross actually ever did any of this: at best, he is being taken out if context and misunderstood, but if he had ever made such a sloppy, mistake-filled calculations, then his credibility as an astrophysicist would be lowered tremendously, as it would display ignorance of probability theory at a basic level.
It only proves that atheism is just a dogmatic belief.
What it proves is that you do not understand what citing your sources means.
Important: The term “entropy” describes degree of thermodynamic “disorder” in a closed system like the universe.
It does not. What it does actually describe is the information that we have about the microstates of a system in extrapolation from the known macrostate.
Amazingly, our universe was at its “minimum entropy” at the very beginning,...
No, it was not. The classical laws of thermodynamics are known to not be applicable at the Planck scales at which rapid cosmic inflation began.
...which begs the question “how did it get so orderly?”
This is very simple: entropy is not a description of orderliness. "Order" and "disorder" are not scientifically valid concepts, not within physics.
Looking just at the initial entropy conditions,...
The initial conditions of cosmic inflation are literally unknown, what the hell are you talking about?
...what is the likelihood of a universe supportive of life coming into existence by coincidence? One in billions of billions? Or trillions of trillions of trillions? Or more?
This is a meaningless question. To ask what the probability of an event is, you must assume that other events are possible (not known to be true), and what the probability of the other events is (not knowable).
Sir Roger Penrose, 2020 Nobel prize winner and a close friend of Stephen Hawking, wondered about this question and tried to calculate the probability of the initial entropy conditions of the Big Bang...
No, he did not. Once again, you are misrepresenting well-known scientific ideas. In this case, you are strongly misrepresenting Penrose's work.
According to Penrose, the odds against such an occurrence were on the order of 10 to the power of 10^123 to 1.
Citation needed.
But Penrose's answer is vastly more than this: It requires 1 followed by 10^10^123 zeros It’s important to recognize that we're not talking about a single unlikely event here. We’re talking about hitting the jackpot over and over again, nailing extremely unlikely, mutually complementary parameters of constants and quantities, far past the point where chance could account for it.
Alright, cool story. Now, show me some nonfiction. Show me some science.
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@AShaif The composition fallacy is not a decisive defeater,...
It is, though. Formally speaking, the composition fallacy is the claim that if S is the mereological sum of the parts in collection P, and each element of P has a property Q, then S also has the property Q. Even just from naive set theory, this does not follow, obviously. For example, every natural number is finite, but the set of natural numbers is infinite.
Induction is taken for granted for everyday life, but suddenly we go all skeptic when it comes to the cause of the universe...
Everyday life, and the origins of the universe, are fundamentally different circumstances, and the distinction is relevant. So it is reasonable to not overextend induction here.
...because there is 1% chance that there is no cause,...
The probability is much bigger than 1%.
...despite the arguments from fine tuning,...
I provided a systematic debunking of the strongest version of the fine-tuning argument below.
...irreducible complexity...
Irreducible complexity is mutually inconsistent with the fine-tuning argument, as the fine-tuning argument assumes evolution is true. Also, the concept of irreducible complexity is unscientific.
...contingency...
I already addressed the argument from contingency you presented above. However, there are better, strongers versions of the contingency argument. The strongest version I know of is the modal ontological argument presented by Alvin Platinga. However, the argument is flawed, in that the starting premise is speculative assumption, and also, the jump from "Possibly, necessarily, a maximally excellent being exists" and "necessarily, a maximally excellent being exists" requires accepting modal axiom 5, which is very much questionable.
...truth...
The existence of truth is entirely explained by the theory of evolution.
...consciousness...
Idbit.
...language origin...
Idbit.
...evolutionary argument against naturalism...
The evolutionary argument against naturalism betrays a misrepresentation of the theory of evolution, so it is unscientific. Also, this is mutually inconsistent with the argument from irreducible complexity.
...and other cosmological, teleological arguments for the first cause.
These all have the same unsoundness problems that the Kalam has: they all fundamentally misunderstand causation, and all assume that the universe "began," which is false.
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@MZONE991 If causal finitism is true, then we end up with a simple non-composite thing which is being itself.
This is nonsensical, as "being" is not a thing in itself, nor can it be.
You just showcasing your ignorance of classical theism.
You can make up your own worldview and slap a catchy name onto it. It does not make any less made up. You are just showcasing your ignorance of all concepts philosophical.
because the first cause of the universe cannot be a composite thing, because this eternal composition of parts is also infinite causation.
No, it is not the case that an eternal composition of parts is infinite causation.
because that's what we mean when say "God"
No, it is not. I assure you most Christians do not define "God" in such a manner, and neither does WLC, or most apologists. All you are demonstrating is that you are sufficiently intellectually dishonest, that you are willing to let the word "God" mean whatever you want it to, even change its meaning, as long as your ego thinks it is helping you prove a point. To define "God" in such a manner is pointless, as someone who accepts the existence of "God" defined in this manner is not even a theist, only a deist. You have yet to demonstrate that "God" is worthy of worship, is accurately described by the Bible, etc. You cannot call it "God" until you demonstrate such things, lest you admit you are intellectually dishonest.
this is like asking "why call the molecule with 2 hydrogen and oxygen atoms water?"
No, it is not like that at all, because "water" is what we call just a particular liquid, though to what extent the name is applicable is nebulous, vague, ambiguous, fuzzy, and ill-defined, since it is just a colloquial categorization based solely on intuition; but it just so happens that this liquid is composed of molecules of 2 hydrogen atoms ionically bonded with 1 oxygen atom, and so by extension, we also call it "water," whenever applicable. This is not at all analogous to taking multiple completely different definitions, and slapping the label "God" onto them without (0) proving any of the definitions is satisfied or even satisfiable, (1) the definitions are equivalent.
Because if they don't, then by definition, they are not one composite whole, and do not form one being.
That is not what the definition of composite being is.
Analogy: if each mechanism in a car does not interact with the other, then is this really a car?
This is not a valid analogy. Built into the definition of "car" specifically is the fact that certain parts interact in a specific way, but there is no reason to suggest this ought to be true of all composite things.
Language is a human construct.
No. Language is a construct of a social-emotional species. Language exists in other animal species, and it even exists in plants, strangely enough. Anyway, this is just a minor nitpick on my part. But what is actually important is that you are failing to undertand how this social-emotional construct actually works. Words are signifiers, but signifiers serve no purpose without making reference to a signified thing. A correct use of language only declares a same usage of meaning for a signifier when the signified is the same in the different usages. If I take a word two refer to two different things, while pretending that it actually only refers to one thing, then I am using language incorrectly, and it demonstrates I am ignorant or dishonest.
but the actual cause of lightning is not identical to what Greek mythology calls Zeus.
You are so close to understanding the point that Kanna-chan is making.
however, the fundamental origin of reality is exactly th God described by classical theism.
The problem is that this is just not true, whatever you think classical theism is. Also, it is nonsensical to talk about the fundamental origin of reality, since whatever that origin is must itself be a part of reality. That is, unless you think the origin is fictional.
Beyond this, there are multiple other problems with your argument.
0. You have yet to demonstrate that "atemporal" is a coherent property.
1. That "causation" is not inherently temporal.
2. That causal finitism is true.
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@Thefamilychannel723 The question you ask does not make sense, if you analyze it carefully. You see, in physics, we analyze worldlines. A worldline is just some path in spacetime, and the laws of physics just tell us what the restrictions are for these paths. These paths are meant to describe physical systems, and we can interpret the endpoints of the path as the "beginning" and "end" of the systems' lifetime. At each point (t, x, y, z) in the path, you can ask question about the state of the system at that point. If you have two systems, you can compare their worldlines, and you can compare their beginning points. This means you can compare the time coordinates of their beginning points. So, it makes sense to ask "which came first?," in the sense that you can ask "if t0 is the beginning time of system A, and t1 is the beginning time of system B, then, is t0 less than t1, are they equal, or is t0 greater than t1?" This question is perfectly coherent.
So, why is your question not coherent? Is it not analogous to the scenario I just presented? No, it is not analogous. The problem is, spacetime, as a physical system, cannot be represented by a worldline... because it is the collection of all possible worldlines to begin with! As such, it really makes no sense to ask about the "beginning" or "end" of spacetime as a system. Your question is analogous to taking the set of real numbers, treating it like a number in itself, and then asking "Does the set of real numbers come before 0, after 0, or is equal to 0?" That question does not make any sense. You can ask if a real number comes before another real number, but you cannot ask if the set of real numbers itself comes before or after a particular real number included in the set. Your question is completely analogous to this: the example I presented is the 1-dimensional analogue of your question, since spacetime is basically just 4 copies of the set of real numbers multiplied together.
The lesson here is this: you can meaningfully ask about spatiotemporal properties of physical systems embedded within spacetime, but those questions stop making any sense when you ask them about spacetime itself. Spacetime is fundamentally different from all other physical systems which exist, so you need to think about it separately. By the way, I do not know if you are religious or not, but I will just say this: Christian apologists consistently fail to understand this fundamental distinction between spacetime, and other systems embedded in spacetime. This is why the Kalam cosmological argument fails miserably: the argument insists that the universe (and therefore, spacetime) had a beginning point. But if you study the mathematics and physics of spacetime, then one can see that this is simply not true.
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@Jeremy-wp4yh As expected, the comments are filled with people quoting scripture out of context or not understanding what they've read.
I seriously doubt you have the high literacy skills necessary for your opinion to hold any weight in that subject-matter. Besides, the criticism is completely worthless, as it fails to point out examples, and as it fails to actually provide corrections anyone could learn from. You are exhibiting the behavioral traits of an Internet troll, and not the traits of an intellectually honest individual who is willing to have a discussion in which you and other people help each other learn and improve yourselves. Why should anyone even take you seriously, when you are only here to antagonize, and not to be civil? Do you seriously believe anyone is going to convert to Christianity, when the only thing you are doing is be a bit of an annoying pest?
But nevertheless, why are atheists always debating Christians.
I know this sentence is meant to be a question, but you clearly forgot to replace the period with a question mark. When you make mistakes like this, do you expect me to believe that you have the sufficient literacy skills to actually be a reliable judge of other people's comprehension of the text that they are reading? Because if that is your expectation, then my advice to you is: stop it.
Anyway, to actually answer your question: we are not always debating Christians. Most of the time, we are just living our lives, and not debating anyone at all. The problem is, people like you always show up, and start cooking up some trouble. People like you are always trying to overthrow democracy by imposing religious laws onto the country, and are always promoting that we indoctrinate our children and brainwash them with mythology. You expect us to sit back and allow that? Of course not. People like the Jehovah's Witnesses are always knocking on people's doors and trying to annoy us with beliefs they are incapable of supporting with evidence, all while promoting anti-scientific drivel. Are Muslims doing that? At least in the West, no, they are not. Are Jewish people doing that? Again, at least in the West, no. Are Buddhists doing that? No. Are Satanists doing that? No.
Why not other religion?
Again with the linguistic mistakes. You are really not inspiring confidence, as far as literacy goes.
Anyway, we DO debate people from other religions. We even debate fellow atheists. We do not debate people from other religions as commonly as Christians, because they do not bother us anywhere nearly as much Christians with their nonsense, but we still do debate them whenever they try.
Why not Satanism?
Satanism is a lot like Daoism, in that while it can technically be argued to be a religion, many of the adherents are essentially irreligious, and only hold Satanism philosophically, and not ritually. Satanism and Daoism are also like Buddhism in that these religions are functionally atheistic. Sure, you can be a Buddhist and believe in gods, but this is not actually a requirement of Buddhism. The Great Dao in Daoism is essentially a metaphor for the divine, incomprehensible aspects for the universe, and so, Daoism is basically a form of pantheism, but at the end of the day, pantheism is essentially a form of superstitious or panpsychic atheism that reinterprets religious language and tries to make that language work within the confines of atheistic worldviews. Basically, pantheism and atheism are identical in what they assert, they only differ in the details of the semantics they use when making their assertions. Satanism is like Daoism in this regard. Satanists, generally speaking, treat Satan more like an abstract symbol than like an actually existing, concrete entity. It is basically a modernity-resurrected form of ancient "pagan" pantheism. So, when it comes down to it, people who self-identify as atheists do not have all that much to disagree with when it comes to Satanism.
Besides, every Satanist I have met has been far friendlier and far more ethical than almost all Christians I know. Also, these people hold no political power at all, given how much of a minority they are. They are not even trying to legislate our lives with religious laws infringing upon human rights, so there is not much of a point to debating them.
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