The apologia of the cosmos. Evidence of God

[KCfromNC]

Archaeopteryx, you are one of the few people here who actually seem to be interested and sincere in your questions

Hey look, more passive aggressive sniping at posters someone couldn't find a way to answer. I can tell that those nagging doubts are getting stronger.

 

[The Engineer]

Thanks to Archaeopteryx, I found this nice post made by Elioenai, and just couldn't leave it uncommented:

There are several good arguments as to why this position simply is not tenable:

1. A conciousness or a mind cannot be necessarily equated only with a physcial organ of the body. The organ composed of grey matter in our cranium is not joyful or happy, or cheerful. These are mental states and cannot characeterize an organ of the body.

This is just an unsubstantiated assertion. I don't see an argument about why the brain can't experience happiness on its own.

2. The phenomenon of intentionality. For example: to say that you think about lunch, or you think about these posts, or you think about eating. Physcial objects do not have intentionality or "aboutness". These are properties of mental states

Intention is determined by neuronal activity, nothing magical about that.

4. Existence of what is termed as free will. To have freedom of will you must have an immaterial self that has the potential to influence brain states. If all interaction in our bodies is brain to mind or physical to mental, then all of our acts are determined. But if you think you can will or cause things to happen in your body i.e the ability to will to open your eyes, or the ability to will to lift your leg and take a step forward, or the choice to move your fingers across the keys of a keyboard, you have mental to physical causation or mind to brain dictation, and that implies a nonreductive view of ourselves which implies the existence of an immaterial entity or "self" conjoined or correlated to the body but not reducible to it. This dualistic view has been the standard, most universally attested to view of the essential nature of humans for thousands of years.

For this argument to work, one must assume that free will exists in the first place.

The brain can influence itself, no separate mind needed here. It adapts itself. Your muscles do this, why shouldn't your brain be capable of it, too?

4. Saying that the mind is nothing more than matter is simply begging the question for materialism/naturalism. If one maintains this as an objection to the logical inference to the best explanation of said cause, specifically the aspect of it's personhood, they must give some kind of argument as to why the mind is only a property of matter and nothing more, and that it is not a distinct immaterial entity.

I made an entire thread about this issue. Haven't seen you around in the thread, however, even though you started the debate about mind-body-dualism in the first place.

5. In our deepest most introspective experience and knowledge of ourselves, we have an acquaintance of this immaterial self. In fact it is so intuitive that it is all but taken for granted!

And surely, our brain would never lie to us, ever!
Change blindness - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

6. Dr. Goetz, who is Professor of Philosophy at Ursinus College and a specialist in philosophy of mind has this to say:

"I am not convinced that evidence from neuroscience supports the view that our minds are identical with our brains. The reasons for my not being convinced are several.

Yeah, surely a professor of philosophy knows a lot about neurology! Sorry, but if that's intended as an appeal to authority, then it fails. And it's not even as if his arguments were good:

First, neuroscience contributes nothing substantively new to our understanding of ourselves

It does, all the time. Neuroscientists even pinned down which part of us is located where.

and our relationship to our bodies.

Yeah, it sure didn't. It's not like neuroscientists discovered locked-in-syndrom, motoric nerves and stuff like that, all of which have something to do with the relationship between our mind and our body. They also haven't found the link between our eyes and our brain and... sorry, forgot about the occipital cortex!

That's just laughable.

We have known all along that our mental lives could be and are causally related to what happens to our bodies. After all, we did not need neuroscience to know that a good knock on the head could produce a change in our psychological lives.

Sure, but we needed neuroscience to figure out why this is so, and what the exact effects are.

Who could fail to be aware that dropping a brick on one’s foot would produce pain?

Feeling No Pain: New Form of Rare Gene Disorder Decoded

What neuroscience has done is provide us with a more detailed picture of how the human mind is influenced by certain events in the brain. It has not changed the general nature of that picture. The fact that much of what happens in our minds is influenced by what happens in our bodies was something known by the first self-conscious human beings.

Actually, it's been shown that everything that happens in our minds is influenced by our brains. The correlation is perfect, and the fact that the cause-effect-relationship always goes from the brain to the mind (i.e. changes to the brain cause changes to the mind, not vice versa) suggests that the mind is subordinated to the brain. Add to this that we simply can't detect our mind, only the ostensible effect it has on our brain, and the idea that the mind is the brain, or rather, that it's part of the brain, doesn't seem so far off anymore.

Second, ..... not everything that goes on in our minds is causally determined by what goes on in our bodies. Sometimes what goes on in our bodies is a result of what goes on in our minds. For example, the movements of my fingers as I type this response to your question are ultimately produced my mental events...

Mental events, which are, in return, caused by activity in the brain.

Here we have mental-to-physical causation.

For this argument to work, one must already assume that the mind is not a part of the brain, and as I have shown, this doesn't seem to be the case.

What explains both this choice of mine

Neurology. You typed it because your brain wanted to type it, because our brains are hard-wired in a way that makes them want to convince others.

and the physical events in my body that are ultimately produced by this choice?

Motoric nerves that are activated by the choice made by your brain.

The explanation is the purpose that I provide an answer to your question. A purposeful explanation is a teleological explanation. It is well known that those who identify the mind with the brain typically deny that any of us freely (indeterministically) make choices for purposes.

The purpose of your actions is determined by your brain. Your brain has a purpose in mind (in this case, convincing others) and figures out that the best way to do so is to write a crappy essay about how evil neuroscientists deny free will.

Materialists are typically determinists who insist that the only legitimate kind of explanation is a non-teleological explanation. Causal explanations are the most well-known and frequently used kind of non-teleological explanations. Those who exclude the possibility of teleological explanations are often called ‘naturalists.’ My colleague, Charles Taliaferro, and I have written a book entitled Naturalism (Grand Rapids, Mich: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008) in which we explain what naturalism is and offer a critique of it.

Sorry, never read the book. Can you please upload it, Elioenai?
By the way, that was sarcasm.


Next part will follow.

 

[The Engineer]

Third, I believe it is important to note that some of the world’s foremost neuroscientists have believed that the mind is immaterial.

They believed it, hence it must be true! Great argument!

These neuroscientists have been well aware that stimulating the brain can produce some intriguing psychological results. One of the pioneers in the field of neuroscience was Wilder Penfield. In his fascinating book The Mystery of the Mind, he writes the following:

When I have caused a conscious patient to move his hand by applying an electrode to the motor cortex of one hemisphere, I have often asked him about it. Invariably his response was: ‘I didn’t do that. You did.’ When I caused him to vocalize, he said: ‘I didn’t make that sound. You pulled it out of me.’ When I caused the record of the stream of consciousness to run again and so presented to him the record of his past experience, he marveled that he should be conscious of the past as well as of the present. He was astonished that it should come back to him so completely, with more detail than he could possibly recall voluntarily. He assumed at once that, somehow, the surgeon was responsible for the phenomenon, but he recognized the details as those of his own past experience. (76)

If I understand it correctly, the patient was made to move his hand when an electrode was applied to a motor cortex, yet he said it wasn't his choice. That's correct, his brain didn't make the choice. So?

Penfield goes on to note that “There is no place in the cerebral cortex where electrical stimulation will cause a patient . . . to decide” (77).

Absolute negative statements are a bit... problematic, especially when made by a person that has been dead for almost fourty years. I can't say which part of the brain makes the actual choice, but I doubt this part doesn't exist. Maybe neuroscientists haven't quite figured out what the actual part is (maybe, don't know enough about this yet) but it's not like decision-making is a topic that's completely outside neurology:
Researchers Find Where Brain Learns to Make Decisions
Scientists identify brain region that helps us make choices - Telegraph
How the Brain Makes Moral Choices

This is consistent with my point that choices are undetermined events with a teleological explanation. In light of his work as a neuroscientist, Penfield concludes the following: “For my own part, after years of striving to explain the mind on the basis of brain-action alone, I have come to the conclusion that it is simpler (and far easier and logical) if one adopts the hypothesis that our being does consist of two fundamental elements” (80).

Penfields opinion doesn't count as an argument, and his prior arguments don't work, as I just showed.

Another famous neuroscientist who believed that the mind is immaterial was Sir John C. Eccles. He and the widely respected philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper wrote a book entitled The Self and Its Brain in which they argued that the human mind is best understood along interactionist dualist lines (the mind and brain are separate entities that causally interact).

This book is more than twenty years old. Using it to argue against contemporary neurology is a bit cheap.

After reading The Mystery of the Mind and The Self and Its Brain and many similar books and puzzling over questions about the mind-brain relationship, I have come to the conclusion that neuroscience provides no evidence whatsoever that the mind is identical with its brain.

I guess scientific books that are more than twenty years old are not exactly the best ones to learn about contemporary science.
I also mentioned above what the evidence is.

I am convinced that those who believe that it does provide such evidence bring their naturalist convictions to the evidence. In other words, they are already naturalists (materialists) before they do their neuroscience.

Is that his argument? You're biased, so your argument is wrong? Sorry, no.

Fourth, we might ask why neuroscientists like Penfield and Eccles believed in the immateriality of the mind, even though they were well aware of the causal dependency of many psychological events on brain events.

Because they got that one thing wrong, either because they themselves were biased or because they formulated their views more than twenty years ago and didn't have access to the evidence.

I believe that part of the answer is that they did not confuse the concept of the correlation of two events with the concept of the identity of two events.

As I said, the correlation is perfect, and the processes of the mind seem to be influenced by processes in the brain but not vice versa. Because there is no evidence for the mind, we can conclude that it doesn't exist.

It simply does not follow from the fact that two events are correlated that they are identical.

That's true, but I'm not saying they are the exact same thing just because they correlate, but because they correlate perfectly, because the brain seems to influence the mind and because the mind is not necessary to explain any phenomenons anymore, and because there's no evidence for it.

For example, when one learns that a high score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) is correlated with entrance to a good college one does not identify scoring well on the exam with entrance to college. Similarly, when one discovers that eating a certain food is correlated with an upset stomach one does not identify eating that food with having an upset stomach.

True.

Then there is the fact that movements of bodily limbs like arms and legs are correlated with events in the motor cortex of the brain.

There's a lot to suggest that they are not just correlated, but that the motor cortex causes bodily movements. For example, if the motor cortex is damaged, bodily movements become impossible or impaired; if movement and activity in the motor cortex were caused by a third entity (the mind), we would expect the arm to move nevertheless. That's not the case.

No one believes, however, that movements of arms and legs are identical with their causal antecedents in the brain.

I do, and I showed you above why.

Upon reflection, it is just as obvious that there is no good reason to believe that psychological events are identical with brain events simply because the two are correlated.

There is. Changes in parts of the brain associated with emotion or thinking always lead to psychological changes. Why does damage to the frontal lobe cause apathy, if mental activity is merely correlated to brain activity, but not caused by it?
If there was merely a correlation between brain activity and the mind, we would expect that changes to the brain wouldn't cause changes to the mind. As it turns out, changes to the brain do cause changes to the mind; for all practical purposes, the brain causes the mind.

Finally, ..... some religious people cite out-of-the-body or near-death experiences as evidence for the immateriality of the mind and the possibility of its surviving disembodied. With all due respect, I seriously doubt that this is what really convinces people that the mind is immaterial. Most people start out believing that the mind is immaterial and in light of this initial conviction find nothing conceptually problematic with near-death and out-of-the-body experiences. They do not come to believe that the mind is immaterial on the basis of having or hearing about such experiences. Moreover, I believe that most people are religious because they believe that the mind is immaterial. They do not come to believe that the mind is immaterial because they are religious.
With all good wishes,"

Stewart Goetz, Ph.D.
Professor of Philosophy
Ursinus College
Collegeville, PA 19426

Read more: God and Mind/Body Dualism | Reasonable Faith

This was a pretty weak argumentation.

 

[Davian]

Two things here very quickly :

Would not it be quicker just to answer my questions?

1. I do enjoy discoursing with you, you seem to be a lot more mature than some here who just post random nonsensical irrelevant posts. Im just not going to be discussing anything related to God unless you admit that the word is intelligible.

I do not find it to be.

Look at this way: in this post, a derail of your own doing, you said: "This would amount to me being justified in dismissing your position as meaningless because the term "theological noncognitivist" has no meaning because it is not empirically verifiable!"

To which I replied: "Can you empirically verify yours?"

You did not respond to that question.

I am not making a positive claim, so it does not apply to my theological postion.

But this does apply to yours. For your word to be intelligible, for me to understand what you are talking about, I would ask (have asked) for you to provide a coherent definition for this "God" that you would like to discuss. Something testable, falsifiable.

Here, you would write something like "I will be waiting". I won't, as I am getting the impression that this would be akin to a snipe hunt.

2. These questions you are asking me now have absolutely no bearing on the KCA.

No, but they have a direct bearing on your comments of us having an open, honest discussion. How can that happen where one of the postions is unfalsifiable?

 

[Davian]

The Engineer has already spent more time on this than I would allow for, but I have a few comments:

This is irrelevant to the KCA. But I will say that the greatest evidence that God has acted within the universe and is acting even now, is that He sent His only Son to live among men, to die vicariously for their sins, to be buried, and then on the third day rise as a testament to His divine power and authority.

This is *not* evidence, this *requires* evidence. WLC may throw this out in a debate, but here you get called on it.

There are several good arguments as to why this position simply is not tenable:

1. A conciousness or a mind cannot be necessarily equated only with a physcial organ of the body. The organ composed of grey matter in our cranium is not joyful or happy, or cheerful. These are mental states and cannot characeterize an organ of the body.

Consciousness, or mind, is not equated with the brain... it is what the brain *does*. The stomach is not digestion.

2. The phenomenon of intentionality. For example: to say that you think about lunch, or you think about these posts, or you think about eating. Physcial objects do not have intentionality or "aboutness". These are properties of mental states

The brain does mental states.

4. Existence of what is termed as free will. To have freedom of will you must have an immaterial self that has the potential to influence brain states. If all interaction in our bodies is brain to mind or physical to mental, then all of our acts are determined. But if you think you can will or cause things to happen in your body i.e the ability to will to open your eyes, or the ability to will to lift your leg and take a step forward, or the choice to move your fingers across the keys of a keyboard, you have mental to physical causation or mind to brain dictation, and that implies a nonreductive view of ourselves which implies the existence of an immaterial entity or "self" conjoined or correlated to the body but not reducible to it. This dualistic view has been the standard, most universally attested to view of the essential nature of humans for thousands of years.

Let us look in your big book of fallacies... how about, the argument from antiquity?

4. Saying that the mind is nothing more than matter is simply begging the question for materialism/naturalism. If one maintains this as an objection to the logical inference to the best explanation of said cause, specifically the aspect of it's personhood, they must give some kind of argument as to why the mind is only a property of matter and nothing more, and that it is not a distinct immaterial entity.

The absence of any evidence to the contrary.

5. In our deepest most introspective experience and knowledge of ourselves, we have an acquaintance of this immaterial self.

I don't.

In fact it is so intuitive that it is all but taken for granted!

Self reflection can be deceptive. I will post this again, as you did not comment last time.

Excerpted from Thomas Metzinger's book, Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (Bradford):

Consciousness, the Phenomenal Self, and the First-Person Perspective

"This is a book about consciousness, the phenomenal self, and the first-person perspective. Its main thesis is that no such things as selves exist in the world: Nobody ever was or had a self. All that ever existed were conscious self-models that could not be recognized as models. The phenomenal self is not a thing, but a process—and the subjective experience of being someone emerges if a conscious information-processing system operates under a transparent self-model. You are such a system right now, as you read these sentences. Because you cannot recognize your self-model as a model, it is transparent: you look right through it. You don’t see it. But you see with it. In other, more metaphorical, words, the central claim of this book is that as you read these lines you constantly confuse yourself with the content of the self-model currently activated by your brain.
This is not your fault. Evolution has made you this way. On the contrary. Arguably, until now, the conscious self-model of human beings is the best invention Mother Nature has made. It is a wonderfully efficient two-way window that allows an organism to conceive of itself as a whole, and thereby to causally interact with its inner and outer environment in an entirely new, integrated, and intelligent manner. Consciousness, the phenomenal self, and the first-person perspective are fascinating representational phenomena that have a long evolutionary history, a history which eventually led to the formation of complex societies and a cultural embedding of conscious experience itself. For many researchers in the cognitive neurosciences it is now clear that the first-person perspective somehow must have been the decisive link in this transition from biological to cultural evolution. In philosophical quarters, on the other hand, it is popular to say things like “The first-person perspective cannot be reduced to the third-person perspective!” or to develop complex technical arguments showing that some kinds of irreducible first-person facts exist. But nobody ever asks what a first-person perspective is in the first place. This is what I will do. I will offer a representationalist and a functionalist analysis of what a consciously experienced first-person perspective is."

-------------------------

From Youtube: "Thomas Metzinger is the Director of the Philosophy Group at the Department of Philosophy at Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz. His research focuses on philosophy of mind, especially on consciousness and the nature of the self. In this lecture he develops a representationalist theory of phenomenal self-consciousness. "

"Being No One"

6. Dr. Goetz, who is Professor of Philosophy at Ursinus College and a specialist in philosophy of mind has this to say:

"I am not convinced that evidence from neuroscience supports the view that our minds are identical with our brains. The reasons for my not being convinced are several.

First, neuroscience contributes nothing substantively new to our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to our bodies.

Sure. Look at all those people doing molecular and cellular neuroscience just for fun.

We have known all along that our mental lives could be and are causally related to what happens to our bodies. After all, we did not need neuroscience to know that a good knock on the head could produce a change in our psychological lives. Who could fail to be aware that dropping a brick on one’s foot would produce pain? What neuroscience has done is provide us with a more detailed picture of how the human mind is influenced by certain events in the brain. It has not changed the general nature of that picture. The fact that much of what happens in our minds is influenced by what happens in our bodies was something known by the first self-conscious human beings.

Second, ..... not everything that goes on in our minds is causally determined by what goes on in our bodies. Sometimes what goes on in our bodies is a result of what goes on in our minds. For example, the movements of my fingers as I type this response to your question are ultimately produced my mental events... Here we have mental-to-physical causation. What explains both this choice of mine and the physical events in my body that are ultimately produced by this choice? The explanation is the purpose that I provide an answer to your question. A purposeful explanation is a teleological explanation. It is well known that those who identify the mind with the brain typically deny that any of us freely (indeterministically) make choices for purposes. Materialists are typically determinists who insist that the only legitimate kind of explanation is a non-teleological explanation. Causal explanations are the most well-known and frequently used kind of non-teleological explanations. Those who exclude the possibility of teleological explanations are often called ‘naturalists.’ My colleague, Charles Taliaferro, and I have written a book entitled Naturalism (Grand Rapids, Mich: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008) in which we explain what naturalism is and offer a critique of it.

Third, I believe it is important to note that some of the world’s foremost neuroscientists have believed that the mind is immaterial. These neuroscientists have been well aware that stimulating the brain can produce some intriguing psychological results. One of the pioneers in the field of neuroscience was Wilder Penfield. In his fascinating book The Mystery of the Mind, he writes the following:

When I have caused a conscious patient to move his hand by applying an electrode to the motor cortex of one hemisphere, I have often asked him about it. Invariably his response was: ‘I didn’t do that. You did.’ When I caused him to vocalize, he said: ‘I didn’t make that sound. You pulled it out of me.’ When I caused the record of the stream of consciousness to run again and so presented to him the record of his past experience, he marveled that he should be conscious of the past as well as of the present. He was astonished that it should come back to him so completely, with more detail than he could possibly recall voluntarily. He assumed at once that, somehow, the surgeon was responsible for the phenomenon, but he recognized the details as those of his own past experience. (76)

Penfield goes on to note that “There is no place in the cerebral cortex where electrical stimulation will cause a patient . . . to decide” (77). This is consistent with my point that choices are undetermined events with a teleological explanation. In light of his work as a neuroscientist, Penfield concludes the following: “For my own part, after years of striving to explain the mind on the basis of brain-action alone, I have come to the conclusion that it is simpler (and far easier and logical) if one adopts the hypothesis that our being does consist of two fundamental elements” (80).

Another famous neuroscientist who believed that the mind is immaterial was Sir John C. Eccles. He and the widely respected philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper wrote a book entitled The Self and Its Brain in which they argued that the human mind is best understood along interactionist dualist lines (the mind and brain are separate entities that causally interact). After reading The Mystery of the Mind and The Self and Its Brain and many similar books and puzzling over questions about the mind-brain relationship, I have come to the conclusion that neuroscience provides no evidence whatsoever that the mind is identical with its brain. I am convinced that those who believe that it does provide such evidence bring their naturalist convictions to the evidence. In other words, they are already naturalists (materialists) before they do their neuroscience.

Fourth, we might ask why neuroscientists like Penfield and Eccles believed in the immateriality of the mind, even though they were well aware of the causal dependency of many psychological events on brain events. I believe that part of the answer is that they did not confuse the concept of the correlation of two events with the concept of the identity of two events. It simply does not follow from the fact that two events are correlated that they are identical. For example, when one learns that a high score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) is correlated with entrance to a good college one does not identify scoring well on the exam with entrance to college. Similarly, when one discovers that eating a certain food is correlated with an upset stomach one does not identify eating that food with having an upset stomach. Then there is the fact that movements of bodily limbs like arms and legs are correlated with events in the motor cortex of the brain. No one believes, however, that movements of arms and legs are identical with their causal antecedents in the brain. Upon reflection, it is just as obvious that there is no good reason to believe that psychological events are identical with brain events simply because the two are correlated.

Link to the peer-reviewed scientific papers that support these opinions.

Finally, ..... some religious people cite out-of-the-body or near-death experiences as evidence for the immateriality of the mind and the possibility of its surviving disembodied.

NDE is not after death, so it is not evidence of what happens after death.

With all due respect, I seriously doubt that this is what really convinces people that the mind is immaterial. Most people start out believing that the mind is immaterial and in light of this initial conviction find nothing conceptually problematic with near-death and out-of-the-body experiences. They do not come to believe that the mind is immaterial on the basis of having or hearing about such experiences. Moreover, I believe that most people are religious because they believe that the mind is immaterial. They do not come to believe that the mind is immaterial because they are religious.
With all good wishes,"

Stewart Goetz, Ph.D.
Professor of Philosophy
Ursinus College
Collegeville, PA 19426
...

They may not come to believe that the mind is immaterial because they are religious, but for that same reason they may not critically examine that assertion.

 

[Elioenai26]

Suffice it to say, no argument or belief of mine is empirically verifiable. Nor do they need to be to be true beyond a reasonable doubt.

Your position however, as I have stated earlier, is self-refuting, and therefore is by definition, false. It is necessarily false because it violates a very fundamental law of logic, the law of non-contradiction. This law states that A and non-A cannot both be true at the same time and in the same sense.

The statements "statements are meaningless unless they can be empirically verified" and "statements are meaningless unless they can be empirically falsified" have both been called self-refuting on the basis that they can neither be empirically verified nor falsified.

Similar arguments have been made for statements such as "no statements are true unless they can be shown empirically to be true," which was a problem for logical positivism. (Wikipedia)

A simple definition for God would be that He is the Greatest Conceivable Being. -Anselm

Key tenets of logical positivism, including its atomistic philosophy of science, the verifiability principle, and the fact-value distinction, came under attack after the Second World War by philosophers such as Nelson Goodman, Quine, J. L. Austin, and Peter Strawson. Nicholas G. Fotion comments that, "By the late 1960s it became obvious that the movement had pretty much run its course." Most philosophers consider logical positivism to be, as John Passmore expressed it, "dead, or as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes." By the late 1970s, its ideas were so generally recognized to be seriously defective that one of its own main proponents, A. J. Ayer, could say in an interview: "I suppose the most important [defect]...was that nearly all of it was false." (Wikipedia)

Just because you affix a new label to an old, debunked, antiquated, self defeating view, does not make it legitimate.

 

[Davian]

Until you renounce your theological noncognitivist self-defeating view, I see no reason to facilitate in your discussing something that is meaningless and non-sensical to you. This means any discussion related to God cannot be undertaken by you and I because the word God has no meaning to you.

Thank you.

This is an obvious evasion on your part. You often point out to others that this is a Philosophy board, and with that come certain expectations regarding how the dialogue is supposed to work. A philosopher can adopt any view he wishes at any given moment and argue for it, even if he does not in the end accept that view as his own. You are evading.

Until I joined this site, I had not observed evasion being used in an effort to support one's arguments.

 

[Gadarene]

Until I joined this site, I had not observed evasion being used in an effort to support one's arguments.

Everything is evidence for God if you try hard enough

 

[Davian]

Why do you not just answer the questions put to you? Do you not have the truth?

Suffice it to say, no argument or belief of mine is empirically verifiable.

If something is true, why would it not be verifiable true?

Nor do they need to be to be true beyond a reasonable doubt.

You mean, 'proven true beyond reasonable doubt'.

I disagree, given what you are claiming. But then, I do not think you have reached even this point.

Your position however, as I have stated earlier, is self-refuting, and therefore is by definition, false. It is necessarily false because it violates a very fundamental law of logic, the law of non-contradiction. This law states that A and non-A cannot both be true at the same time and in the same sense.

How can something this cannot be true or false be false? Can it also be cyan?

The statements "statements are meaningless unless they can be empirically verified" and "statements are meaningless unless they can be empirically falsified" have both been called self-refuting on the basis that they can neither be empirically verified nor falsified.

Similar arguments have been made for statements such as "no statements are true unless they can be shown empirically to be true," which was a problem for logical positivism. (Wikipedia)

But if one observes, gathers data, makes models from that data, and those models provide useful predictions and further insight, then we avoid those problems.

A simple definition for God would be that He is the Greatest Conceivable Being. -Anselm

Of what use is that statement? How would one test that?

Key tenets of logical positivism, including its atomistic philosophy of science, the verifiability principle, and the fact-value distinction, came under attack after the Second World War by philosophers such as Nelson Goodman, Quine, J. L. Austin, and Peter Strawson. Nicholas G. Fotion comments that, "By the late 1960s it became obvious that the movement had pretty much run its course." Most philosophers consider logical positivism to be, as John Passmore expressed it, "dead, or as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes." By the late 1970s, its ideas were so generally recognized to be seriously defective that one of its own main proponents, A. J. Ayer, could say in an interview: "I suppose the most important [defect]...was that nearly all of it was false." (Wikipedia)

Just because you affix a new label to an old, debunked, antiquated, self defeating view, does not make it legitimate.

My worldview does not rest on logical positivism, so I do not see this as a problem.

You claim that this word of yours has meaning. If it does, you are certainly taking the roundabout way of establishing it.

 

[The Engineer]

Elioenai26, will you please address my posts? I didn't write them for giggles, you know?

 

[Wiccan_Child]

Elioenai26, will you please address my posts? I didn't write them for giggles, you know?

I'm still waiting for a response to mine, too.

 

[Elioenai26]

Elioenai26, will you please address my posts? I didn't write them for giggles, you know?

With regards to your posts, they have no grounds whatsoever to be taken as credible.

Why?

Well, you are making assertions from a deterministic, reductionistic view, which is, like Davin's position, self defeating and therefore is by definition, false. The reasons however are slightly different for, note:

To maintain that determinism is rational is self-defeating, not in one but two ways:

‪1.‬To count as rational, a belief must be freely chosen, which according to the determinist, is impossible.

‪2.‬ Any kind of debate seems to be posited on the idea that the parties involved are trying to change each others minds. If not, then it would not be a debate. But if our minds are no more than chemical reactions in our mental organ, and are reducible to a deterministic understanding sans free-will, I have no mind to change, and therefore you are engaging in a self-defeating futile exercise.

 

[Gadarene]

With regards to your posts, they have no grounds whatsoever to be taken as credible.

Why?

Well, you are making assertions from a deterministic, reductionistic view, which is, like Davin's position, self defeating and therefore is by definition, false. The reasons however are slightly different for, note:

To maintain that determinism is rational is self-defeating, not in one but two ways:

‪1.‬To count as rational, a belief must be freely chosen, which according to the determinist, is impossible.

‪2.‬ Any kind of debate seems to be posited on the idea that the parties involved are trying to change each others minds. If not, then it would not be a debate. But if our minds are no more than chemical reactions in our mental organ, and are reducible to a deterministic understanding sans free-will, I have no mind to change, and therefore you are engaging in a self-defeating futile exercise.

Determinism has nothing to do with the logic of what he said.

But I'm sure you'll invent another feeble copout soon. Seems to be apologists' MO.

 

[Belk]

With regards to your posts, they have no grounds whatsoever to be taken as credible.

Why?

Well, you are making assertions from a deterministic, reductionistic view, which is, like Davin's position, self defeating and therefore is by definition, false. The reasons however are slightly different for, note:

To maintain that determinism is rational is self-defeating, not in one but two ways:

‪1.‬To count as rational, a belief must be freely chosen, which according to the determinist, is impossible.

I am unaware of any definition of "rational" that requires a belief to be freely chosen let alone chosen at all. To be rational a belief must simply have a logical basis.

‪2.‬ Any kind of debate seems to be posited on the idea that the parties involved are trying to change each others minds. If not, then it would not be a debate. But if our minds are no more than chemical reactions in our mental organ, and are reducible to a deterministic understanding sans free-will, I have no mind to change, and therefore you are engaging in a self-defeating futile exercise.

Simply because our brains are chemical based does not mean we lack free will.

 

[Davian]

Why do you not just answer the questions put to you?

With regards to your posts, they have no grounds whatsoever to be taken as credible.

Why?

Well, you are making assertions from a deterministic, reductionistic view, which is, like Davin's position, self defeating and therefore is by definition, false. The reasons however are slightly different for, note:

To maintain that determinism is rational is self-defeating, not in one but two ways:

‪1.‬To count as rational, a belief must be freely chosen, which according to the determinist, is impossible.

Is it possible for you? I did ask previously, back on post 415. Can you stop believing in deities today, and start back up next week?

‪2.‬ Any kind of debate seems to be posited on the idea that the parties involved are trying to change each others minds. If not, then it would not be a debate. But if our minds are no more than chemical reactions in our mental organ, and are reducible to a deterministic understanding sans free-will, I have no mind to change, and therefore you are engaging in a self-defeating futile exercise.

Straw man.

Interestingly, I just listened to Daniel Dennett discuss this topic on the Philosophy Bites podcast.

"Daniel C. Dennett discusses free will, moral responsibility, and the intentional stance in this wide-ranging Philosophy Bites interview with Nigel Warburton."

Philosophy Bites: Daniel Dennett on Free Will Worth Wanting

"Listen to Daniel Dennett on Free Will Worth Wanting:" MP3 15 minutes

 

[Elioenai26]

We can speak about determinism in another thread. This thread is devoted to the KCA. Please keep that in mind.

 

[Gracchus]

1. What is truth?
2. Can truth be known?
3. Can truths about God be known?
4. So what? Who cares about truth?​

1. Truth is composed of those statements that correspond with reality.​

2. To some extent, truth can be ascertained. It is not clear that a complete statement of reality is possible.
3. If God is cannot be observed, and if no observation can be made that evidences God, then for all practical purposes God is not real, and thus all that can be said truthfully, is that God is probably not real.
4. Certainly not those who persist in the belief of unreal things in the face of evidence.

 

[Davian]

We can speak about determinism in another thread. This thread is devoted to the KCA. Please keep that in mind.

My bad. I thought we had moved on to "excuses used by the OP for avoiding the original topic".

 

[The Engineer]

With regards to your posts, they have no grounds whatsoever to be taken as credible.

I take this as a personal insult.

Why?

Because you know absolutely nothing about neurology, that's why! You haven't responded to my answer to your first rip-off from Dr Goetz, you didn't post anything in my mind-brain-dualism thread, and now, you didn't make a rational response, either, you just told me that you're not going to argue with me because you don't like my position, albeit in fancier words!

Well, you are making assertions from a deterministic, reductionistic view, which is, like Davin's position, self defeating and therefore is by definition, false. The reasons however are slightly different for, note:

To maintain that determinism is rational is self-defeating, not in one but two ways:

Can you please address my arguments instead of talking to mr strawman?

‪

1.‬To count as rational, a belief must be freely chosen, which according to the determinist, is impossible.

I never heard this definition before.

‪

2.‬ Any kind of debate seems to be posited on the idea that the parties involved are trying to change each others minds. If not, then it would not be a debate. But if our minds are no more than chemical reactions in our mental organ, and are reducible to a deterministic understanding sans free-will, I have no mind to change, and therefore you are engaging in a self-defeating futile exercise.

I never said the mind doesn't exist, I said your mind is a part of your brain! By the way, changing a persons mind is still absolutely possible, even with determinism. Just because you can't choose to accept them doesn't mean your brain is immune to logic.

Both your arguments are crap.

We can speak about determinism in another thread. This thread is devoted to the KCA. Please keep that in mind.

Right, just change the topic when you see that no one buys your crap anymore!

I hope you remember that you're the one who started this debate in the first place. You wrote pseudoscientific crap, I countered it, now you tell us we should go back to topic? Good one! If you want a debate about something neurology related, just start another thread, or post it in this thread if it's related, but don't start it and then instantly shout BTT! the moment somebody sees through your shallow, worthless, pseudoscientific arguments.

 

[Lord Emsworth]

With regards to your posts, they have no grounds whatsoever to be taken as credible.

Why?

Well, you are making assertions from a deterministic, reductionistic view, which is, like Davin's position, self defeating and therefore is by definition, false. The reasons however are slightly different for, note:

To maintain that determinism is rational is self-defeating, not in one but two ways:

‪1.‬To count as rational, a belief must be freely chosen, which according to the determinist, is impossible.

The corollary is, that compelling arguments or evidence are not rational. Talk about self-defeating.

‪2.‬ Any kind of debate seems to be posited on the idea that the parties involved are trying to change each others minds. If not, then it would not be a debate. But if our minds are no more than chemical reactions in our mental organ, and are reducible to a deterministic understanding sans free-will, I have no mind to change, and therefore you are engaging in a self-defeating futile exercise.

You are confusing determinism with fatalism.

The difference being that in fatalism a certain condition will obtain no matter what happened before, or put differently, a condition will obtain despite what happened before. In this case, the conclusion is already certain and it does not matter what arguments or evidence are presented.

In determinism a state of affairs obtains because of what happens before. In this case, a given belief might in fact be caused by, might be a conclusion of a given set of arguments or evidence. (Compatibilism, falls into this category too.)

Libertarian free will (LFW) is kind of like fatalism in that in that is ultimately irrelevant what happens before. (LFW is the kind of free will that is incompatible with determinism/causality. Not to be confused or equivocated with Compatibilism.) Compelling evidence or arguments? Whatever; it violates free will. See here, where this kind of thinking leads to:
http://www.christianforums.com/t7677901/#post61121084


As you can see, in fact the only way to be rational is to have your conclusions form because of, or if you will, as a consequence of whatever arguments or evidence or whatever you have. The only way to reach a conclusion rationally is to have your conclusion be determined by evidence, arguments etc. With fatalism or LFW there is no 'because', there can not be 'because' - it would be 'just so'.