Thanks Pat!
[quote]Severiano wrote:
[quote]JoabSonOfZeruiah wrote:
[quote]Severiano wrote:
but again your faith is supposed to scoff in the face of logic.[/quote]
Sigh I thought I responded to this Bertrand Russell mischaracterization of faith that wasn’t held by the majority of Christians for the last 2000 years but gets ignored.[/quote]
Mischaracterization of faith?
You sure you got Bertrand Russell pegged down right?
When Bertrand Russell goes about his explanations, his dialogue is about what the Church put forward in response to some simple arguments against God, like the first cause, which were all shot to hell, many at much earlier times by folks like David Hume. So it’s not Russell’s characterization of faith, it’s the church’s characterization of faith, and the evolution of the faith of the Church, because the nature of faith has changed with time in response to these logical arguments and counter arguments, the Church losing on every single front when it came to proving gods existence through faith. Not my words, not my goal, that’s what the Church did, and those were their endeavors at the time…
[/quote]
Neither he, nor you know then knew what the Church argued regarding the existence of God. Faith isn’t about know God exists. You do not need faith to do that, logic simply dictates a necessity for God’s existence. What takes faith is trusting God.
Russell lost me when his counter argument to the arguments for the existence of God when he claimed the ‘Universe just is’. That may be the worst philosophical proposition ever put forth that wasn’t a joke.
All it takes is a little google. Faith isn’t required to be defined by a church, it has a definition outside of that context. And it’s basically a belief in non-concrete propositions, which includes…mmmmm just about everything…Just about, but not quite.
I didn’t realize that Russell had the authority to change the meaning of words? The church doesn’t sit around characterizing what faith is. It’s job is to act in religious faith and be a beacon to others acting in religious faith.
Wisdom is available to any who seek it. And I scoff at the proposition that Christians are close minded and the atheist/ agnostic is open minded and if one just opens their mind, then clearly they will see the way of the atheist/ agnostic. That’s bunk. Is the atheist/ agnostic being honest with themselves? Can you look at the way things really are and accept the answer even if it doesn’t suite you, or worse, require you to change? Most of the time, I find that it’s a reason to justify one’s self, rather than an honest proposition. And Russell was a terrible philosopher. ← That’s an honest look right there.
[quote]
Character of Christ, at 22ish minutes in… Something Christians haven’t been doing since the time of Christ, and probably the most important aspect of Christianity. Give to the poor, give to the poor, or you are not Christ like. [/quote]
There’s a lot more to Christ than charity.
PAT!!! I’m glad you’re back.
[quote]pat wrote:
[quote]Severiano wrote:
[quote]JoabSonOfZeruiah wrote:
[quote]Severiano wrote:
but again your faith is supposed to scoff in the face of logic.[/quote]
Sigh I thought I responded to this Bertrand Russell mischaracterization of faith that wasn’t held by the majority of Christians for the last 2000 years but gets ignored.[/quote]
Mischaracterization of faith?
You sure you got Bertrand Russell pegged down right?
When Bertrand Russell goes about his explanations, his dialogue is about what the Church put forward in response to some simple arguments against God, like the first cause, which were all shot to hell, many at much earlier times by folks like David Hume. So it’s not Russell’s characterization of faith, it’s the church’s characterization of faith, and the evolution of the faith of the Church, because the nature of faith has changed with time in response to these logical arguments and counter arguments, the Church losing on every single front when it came to proving gods existence through faith. Not my words, not my goal, that’s what the Church did, and those were their endeavors at the time…
[/quote]
Neither he, nor you know then knew what the Church argued regarding the existence of God. Faith isn’t about know God exists. You do not need faith to do that, logic simply dictates a necessity for God’s existence. What takes faith is trusting God.
Russell lost me when his counter argument to the arguments for the existence of God when he claimed the ‘Universe just is’. That may be the worst philosophical proposition ever put forth that wasn’t a joke.
All it takes is a little google. Faith isn’t required to be defined by a church, it has a definition outside of that context. And it’s basically a belief in non-concrete propositions, which includes…mmmmm just about everything…Just about, but not quite.
I didn’t realize that Russell had the authority to change the meaning of words? The church doesn’t sit around characterizing what faith is. It’s job is to act in religious faith and be a beacon to others acting in religious faith.
Wisdom is available to any who seek it. And I scoff at the proposition that Christians are close minded and the atheist/ agnostic is open minded and if one just opens their mind, then clearly they will see the way of the atheist/ agnostic. That’s bunk. Is the atheist/ agnostic being honest with themselves? Can you look at the way things really are and accept the answer even if it doesn’t suite you, or worse, require you to change? Most of the time, I find that it’s a reason to justify one’s self, rather than an honest proposition. And Russell was a terrible philosopher. ← That’s an honest look right there.
[quote]
Character of Christ, at 22ish minutes in… Something Christians haven’t been doing since the time of Christ, and probably the most important aspect of Christianity. Give to the poor, give to the poor, or you are not Christ like. [/quote]
There’s a lot more to Christ than charity.[/quote]
Russell was a terrible Philosopher? Really? I’m a little disappointed. I don’t know what misunderstandings your teachers, or priests taught you… But the Church did teach in the past that God’s existence could be proven though faith, Aquinas was clearly a brilliant man, he existed, and he thought there was proof of God via faith. Are you denying the existence of probably the smartest Catholic to ever live?
Allow your religion to be tempered and disciplined by science. Be smart enough to recognize that science hasn’t refuted the existence of God, no matter what Russell or Hume say… And be comfortable with it. You seem to think that the Church didn’t come up with these arguments that failed, but they did. Russell broke down and refuted every single one of these, actually he did a lot of repeating of what other philosophers had concluded before him. Here they are, you will see Russell refuted these in the video I posted before.
The First Way: Argument from Motion
Our senses prove that some things are in motion.
Things move when potential motion becomes actual motion.
Only an actual motion can convert a potential motion into an actual motion.
Nothing can be at once in both actuality and potentiality in the same respect (i.e., if both actual and potential, it is actual in one respect and potential in another).
Therefore nothing can move itself.
Therefore each thing in motion is moved by something else.
The sequence of motion cannot extend ad infinitum.
Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God.
The Second Way: Argument from Efficient Causes
We perceive a series of efficient causes of things in the world.
Nothing exists prior to itself.
Therefore nothing is the efficient cause of itself.
If a previous efficient cause does not exist, neither does the thing that results.
Therefore if the first thing in a series does not exist, nothing in the series exists.
The series of efficient causes cannot extend ad infinitum into the past, for then there would be no things existing now.
Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God.
The Third Way: Argument from Possibility and Necessity (Reductio argument)
We find in nature things that are possible to be and not to be, that come into being and go out of being i.e., contingent beings.
Assume that every being is a contingent being.
For each contingent being, there is a time it does not exist.
Therefore it is impossible for these always to exist.
Therefore there could have been a time when no things existed.
Therefore at that time there would have been nothing to bring the currently existing contingent beings into existence.
Therefore, nothing would be in existence now.
We have reached an absurd result from assuming that every being is a contingent being.
Therefore not every being is a contingent being.
Therefore some being exists of its own necessity, and does not receive its existence from another being, but rather causes them. This all men speak of as God.
The Fourth Way: Argument from Gradation of Being
There is a gradation to be found in things: some are better or worse than others.
Predications of degree require reference to the â??uttermostâ?? case (e.g., a thing is said to be hotter according as it more nearly resembles that which is hottest).
The maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus.
Therefore there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.
The Fifth Way: Argument from Design
We see that natural bodies work toward some goal, and do not do so by chance.
Most natural things lack knowledge.
But as an arrow reaches its target because it is directed by an archer, what lacks intelligence achieves goals by being directed by something intelligence.
Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.
Also, I think that there are some design/ specifically arguments from fine tuning that aren’t so clearly refuted by Russell. Perhaps he would be able to come up with the same refutation I came up with, but alas he never got to see the argument from a finely tuned universe.
If you like, I can poke some different holes in that one as well. 
It still kinda holds water, it holds chance at the very least.
Pat, Tirib, Joab you should check out and research Aquinas as well as Etienne Tempier. You might change your attitude about what the Church put forward in the past, and what sort of bullshit dominated the thinking, way back in the 1200’s 
[quote]JoabSonOfZeruiah wrote:
Well he certainly is an articulate speaker and I can see where Richard Dawkins gets many of his arguments and positions from and at times I can sympathize with him on certain issues such as Christians not living up what they claim to be.
However many of his arguments are bad, on his first cause argument he doesn’t deal with the most well known work on the first cause i.e. what Aquinas and Leibniz had done on it and attacks a strawman mainly the premise “that everything has a cause” which they never asserted and his lack of distinction between necessary and contingent is quite telling in his question “what caused God?” is just like the question what “taste does the color blue have?” or “to whom is the bachelor married to”?
He lived before a time when the inductive evidence from science had strong support for the beginning of the universe and if he wishes to attribute no cause to its beginning I’m not one to say that he can’t but it certainly isn’t logical.
In his critique of natural law has intermediate aspects which my answer to his response on the first cause and the moral law will address mainly the designation between contingent and necessary from the first cause.
In his Moral law critique, he brings up Euthyphro Dilemma. Thing is in Christian doctrine(this might rustle Tirib’s jimmies if I don’t make myself clear) there are certain properties God has necessarily has or else he isn’t God. The laws of Logic and the moral Law are as they are by necessity and they couldn’t be any other way, however they have their ontological basis in God’s nature and not anterior to God in some platonic realm where forms such as kindness, love make no sense since they are inseparable from person hood nor could God deny his nature and lie and sin.
His critique of Christians not obeying Jesus’s words does has some force but it does nothing to show Christianity is false including his use of genetic fallacies with Freudian arguments. He also takes Jesus out of context in many occasions in the Gospels especially when he says “Do not Judge lest ye be Judged” Ill let Tirib explain that one. Have you ever heard taking the bible for what it’s worth? Well genre counts a lot given that the gospels are Greco-roman bio.
Given my analysis of his bad argumentation and how he has made a straw man concerning a few things in christian doctrine its not unreasonable to say that he mischaracterized what the majority of Christians have meant by faith throughout its history although he may have been responding to a movement in Christianity that started in the late 1800s know as the great awakening which emphasized the heart over the mind.
Your definition of faith isn’t what Tirib takes it to be and I highly doubt its what KingKai takes it to be given that he should know the semantic meaning and range of the word used for faith in the bible “pistis”.
Knowledge can be by acquaintance or propositional and most people would say their knowledge of God isn’t on the basis of any argument but rather by experience(acquaintance). This doesn’t mean that they will say they can’t possibly be mistaken but any argument to say they could be mistaken about their experience can be said of there experience of the external world as well and thus their belief in constitutes a properly basic belief just as their belief in the external world.
This is why for Plantinga Basic belief constitutes knowledge for the one who has it. I perceive a pecan tree in my front yard, is it broadly logically possible that I could be mistaken about it sure but knowledge I have of it.[/quote]
Aquinas put forth deductive arguments in an attempt to prove the existence of God via faith/reason. Also, we have been using inductive logic as human beings before the time of Aquinas. He was probably one of the smartest and most educated people in the world during his time, inductive logic is 2nd nature to me and most philosophers I know, it must have been the same for Aquinas. You see faith/reason one way, I see it the same way the priest does in the video above. Aquinas saw a necessary connection to faith and reason. Not everyone agreed with him then, and not everyone agrees with him now.
While Aquinas was saying things like this, the Church was persecuting Aristotelian’s for their beliefs. Faith was a squirmy thing back, knowledge was another thing that the Church tried to control the definition of… Funny how that worked out.
Dude, I’ve been beating up on Aquinas here forever. I do agree though that he was one titanic intellect. His addiction to Aristotle is what did him in. Ya jist gotta get it between your ears somehow that there are Christians with views like mine that have literally NOTHING in common with historical romanist religious philosophy. At bottom, Plantinga is no different than Aquinas and is not helping you.
Russel is not even close to the best the pagans have to offer. He is an eye rolling yawn. The only sound and valid (in the illusory realm of autonomous man anyway) stalemate I’ve ever been brought to is with the non famous Kamui. Methodologically he is far too close to guys like me to be taken very seriously by his peers I suspect though.
[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
PAT!!! I’m glad you’re back.[/quote]
Thanks Tirib…I have been super busy. And it’s good to take a break from time to time. I am going to do that more frequently in the future.
[quote]Severiano wrote:
[quote]pat wrote:
[quote]Severiano wrote:
[quote]JoabSonOfZeruiah wrote:
[quote]Severiano wrote:
but again your faith is supposed to scoff in the face of logic.[/quote]
Sigh I thought I responded to this Bertrand Russell mischaracterization of faith that wasn’t held by the majority of Christians for the last 2000 years but gets ignored.[/quote]
Mischaracterization of faith?
You sure you got Bertrand Russell pegged down right?
When Bertrand Russell goes about his explanations, his dialogue is about what the Church put forward in response to some simple arguments against God, like the first cause, which were all shot to hell, many at much earlier times by folks like David Hume. So it’s not Russell’s characterization of faith, it’s the church’s characterization of faith, and the evolution of the faith of the Church, because the nature of faith has changed with time in response to these logical arguments and counter arguments, the Church losing on every single front when it came to proving gods existence through faith. Not my words, not my goal, that’s what the Church did, and those were their endeavors at the time…
[/quote]
Neither he, nor you know then knew what the Church argued regarding the existence of God. Faith isn’t about know God exists. You do not need faith to do that, logic simply dictates a necessity for God’s existence. What takes faith is trusting God.
Russell lost me when his counter argument to the arguments for the existence of God when he claimed the ‘Universe just is’. That may be the worst philosophical proposition ever put forth that wasn’t a joke.
All it takes is a little google. Faith isn’t required to be defined by a church, it has a definition outside of that context. And it’s basically a belief in non-concrete propositions, which includes…mmmmm just about everything…Just about, but not quite.
I didn’t realize that Russell had the authority to change the meaning of words? The church doesn’t sit around characterizing what faith is. It’s job is to act in religious faith and be a beacon to others acting in religious faith.
Wisdom is available to any who seek it. And I scoff at the proposition that Christians are close minded and the atheist/ agnostic is open minded and if one just opens their mind, then clearly they will see the way of the atheist/ agnostic. That’s bunk. Is the atheist/ agnostic being honest with themselves? Can you look at the way things really are and accept the answer even if it doesn’t suite you, or worse, require you to change? Most of the time, I find that it’s a reason to justify one’s self, rather than an honest proposition. And Russell was a terrible philosopher. ← That’s an honest look right there.
I guess you don’t know me very well and that’s fine. I am well aware of Aquinas, I even had a dog named Aquinas in his honor. His his insight into causal relationships is the cornerstone of Cosmology.
I am well aware science doesn’t disprove the existence of God. It’s not me you have to convince, many atheist use science as their arguments against the existence of God. And I am a huge fan of Hume, he was my favorite philosopher. The most honest of any and far less tortuous to read than Kant. For all the brilliance of Kant, I hate his writings, they are flat painful to read. And when you figure out what the hell he was trying to say, it’s like ‘Dude, you could have put that in a much simpler way.’
I deduced Russell was a terrible philosopher on my own. Nobody taught me. He just didn’t bring anything new to the table. I study philosophy in a purely secular setting totally absent of religious bias. If anything, it was the opposite.
[quote]Severiano wrote:
[/quote]
This video was really good. The ideas that truth is truth regardless of it’s source and there are not contradictory truths explains my views very well. If there are two contradictory truths as explanation of a single entity, one of them is wrong. Or our understanding is flawed. These are things I have been espousing for many years on these forums. Of course Aquinas’s work on contingencies are also something very near and dear to my heart.
That is why I said, you don’t need faith to know God exists. Logic tells us that He must. It takes faith to believe God is who he says he is in the scriptures and to trust him implicitly without the benefit of sensory interaction with Him.
You can believe in the Uncaused-cause as a stagnant lifeless being who started and left the creation to just follow the ‘rules’ put forth by creation, which is what the deists believe. Of course, that’s a partial denial of what the Uncaused-cause must be. For to be what it is, it must possess something like a will, and there is nothing to suggest will died off in the process of initial cause. That’s imposing a temporal limitation on something that by definition cannot be limited in such a way.
Thanks for bringing this up…
[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
Dude, I’ve been beating up on Aquinas here forever. I do agree though that he was one titanic intellect. His addiction to Aristotle is what did him in. Ya jist gotta get it between your ears somehow that there are Christians with views like mine that have literally NOTHING in common with historical romanist religious philosophy. At bottom, Plantinga is no different than Aquinas and is not helping you.
Russel is not even close to the best the pagans have to offer. He is an eye rolling yawn. The only sound and valid (in the illusory realm of autonomous man anyway) stalemate I’ve ever been brought to is with the non famous Kamui. Methodologically he is far too close to guys like me to be taken very seriously by his peers I suspect though.[/quote]
I am curious, why do you think Aristotle is in error? It’s not the man we are concerned with, it’s the model of logic he discovered. Reason is a means to an end, not and end in it self. It helps us discover the truth. Truth is truth and not exclusive to one thing or another. A religious truth is truth, a scientific truth is truth, a logical truth is truth. Truth is one., there are not different kinds.
For you Pat I will find a way to make time. I do so very much wish you would email me. I don’t wanna fight with ya man. Honest I don’t.
[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
For you Pat I will find a way to make time. I do so very much wish you would email me. I don’t wanna fight with ya man. Honest I don’t. [/quote]
I really don’t know how I would get it to you. Since PM’s no longer work and presumably never will again, I wouldn’t know how to get it to you. I darn sure ain’t posting it.
[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
For you Pat I will find a way to make time. I do so very much wish you would email me. I don’t wanna fight with ya man. Honest I don’t. [/quote]
I don’t need a dissertation on it, just the basics. Why are you against using logic and reason? That’s all the Aristotelian model is about. I know you have railed against it many times, but I never thought to ask why.
[quote]Severiano wrote:
[quote]JoabSonOfZeruiah wrote:
Well he certainly is an articulate speaker and I can see where Richard Dawkins gets many of his arguments and positions from and at times I can sympathize with him on certain issues such as Christians not living up what they claim to be.
However many of his arguments are bad, on his first cause argument he doesn’t deal with the most well known work on the first cause i.e. what Aquinas and Leibniz had done on it and attacks a strawman mainly the premise “that everything has a cause” which they never asserted and his lack of distinction between necessary and contingent is quite telling in his question “what caused God?” is just like the question what “taste does the color blue have?” or “to whom is the bachelor married to”?
He lived before a time when the inductive evidence from science had strong support for the beginning of the universe and if he wishes to attribute no cause to its beginning I’m not one to say that he can’t but it certainly isn’t logical.
In his critique of natural law has intermediate aspects which my answer to his response on the first cause and the moral law will address mainly the designation between contingent and necessary from the first cause.
In his Moral law critique, he brings up Euthyphro Dilemma. Thing is in Christian doctrine(this might rustle Tirib’s jimmies if I don’t make myself clear) there are certain properties God has necessarily has or else he isn’t God. The laws of Logic and the moral Law are as they are by necessity and they couldn’t be any other way, however they have their ontological basis in God’s nature and not anterior to God in some platonic realm where forms such as kindness, love make no sense since they are inseparable from person hood nor could God deny his nature and lie and sin.
His critique of Christians not obeying Jesus’s words does has some force but it does nothing to show Christianity is false including his use of genetic fallacies with Freudian arguments. He also takes Jesus out of context in many occasions in the Gospels especially when he says “Do not Judge lest ye be Judged” Ill let Tirib explain that one. Have you ever heard taking the bible for what it’s worth? Well genre counts a lot given that the gospels are Greco-roman bio.
Given my analysis of his bad argumentation and how he has made a straw man concerning a few things in christian doctrine its not unreasonable to say that he mischaracterized what the majority of Christians have meant by faith throughout its history although he may have been responding to a movement in Christianity that started in the late 1800s know as the great awakening which emphasized the heart over the mind.
Your definition of faith isn’t what Tirib takes it to be and I highly doubt its what KingKai takes it to be given that he should know the semantic meaning and range of the word used for faith in the bible “pistis”.
Knowledge can be by acquaintance or propositional and most people would say their knowledge of God isn’t on the basis of any argument but rather by experience(acquaintance). This doesn’t mean that they will say they can’t possibly be mistaken but any argument to say they could be mistaken about their experience can be said of there experience of the external world as well and thus their belief in constitutes a properly basic belief just as their belief in the external world.
This is why for Plantinga Basic belief constitutes knowledge for the one who has it. I perceive a pecan tree in my front yard, is it broadly logically possible that I could be mistaken about it sure but knowledge I have of it.[/quote]
Aquinas put forth deductive arguments in an attempt to prove the existence of God via faith/reason. Also, we have been using inductive logic as human beings before the time of Aquinas. He was probably one of the smartest and most educated people in the world during his time, inductive logic is 2nd nature to me and most philosophers I know, it must have been the same for Aquinas. You see faith/reason one way, I see it the same way the priest does in the video above. Aquinas saw a necessary connection to faith and reason. Not everyone agreed with him then, and not everyone agrees with him now.
While Aquinas was saying things like this, the Church was persecuting Aristotelian’s for their beliefs. Faith was a squirmy thing back, knowledge was another thing that the Church tried to control the definition of… Funny how that worked out. [/quote]
I saw the video and even though I’m not a Catholic agreed with much of it though Ive don’t recall the priest saying faith is what you said it was.
I’m not committed to Aquinas 5 ways but to say Russel refuted them is quite ridiculous given the straw men of premises he never defended in his arguments; secondly philosophers continue to develop them like Leibniz for example.
[quote]pat wrote:
[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
For you Pat I will find a way to make time. I do so very much wish you would email me. I don’t wanna fight with ya man. Honest I don’t. [/quote]
I really don’t know how I would get it to you. Since PM’s no longer work and presumably never will again, I wouldn’t know how to get it to you. I darn sure ain’t posting it.[/quote] tiribulus @ gmail dot com . To the mods. This is a utility account I WANT it posted on purpose please. I appreciate the concern, but there is no need to delete this address from posts. I do hereby absolve you of any and all responsibility for havoc that may result from it’s being made public. If they still won’t post the address here you can get from you know who. Don’t blame him btw. It was all my doing. I will NOT make you sorry Pat.
[quote]pat wrote:
[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
Dude, I’ve been beating up on Aquinas here forever. I do agree though that he was one titanic intellect. His addiction to Aristotle is what did him in. Ya jist gotta get it between your ears somehow that there are Christians with views like mine that have literally NOTHING in common with historical romanist religious philosophy. At bottom, Plantinga is no different than Aquinas and is not helping you.
Russel is not even close to the best the pagans have to offer. He is an eye rolling yawn. The only sound and valid (in the illusory realm of autonomous man anyway) stalemate I’ve ever been brought to is with the non famous Kamui. Methodologically he is far too close to guys like me to be taken very seriously by his peers I suspect though.[/quote]
I am curious, why do you think Aristotle is in error? It’s not the man we are concerned with, it’s the model of logic he discovered. Reason is a means to an end, not and end in it self. It helps us discover the truth. Truth is truth and not exclusive to one thing or another. A religious truth is truth, a scientific truth is truth, a logical truth is truth. Truth is one., there are not different kinds. [/quote]Aristotle viewed HIMSELF as the arbiter of all truth, though he wouldn’t have stated it that way. The quintessential sinful autonomous man for whom god was simply the grandest occupant on a scale of being that includes God, man and everything else. (vast oversimplification) Any intellectual method that seeks to “prove” the God of the bible has by definition set itself above Him and deemed Him to be one object of investigation among all the rest. No sir. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is HIMSELF the standard by which all else is investigated. It could not possibly be otherwise. The axiom of axioms. Everybody has one of two. I don’t think you’ve seen this post like everybody else has 20 times. I guess we could start there: http://gregnmary.gotdns.com/index4.html
Aristotle was right about ALOT. But he was sinfully wrong about how and why he was right about it. THAT’S the difference between the scriptural doctrine of knowledge and ALL others. The biblical view is that whatever ANYBODY, Christian or not is right about, they are right about it because they are God’s creature formed in His image to think His thoughts after Him on a finite scale and are inescapably designed to do so. Aristotle’s view, along with absolutely every other other non Christian philosopher in history and even most that were/are is, things are how they are because “that’s just the way it is”. For man AND God.
[quote]pat wrote:
[quote]Severiano wrote:
[/quote]
This video was really good. The ideas that truth is truth regardless of it’s source and there are not contradictory truths explains my views very well. If there are two contradictory truths as explanation of a single entity, one of them is wrong. Or our understanding is flawed. These are things I have been espousing for many years on these forums. Of course Aquinas’s work on contingencies are also something very near and dear to my heart.
That is why I said, you don’t need faith to know God exists. Logic tells us that He must. It takes faith to believe God is who he says he is in the scriptures and to trust him implicitly without the benefit of sensory interaction with Him.
You can believe in the Uncaused-cause as a stagnant lifeless being who started and left the creation to just follow the ‘rules’ put forth by creation, which is what the deists believe. Of course, that’s a partial denial of what the Uncaused-cause must be. For to be what it is, it must possess something like a will, and there is nothing to suggest will died off in the process of initial cause. That’s imposing a temporal limitation on something that by definition cannot be limited in such a way.
Thanks for bringing this up…[/quote]
It was actually Hume that refuted the prime mover/ uncaused cause. You might be interested to check it out. http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/hume/letter_from_a_gentleman.html
[quote]Severiano wrote:
Also, I think that there are some design/ specifically arguments from fine tuning that aren’t so clearly refuted by Russell. Perhaps he would be able to come up with the same refutation I came up with, but alas he never got to see the argument from a finely tuned universe.
If you like, I can poke some different holes in that one as well.
It still kinda holds water, it holds chance at the very least.
Pat, Tirib, Joab you should check out and research Aquinas as well as Etienne Tempier. You might change your attitude about what the Church put forward in the past, and what sort of bullshit dominated the thinking, way back in the 1200’s :D[/quote]
I am a fan of Aquinas as previously stated. I like him more for his philosophy than the church treatises. The foundations of the cosmological arguments come from Aquinas.
I am not a fan of the argument from design. While it makes sense from a comon sense point of view, it’s not deductively provable. From a perspective of the universe in which we live a one in a billion chance is pretty good odds. I am a fan of the cosmological and ontological arguments. However, to discuss the ontological arguments requires an opponent who knows metaphysics very well. Cosmology it the easiest to discuss and prove.
[quote]JoabSonOfZeruiah wrote:
Aquinas put forth deductive arguments in an attempt to prove the existence of God via faith/reason. Also, we have been using inductive logic as human beings before the time of Aquinas. He was probably one of the smartest and most educated people in the world during his time, inductive logic is 2nd nature to me and most philosophers I know, it must have been the same for Aquinas. You see faith/reason one way, I see it the same way the priest does in the video above. Aquinas saw a necessary connection to faith and reason. Not everyone agreed with him then, and not everyone agrees with him now.
While Aquinas was saying things like this, the Church was persecuting Aristotelian’s for their beliefs. Faith was a squirmy thing back, knowledge was another thing that the Church tried to control the definition of… Funny how that worked out.
I saw the video and even though I’m not a Catholic agreed with much of it though Ive don’t recall the priest saying faith is what you said it was.
I’m not committed to Aquinas 5 ways but to say Russel refuted them is quite ridiculous given the straw men of premises he never defended in his arguments; secondly philosophers continue to develop them like Leibniz for example.[/quote]
I have to temper my ‘Russell is an idiot’ stance just a bit. He was a brilliant mathematician, (though he stole his famous ‘Russell’s Paradox’) is his ethical and moral philosophies I think are dumb.
[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
[quote]pat wrote:
[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
For you Pat I will find a way to make time. I do so very much wish you would email me. I don’t wanna fight with ya man. Honest I don’t. [/quote]
I really don’t know how I would get it to you. Since PM’s no longer work and presumably never will again, I wouldn’t know how to get it to you. I darn sure ain’t posting it.[/quote] tiribulus @ gmail dot com . To the mods. This is a utility account I WANT it posted on purpose please. I appreciate the concern, but there is no need to delete this address from posts. I do hereby absolve you of any and all responsibility for havoc that may result from it’s being made public. If they still won’t post the address here you can get from you know who. Don’t blame him btw. It was all my doing. I will NOT make you sorry Pat.
[quote]pat wrote:
[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
Dude, I’ve been beating up on Aquinas here forever. I do agree though that he was one titanic intellect. His addiction to Aristotle is what did him in. Ya jist gotta get it between your ears somehow that there are Christians with views like mine that have literally NOTHING in common with historical romanist religious philosophy. At bottom, Plantinga is no different than Aquinas and is not helping you.
Russel is not even close to the best the pagans have to offer. He is an eye rolling yawn. The only sound and valid (in the illusory realm of autonomous man anyway) stalemate I’ve ever been brought to is with the non famous Kamui. Methodologically he is far too close to guys like me to be taken very seriously by his peers I suspect though.[/quote]
I am curious, why do you think Aristotle is in error? It’s not the man we are concerned with, it’s the model of logic he discovered. Reason is a means to an end, not and end in it self. It helps us discover the truth. Truth is truth and not exclusive to one thing or another. A religious truth is truth, a scientific truth is truth, a logical truth is truth. Truth is one., there are not different kinds. [/quote]Aristotle viewed HIMSELF as the arbiter of all truth, though he wouldn’t have stated it that way. The quintessential sinful autonomous man for whom god was simply the grandest occupant on a scale of being that includes God, man and everything else. (vast oversimplification) Any intellectual method that seeks to “prove” the God of the bible has by definition set itself above Him and deemed Him to be one object of investigation among all the rest. No sir. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is HIMSELF the standard by which all else is investigated. It could not possibly be otherwise. The axiom of axioms. Everybody has one of two. I don’t think you’ve seen this post like everybody else has 20 times. I guess we could start there: http://gregnmary.gotdns.com/index4.html
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Okay, I see. Of course I disagree, but at least now I know why you say the things you do. I don’t see Aristotle as the arbiter of truth, for he himself know that existence is discovered, not created.
Even if Aristotle was hopelessly arrogant, the tools for discovering truth by logic and reason are indispensable.
I certainly do not see how proving God’s existence would in any way, shape, or form set oneself above God. That’s non-sequiter by definition or otherwise. Seeking God, does not in anyway set one above God, I am not sure how that would even work.
Logic is simply a means of discovery. Discovery does not mean creation or arbitration. Logic itself is subject to rules and is controlled by the premises.
Whether you discover God by logic or revelation, he IS very much an object of investigation. One method is does not dishonor Him vs. another. He provided the tools after all, why would he do so if he didn’t want to be known?
Being the object of an investigation does not mean that all things that are objects of investigation are equal. If you and the President were both being investigated by the FBI, the president is far more valuable an object of investigation than you or I would be. To say so is committing the fallacy of affirming the antecedent.
a. The nature crayons is an object of investigation.
b. investigating the nature of crayons is trivial and meaningless.
Therefore, all objects of investigation are trivial and meaningless. ← That’s the problem. Trying to learn about God, by whatever method puts Him as an object of investigation. But being the object of investigation does not trivialize God.
Well, logic is God’s creation too. And there is nothing wrong with using the tools God gave us to know more about Him. None of this demands God’s subjectivity to anything. If all existence owes it’s existence to God, then it’s all subject to Him and not the other way around. philosophy and scripture agree on this, they do not disagree, but very much agree.
If cosmology is right (and it is) then everything on the right side of the equation functions differently from the left. On the right you have contingencies and dependencies. On the right you have that on which the contingencies and dependencies are based. That is true by definition.