Comments by "MC116" (@angelmendez-rivera351) on "Rationality Rules"
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@SlimThrull I honestly question the sincerity of your "skepticism". Having questions is fair, but the Internet is a place that exists, and very in-depth discussions on the subject involving various complex topics in sociology, anthropology, physiology, and neuropsychology can be found if you just put 5 minutes of effort into it. Given this, demanding for an answer on YT of all places is suspicious. Also, the fact that you have to assume that people will bring up an objection like "oh, and before you assume that doesn't happen, Google this" as opposed to any other objection over is disingenuous. I do not think you are doing this maliciously, but with an attitude like this, you will just never get a satisfying answer, especially because I doubt many people would want to engage when you present those red flags in the first place. Saying you are open minded does not make it so.
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8:10 - 8:13 THANK YOU! There is no time at which there is no time. I think, whatever else is said in the video later on, that this is the most important sentence in the entire video. Because this one sentence, this one tautology, is what signifies defeat for the Kalam, singlehandedly. It creates problems with both premise 1 and premise 2. More on this later, but for any readers, just keep this sentence in mind. There is no time at which there is no time.
8:25 - 8:30 Exactly! This is the issue that WLC does not understand, and it is the issue that made him look completely foolish when having his live-streamed debate with Scott Cliffton. No one claims the universe popped into existence out of nothing. Such an accusation is a strawman, and all it demonstrates is the people do not understand the Kalam, not even WLC himself, apparently.
9:45 - 9:59 Yes, but the problem with this version is that premise 1, in this case, is just arbitrary baseless assertion that, whenever apologists try to justify it, they always end up having to resort to the unrestricted principle anyway. The restricted principle cannot be substantiated on its own terms. I honestly think it is not even worth discussing, until such an attempt of independent substantiation is given. The burden of proof is on WLC here.
12:08 - 12:21 But that is precisely why appeals to intuition are fallacious. Ultimately, an intuitive statement has no relationship to being a true statement or a demonstrable statement. Whether a statement can be intuited or not should be universally considered irrelevant to discourse, because it does nothing to determine whether asserting the statement is reasonable or not. It adds literally nothing to the conversation. The fact that, in metaphysics, intuition is regarded an acceptable avenue of argument by many philosophers, is part of the reason why I find it very difficult to take metaphysics as an academic field of study, seriously. In my opinion, it is philosophy done poorly.
12:30 - 12:38 I disagree. To start with, this description makes it sound like it is difficult to overturn intuition, and that is just not the case. Every form of evidence to the contrary necessarily overturns intuition, no matter how weak. Intuition is the weakest form of evidence possible, if you can even call it call that. Epistemically, the entire point behind saying that X supports Y is that, in more situations than not, X could only have occurred if Y did. But since there is no correlation between intuition and truth, intuition does not satisfy this basic minimal criterion for what constitutes evidence. Something has no correlation to truth under any circumstances cannot serve as support of anything, by definition. Intuition is as good as support as any other thing not related to truth, such a beauty, naturalness, or what have you. Epistemically, if intuition can support a statement, then literally all things can, regardless of how fallacious it is.
12:40 - 12:52 This is not true. Most mathematical truths and logical truths are not only unintuitive, but counterintuitive, and this also goes for scientific truths. The fact that we find the material implication in logic so weird and "wrong" is an excellent demonstration of this. So I fail to see how exactly these things are based on intuition.
12:52 - 13:07 Well, no, that is inaccurate. You are treating it as if "if p and p implies q, then q" is a conclusion that we make. But that is not how it is. "If p and p implies q, then q" is literally just the definition of the word "implies." There is nothing to conclude here, intuitively or otherwise. So I disagree with your explanation that logic is based on intuition. The evidence very strongly suggests it is not, and treating a definition as a conclusion does not demonstrate otherwise.
13:12 - 13:20 What? No, that is, with all due respect, utterly ridiculous. It does not "seem" to the scientist that there is any pressure gauge there. That is literally not how measurement works. The scientist simply reads what the instrument of measurement is saying to the best of their ability, and they write it down. They say the pressure gauge is 14 atm, because to the best of their sensorial-cognitive coordination, that is what the instrument is saying. There are no "seemings" here in the way that you explained them earlier.
13:29 - 13:32 No, that is just false. What makes science reliable is the scientific method, not intuition. In fact, in multiple occasions, the scientific method has had us conclude that seemings actually are unreliable. And to be honest, this entire segment on seemings felt very different from the rest of the video, very lackluster and significantly less well-substantiated than everything else in the video. It was completely unnecessary, and the way it was presented was like propaganda. The video would have been better off without this segment. Everything else so far has been on point, but this segment alone had so many inaccuracies, it made me think you had an agenda of sorts there. It was completely unneeded, as you and I both agree that something being metaphysically intuitive is not sufficient reason for accepting premise 1 of the Kalam (otherwise, this video would not exist). Hopefully, the rest of the video is better than this.
13:34 - 13:50 Okay, so I retract some of my previous statements. This here clarifies what you actually meant, but you did a poor job at explaining it. It is not the case that intuitions actually serve as support for a claim. That much is false, and I already discussed why. But if it is the case that enough people have the intuition, and there is no available information that contradicts the intuition, then it does become more reasonable to believe in the intuition, than to not believe it. This does not mean the claim is sufficiently justified, though, but in this case, a Bayesian analysis would reveal the claim is more likely to be true, based on the available information. But this all falls apart in light of the counterarguments we will encounter only a few seconds later in this video.
14:03 - 14:21 Ditto. And I think this sole response undermines the entirety of the previous segment, hence justifying my admittedly harsh criticism of it. I fail to see why one would have that segment when this objection exists. And I do not think this video will provide a good objection to this counterargument.
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14:26 - 14:52 What? No, I am sorry, but I have to become harsher with my critique. What on Earth does it mean for something to be reliable if not that it consistently proves decisively that statements are true? Now it just seems to me as though you are using the word "reliable" idiosyncratically without providing a disclaimer that you are doing that. If intuition is so often incorrect, why should we trust that it is correct in this one, isolated instance, and not be skeptical right away? All you have done is say "Intuition is not infallible, but that does not mean we should discard it" without even attempting to provide a good reason for why that is the case. I apologize, Rationality Rules, but you are just completely wrong on this point. And let us address the analogy you gave, shall we? Yes, it is true that perception also fails often. But we are talking completely different scales here. Not only is sensorial perception correct much more often than intuition is, but unlike with intuition, we can actually provide very precise and accurate qualitative and quantitative measurements of when our perceptions will fail, and when they will succeed, and we can also explain why they will or will not fail. There is no such thing for intuition that allows us to make it useful for coming to conclusions. Perceptions are reliable, as long as we limit ourselves to a certain class of circumstances that have been well-studied. There is no known class of circumstances for which we know intuition will be reliable. So we should not think of intuition as being reliable, except for the most mundane of circumstances. And as we are clearly talking about the universe beginning to exist here, we are definitely in the realm of "not mundane." So intuition definitely should be discarded in this context. So, again, Rationality Rules, with all due respect, you are super off the mark here. Everything else in the video so far has been great, but your deliberation on intuition is rife of misunderstandings.
15:02 - 15:07 And if that were true, then that would help support the above counterargument against my objection. But as pointed out earlier, this is just not true. There are very few assumptions that logic, mathematics, and the scientific method make, and some of those are not even intuitively true, for what it is worth, but are there just as a matter of formality. Also, I have no idea why you keep insisting so strongly on defending this notion of metaphysical intuition. This creates many more problems than it solves. If we ought to accept premises on metaphysical intuition alone in the absence of evidence to the contrary, then you should be deists, and not atheists. I mean, according to WLC, the existence of God is justified by metaphysical intuition. The entire worldview of reformed epistemology is reliant on this notion. What evidence to the contrary do you have that resists this intuition? To my knowledge, none. What about the kinds of mental gymnastics that people engage in, such as confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance? Those are clearly examples of intuition. And you may say, "yes. But the point of intuition, in this context, is that the evidence can overridde it." But how do you come to that conclusion? The very concept behind cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias is precisely that one does not need to accept that such evidence overrides anything. So if intuition is really to be taken as primitive, as you insist, then why should evidence override anything at all? That does not make any sense, and I know you agree that it makes no sense. So, please, for the sake of the quality of your arguments, stop trying to defend this reformed-epistemology-ridden idea of metaphysical intuitions. It creates more problems for your arguments and everything else you say in the video, than it solves. And it really is unnecessary. Again, I have no clue why you insist so strongly on this point that you have spent a full 3 minutes presenting essentially the same argument. It serves no purpose.
15:15 - 15:29 No, this is completely wrong. The law of contradiction does not rest on intuition, and as I explained, the fact that people feel comfortable in not only engaging in cognitive dissonance, but also straight up just holding mutually exclusive beliefs, demonstrates that the law of noncontradiction is not such an intuition, and perhaps it may not be true at all. This is why there is an entire discipline of formal logic dedicated to researching contradiction-tolerating logics. And the idea that an external world exists at all is not even an assumption the scientific method requires. The scientific method is all about data and making predictions. What the data is describing is solely a matter of interpretation.
15:50 - 15:57 Because that implication is built into 1 itself. It is not possible to accept premise 1 without accepting the implication that defines premise 1. This goes back to the whole "if p and p implies q, then q." You guys claimed this is an intuitive assumption, but it is not: it is literally what defines the implication in "p implies q." sigh You guys are just repeating yourselves now, and it really is just harming the quality of the video. You are trying so hard to defend the indefensible, and I do not understand why. It makes me a bit sad. I have watched many of your other videos, and I know for a fact that you do not actually think arguments from intuition are reasonable in these contexts, so why are you now pretending that you do think that?
16:00 - 16:16 What even makes you conclude that? Did you seriously not acknowledge the possibility that one possible such argument would be "...by definition"?
16:17 - 17:33 Ugh. Okay, in what domain of discourse do you think, conclusively, that intuition is reliable? I understand what you are getting at, and in the end, you are rejecting WLC's argument from intuition based on an appeal to inappropriate domain, but what was the point of that? Why use all of these bad arguments to say that there exists a domain in which intuition works, while failing to describe it, when you know that it does nothing to add nuance to the discussion and defend WLC's argument? And again, all it does is raise many more questions, and put into question everything else you have said, simply because I can argue that something is metaphysically intuitive, and that the domain of discourse in question is appropriate for the intuition. How would you ever debunk such an objection? That is why I find this entire segment problematic. By accepting that there it at least one presumably unspecifiable domain of discourse where metaphysical intuition obviously works - using very fallacious arguments to justify that - it makes anything else you have to say undermined by this. In fact, it makes the Kalam redundant, because as I explained earlier, metaphysical intuition can be and has been used by WLC as justification to believe God exists. It "proves" at least deism, if we are to accept your arguments. But I know you guys are not deists and I know you guys do not accept reformed epistemology. So I fail to see why you spend so much time defending it, when in the end, you are going to reject WLC's premise anyway. It feels like one big waste of everyone's time, and it puts you in a difficult spot. Anyway, I am moving on from this.
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17:35 - 18:39 But the problem with this is that the notion of a statement having "clarity" is inherently subjective. There is no way anyone can come up with an objective standard for this. Philosophers have tried, and all have failed. This is why formal logic formalizes tautologies in terms of truth-tables with respect to a choice of truth-functions, rather than just accepting a formal standard of obviousness.
18:40 - 19:03 There is no proposition that we can demonstrate that definitely satisfies this second criterion. Even the law of noncontradiction, upon further reflection, can seem less likely to be true. And again, this is entirely subjective.
20:17 - 20:23 Yet another example of the unreliability on intuition: the fact that it is subjective. And this brings me to the next point: which philosophers should we trust here? Is the causal principle intuitive? Or is it not? Whatever the answer is, someone is wrong here. If we are to regard intuitiveness as not a property that can be true or false of anything due to its inherent subjectivity, then how can it be evidence of anything? The more elaboration is being given here, the more thoroughly skeptical I am.
22:30 - 22:45 Oh, goodness, what is this? Metaphysically necessary truths? I thought this could not get more absurd.
24:01 - 24:29 This is exactly the problem with the entire discussion. It all boils down to "my opinion is...." "oh really? Well, MY opinion is..." who cares? Stop using intuitions, and actually start providing actual evidence. Personally, I am going to skip ahead in the video to a point in time where the interlocutors finally decide to stop discussing intuition with such unmerited philosophical seriousness, and move on to a legitimate use of logic, because I feel tired of beating the dead horse here.
25:45 - 25:50 You cannot claim that god has any properties before first determining whether god exists or not. This is a circular argument. "The cause of the universe is omnipotent." That assumes the conclusion of the Kalam is true, but that is the very thing we are questioning to begin with.
28:00 - 29:00 This principle is just false, though, and I do not need to "appeal to intuition" to tell you that. We know, for a scientific fact, that there are material things without material causes. In fact, the very notion of "material" is nothing but an emergent property, according to physics, thus making the very classification of "causes" into "material, efficient, formal, and final" deeply flawed. And this is why I complained earlier in the video when you guys gave no definition for causation.
29:55 - 29:58 There is no such a thing as "before the beginning of the universe." That would entail the existence of "before time." And that is nonsense. Remember what you guys said earlier? There is no time at which there is no time. So there is no "before time."
33:30 - 34:14 Excellent presentation of that argument. Finally, we are back to the actually high quality arguments that I am used to seeing from Rationality Rules and Joe.
34:14 - 34:51 Yes, which is why Rationality Rules and Joe's defense of metaphysical intuition as being sometimes reliable is completely untenable. There is no situation where this symmetry problem does not apply. You guys completely debunked WLC's defense, but also debunked your own defense for intuition. This is why I complained so much about. You could have simply foregone that segment altogether and just addressed the contradictions in WLC's argument directly.
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37:05 - 37:15 I am so glad you guys did decide to talk about the A and B theories of time. And yes, the previous description given of the B theory is quite accurate, and it does undermine the Kalam entirely, not only in premise 1, but premise 2. And the B-theory of time, unlike the A-theory of time, is scientifically supported.
37:15 - 37:37 Exactly.
38:20 - 38:48 This misses the point entirely. Remember, there is no time at which there is no time. Yes, things within spacetime have spatiotemporal boundaries that demand explanations in terms of other things within spacetime themselves. But as there is no spacetime outside the boundaries of spacetime, the notion that any causal explanation is required here at all is misconceived, a categorical error. The reason things with spatiotemporal boundaries require causal explanations is because they are surrounded by regions of spacetime not occupied by themselves, and so this needs to be accounted for. But spacetime is the entirety of spacetime itself. Its boundaries are just inherent properties of its intrinsic geometry, they are not causally related to any other objects, and it makes no sense to say that they could be, precisely because they are the boundaries of spacetime. A thorough understanding of this would require mathematical understanding of manifolds. This is the problem with talking about metaphysical things on their own terms without being properly defined, and is another reaosn why I find it difficult to take it seriously.
38:55 - 39:33 Yes, and this all brings me back to wondering why you guys defended arguments from intuition as legitimate, when this point undermines their legitimacy almost entirely. Again, I acknowledge there are very limited contexts where they are clearly okay, but this is not one of them, and we all agree. And this is really just the same objection to the argument from intuition as the other objections. They are all really the same objection, and they all boil down to this: "intuition sucks and is not (sufficient) for this." Which is what I was saying all along. The only objection that is different, in this case, is just that the B-theory of time undermines the Kalam.
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Overall, I think this was a good video, and some things were pointed out that needed pointing out that are typically not pointed out. My one issue with the video is the bad attempt at defending the legitimacy of intuitions, which not only was rife with false claims, but also undermines everything else that they say, and which completely distracts from the more powerful and legitimate objections that they gave that could have been made without discussing intuition. Nonetheless, the video was still ultimately effective in demonstrating the difficulties with premise 1 of the Kalam (to say nothing of premise 2, which the video did not discuss in depth).
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No, you are completely wrong. The problem is the logic. You seem to believe that the only thing that matters here is empirical evidence, but that is just absolutely not the case. I want to redirect you to mathematics. Can you provide me with an experiment that can prove that there is no rational number such that x^2 = 2? No, you cannot. By your own advice, you would thus end up dismissing the claim as being ridiculous, even though, in reality, this is an important theorem in mathematics with real life consequences in the sciences. Abstractions, by definition, cannot be empirically studied. I doubt you actually dismiss mathematics as a whole, though, especially since the scientific method is reliant on mathematics in the first place.
You say that one can construct logical arguments about a multitude of ridiculous things, like gods. This is incorrect, though. You cannot construct logical arguments to prove things that are false. That is why the entire concept of a logical fallacy exists. The very point of contention is whether gods fall under the category you named "multitude of ridiculous things" or not in the first place: that is why this discussion is happening. I find it arrogant and insulting of you to suggest that this is a waste of time simply because you fail to understand the importance of the logic of an argument.
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The implications of set theory for the Kalam are quite disastrous, because, as far as I am concerned, set theory is inconsistent with the distinction between actual infinity, and potential infinity, and set theory is consistent with the existence of sets of infinite cardinalities having different cardinalities. This to say, there exist uncountable models of any reasonable set theory you choose. Thus, the idea of the infinite being traversed being impossible is contradicted by these models, because in these models, ω < ω + 1, yet card(ω) = card(ω + 1).
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@littleredpony6868 You are talking about one of Zeno's paradoxes. The idea is that, if I want to from 0 to 1, I must first go from 0 to 1/2. Then I must go from 1/2 to 1, but to do so, I must go first from 1/2 to 3/4. Once I do, I must them go from
3/4 to 7/8..., etc. Inside the interval [0, 1] that you want to cross, there are infinitely many intervals that you have to cross individually to be able to cross the full [0, 1]. Since there are infinitely many, intuition dictates that crossing the interval [0, 1] should be impossible. However, in the real world, you cross intervals of the form [0, 1] all the time. Hence the apparent contradiction.
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@hlulanizitha9920 Craig is a well-reputed philosopher with great credentials to back it up,...
No, he is not. He is well-reputed only among Christian apologists, and even then, plenty of fundamentalists hate him too. As for his published work in philosophy, it is quite average, if not mediocre. I say this as someone with a college degree in philosophy.
he's defended his Kalaam arguments publicly many times,...
No. He has attempted to publicly defend the Kalam argument plenty of times, but in all his attempts, he fails to convince anyone who is not already a theist, and he fails to address the objections by the opponent.
This harsh criticism of his work is unfounded
No, it is not.
even the best philosophers make mistakes.
Yes, but Craig is not among the best philosophers, he is not even among the good philosophers. If we were talking about someone like Saul Kripke, then it would be a different story, but Craig? Hell no. The fact that you even attempt to compare Craig to the best of philosophers is actually insulting.
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@Hello-vz1md That was a podcast with alex not debate.
It is still a debate. It is called a debate in podcast format, sillybilly.
Theist and Atheist Academic philosophers respect Craig while disagreeing with him
"Respect" is a strong word you are using.
unlike some random people in YouTube comments section with no philosophical background.
Maybe, but I have a degree in philosophy, and I can tell that much of Craig's work is garbage.
Both Rationality Rules and Alex said Craig is an inteligent person
Well, yes, he is an intelligent person. Most people are intelligent people. This does not change the fact that he is not a good philosopher.
but I will not call him complete idiot
No one here has called him that. You need to get off your high horse and actually start reading the replies you are responding to.
philosophy is BS 😂😂😂😂😂 i have no words for your ignorance
No, I will not call him ignorant. While I agree with you that he is patently wrong in saying philosophy is BS, he is justified in incorrectly believing that, precisely because mediocre philosophers like WLC exist. It is people like him that give philosophy an extremely bad reputation where it is not deserved.
i highly recommend you to watch this introduction course on philosophy
No thanks. I already have a degree, and if I want to study more, then I will just buy some books instead.
But I can't remember when science disprove the existence of God or even study or do research about God.
You are right: science has technically never conducted an experiment to gather data concerning the existence of deities. However, a quick cursory analysis reveals that, given the nature of deities, as per theology, the fact that there is no immediate non-trivial evidence for their existence is itself evidence of their non-existence, making their existence quite unlikely.
And blind faith is complete useless and stupid but every knowledge have some level of faith if you think deep philosophically and critically
No, this is nonsense. For one, faith is, by definition, blind, so writing about "blind faith" is literally redundant, as you just said blind twice. Secondly, knowledge does not require faith. Taking something as an axiom is different than having faith.
it's completely different and philosophically, it's about the nature of reality, like do I or anything or anyone really exist, like how we see/think it exists around us.
No, this has nothing to do with faith either. Also, whether this actually constitutes a problem of knowledge depends on how you define "existence". Really, this is all just semantics.
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@Martial-Mat Aha, you're today's designated mind reader huh?
If I had the power of mind reading, that would be nice. However, you give me too much credit.
Shouldn't you be on stage conning old ladies?
No thanks. I have a moral compass.
Your arrogance is a particularly appealing trait btw.
Is it? You have not demonstrated that I am arrogant, but even if I was, how would that be appealing?
Without understanding the basis for my opinion, you are simply going to tell me why I don't understand.
No, this is not what I did, and this is not what I will do. I simply stated a fact: the available evidence contradicts your claim concerning your understanding of philosophy. I have no idea how or why you decided to twist this into me making a claim about why you do not understand, but the fact that you did that makes you quite arrogant yourself.
Anyway, this reply of yours makes you seem like a prime example of the Dunning-Kruger effect in action, so I get the impression that continuing to interact with you will be a waste of time. Have fun talking to your echo chamber.
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@outermarker5801 Again, I did NOT say that meditation is prayer, or even a form of it.
I understand this. I never said that you said that.
I said FOR THE CHRISTIAN it does the same thing to THEIR brain.
One of the effects prayer has is certainly similar, but this alone is not sufficient to justify treating prayer and meditation as comparable in this context.
I don't know about you, but I WAS a Christian,...
I was one as well. I never said anything that should invalidate your experience of prayer.
I'd encourage you to be like Hitchens, calm down,...
I hate to say it, but I am pretty calm. I am not convinced that you are calm at all, though. You are using CAPS LOCK every five words, and you compared me to a dogmatic Christian. These are not actions a calm person does in the beginning of a conversation, solely from a disagreement. Honestly, you seem like a person filled with anger.
...and actually analyze why religion, for all it's bullcrap, is so persistently captivating to the human mind.
I have. This was one of the many things I researched when I studied in college. I am probably more qualified to speak on the topic that you are, and frankly, I would be so bold as to say, more qualified than Hitchens. I never denied that religion is persistently captivating to the human mind, and my point was never about addressing this.
It is literally brain chemistry, specifically dopamine.
It is far more complicated than brain chemistry. Brain chemistry definitely plays a role, but it is not as major as you would claim to be.
Objective observation of the phenomenon rather 'impudent' dismissal will make you a better educated atheist.
(A) The only thing I have dismissed here is the grossly inaccurate comparison between prayer and meditation.
(B) I want to hear nothing about "objective observation" from someone who has conducted no observations of their own on the subject matter.
(C) Given your clear incompetence in holding a civil conversation, you are certainly not qualified to make any worthwhile judgments on how well-educated an atheist (or anyone else, for that matter) is.
Because right now, you remind me of some Christians - so dogmatic, you can't understand what's being said to you over the din of your own negative opinion and contempt.
This is just projection on your part. I understood your argument just fine the first time. You are the one who misunderstood my response to you. You are also the only one here being negative. You decided to proceed with this discussion by insulting me, despite my replies to you being polite. I will end my comment with an insult of my own, pointing out how this all demonstrates that you are definitely not smart enough to understand that this approach you are taking is completely counterproductive: you will not succeed at convincing anyone of your point of view, and if anything, you will only succeed in turning them away. Alas, if there is anyone here who is like dogmatic Christian, that would be you.
I am going to mute you, because there is no point in me bothering to try to have a conversation with someone so irrationally angry, that they are unable to hold a conversation.
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@Vee-Hive No, it is not logically incoherent. Corruption is one of the most well-established ways to damage one's credibility, and the I.B.A. being corrupt is well-known by now. Also, chromosomal tests themselves are not very reliable either, which is why, since the Olympic Games in Sydney at the beginning of the millennium, they were discontinued. So, unlike the corruption idea, the narrative you are promoting has no legs to stand on, beyond the very suspicious yellow-journalism going on of the trainer allegedly having verified the test, even though none of the sources actually can corroborate this independently.
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@AShaif take your time not proceeding to engage
Have some patience, child. Unlike you, I have a life, and yesterday, I did not get a chance to sit down and write down a response to what you wrote. Are you one of those children who will arbitrarily alot a deadline for when I have to respond by, not tell me about the deadline, and then dishonestly claim I forfeit the conversation because I did not follow this arbitrary stupid deadline I was not told about? Geez. Talk about being aggressive: you are the only with the attitude problem here. But hey, with disingenuous, jerklash response like this, it almost seems like you want me to be aggressive you. That would actually explain why you made such a bold accusation despite having nothing to back it up.
At the first time you replied to me, you were too aggressive, arrogant and provocative, with no substantial counter-argument.
Concerning the accusations of me being aggressive, arrogant, and provocative, see my previous paragraph. Concerning there not being a substantial counter-argument: you listed about a dozen of arguments by name, and then a few others you went into more detail. You know very well that each of these arguments would require an essay-length response, followed by a discussion on that response. I know very well that writing a dozen and a half essay responses would be unrealistic, and it would become a wall of text you know you will not read nor reply to. Also, I have no responsibility to provide these counterarguments when the topic of discussion is the cosmological Kalam, a topic of discussion you seem unable to stick to. So this is yet another disingenuous remark by you. And all this does is prove my earliee snarky remark of your dishonesty.
You didn't come to me as a seeker of truth, but rather as a troller.
This is meaningless when coming from you.
However, I have time now and could spend a couple of minutes on your big discovery here :D
There is no big discovery here. Most people with the level of education that I have are at least aware of the things I have mentioned. Or do you think being educated is a rare trait?
Causality is axiomatic to science. Otherwise, no need to discover or look for illness causes, etc.
This is a non-sequitur. The need to look for cures has very little to do with causation, though we do happen to utilize causation in our quest for cures. Also, causation is not axiomatic to science. Causation is something we establish through science. The only thing that is axiomatic to science is that regulated empirical observation is necessary to establish facts about the universe, and that the value of a theory is a function of its predictive power.
Even in quantum theory, there are different interpretations of the Schrödinger equation that don't lead to non-causality, or indeterminacy, or violation of first principles.
Causation and causality are different things. Causation is the notion that things are related via causal relationships of some kind. Causality is a specific scientific principle in the theory of special relativity that restricts the possible types of causal relationships to those that are consistent with locally Minkowski geometry.
Also, I have no clue why you bring up Schrödinger's equation. Schrödinger's equation is not consistent with the theory of special relativity, with curved spacetime, with quantum spin, and is unable to account for quantum electrodynamics, among other things in quantum theory. So it is not suited for a discussion of causality, let alone causation. Also, the interpretations of quantum mechanics do not interpret Schrödinger's equation, they are just potential solutions to the measurement problem. The measurement problem is irrelevant in light of quantum field theories, though, which is how we establish the ontology of the universe in a physicalist worldview.
Bohm's quantum interpretation to give a single example.
Which one? There is an entirely family of interpretations of quantum mechanics attributed to Bohm. This smacks of ignorance, to me.
Also, even if causality is like a spectrum, it's still an uninterrupted chain of causes,...
It is an interrupted chain of causation, not of causes. Again, things cannot be discretely categorized into causes. That would literally contradict it being a spectrum.
...that can't go forever, unless you think they can, or that you adopt determinism.
I see no reason to think causal chains cannot regress forever. And sure, I would be willing to adopt determinism. The only unresolved issue here would be free will, but I fail to see how free will is relevant. There is no known physical process that is known to not be deterministic, not even within quantum theory. I know that quantum mechanics uses plenty of probabilistic calculations, but this tells us nothing about what is actually physically happening in the interactions.
But enough of the Kalam, let's speak of the worst of the bunch as you say, the contingency argument.
I think the argument from language origins is slightly worse, but sure, I am not opposed to discussing contingency.
How can you explain a universe that is made of parts and subject to addition, destruction and change, i.e. dependent, when you take the side that there is not a necessary independent existence?
This is a loaded question. The entities in the universe experience change, insofar as their world-cylinders progress through spacetime. Since the universe is the collection of all entities said to exist, the world-cylinders are themselves a feature of the universe. There is no meaningful sense in which the universe itself is changing, though, because it already contains all the histories of all the entities. There is no need for me to explain how the universes experience change, because I hold that the universe does not experience change, that is only entities within the universe that do.
My argument is as such: - Contingent existences are existences that depend on something else for their existence, and could be any other way. Necessary existence is an existence that is independent for its existence, and could not be any other way.
In what sense do contingent existences depend on other existences? What type of dependence are you talking about? There are many types of dependences, and so this makes your statement ambiguous, and so you could be referring to a wide variety of things you may not intend to refer to. I can tell you what contingency would look like in my worldview, but I doubt it matches your concept of contingency. For example, I, as a human, am a merological sum of histories of quantum field states across spacetime. I am a contingent existence, for the quantum fields did not exist as I do, or did not have the histories that they do, then I would not exist. However, the quantum fields are just... sort of there. Their existence is not ontologically correlated to the existence of any other entities.
Contingent existences could be any other way? In what sense do you mean this? Are you using counterfactuals? Are you using Kripkean semantics? Again, you could be referring to several distinct things.
A world of only a set of contingent existences is inconceivable without a necessary existence.
I am unconvinced this is true.
The set of contingent existences cannot depend on itself to bring itself into existence.
This may just be a quirk of your usage of language, but the set of contingent existences is not itself an existence. As such, there is no sense in which such a set needs to be brought into existence. The set of contingent existences may be the empty set, or it may be some other set, but it is never not a set, and there is no sense in which one can say that there is no set of contingent existences.
Therefore, there exists a necessary being that brought this set into existence , whereas it itself depended on nothing to be existent.
Again, the set does not need to be brought into existence. For the notion of "being brought into existence" to even be meaningful, one has to be able to talk about the entity not existing at some point, and then existing at some later point. Ultimately, this means that "being brought into existence" requires spacetime to be coherent. It is a spatiotemporal concept, and not fundamentally ontological. So if we are talking about some set of contingent existences without spacetime, then there is no meaningful sense in which you can say individual entities in the set can be brought into existence, much less the entire set.
prove me wrong
Before we try to prove each other wrong, we should probably try to clarify the language and understand the claims being made.
stage 2 , how many necessary beings ? stage 3, what are the features of this being ?
Okay, so listen, how about we focus only on stage 1 right now? There is no point in you bringig up these other stages if I already disagree with the argument on stage 1.
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@youwillwin7107 The teleological argument can actually be steel manned, but even then, can still be debunked. This is done using Bayes' theorem. The idea is simply this: The evidence that we observe (E) is better explained by monotheism (M) than by atheism (~M). The argument considers that P(E | ~M) << 1 and P(E | M) >> 0, and the conclusion is that given E, M is more likely than ~M, which is to say, P(M | E) >> P(~M | E). By Bayes' theorem, P(M | E) = P(M)·P(E | M)/P(E), and P(~M | E) = P(~M)·P(E | ~M)/P(E). The idea is that P(E | M) >> 0 means that, as long as P(M)/P(E) >> 0, P(M | E) >> 0, while P(E | ~M) << 1 means P(~M | E) << 1. But the problem here is the assumption P(M)/P(E) >> 0, which is impossible to justify.
So the teleological argument, as even its strongest version is not sound.
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