Unusual Suspect

I'm curious. How can there be a "worst" argument for the existence of God, since they're all fallacious.

Catana

Selsaral

Study some anthropology, lots of great ideas there. If you are interested in a truely great book that reads extremely well (and quickly) and tackles the issue from an essentially functionalist perspective, read 'Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches' by Marvin Harris. I cannot recommend that book highly enough. For a broader perspective, go to Amazon.com and search in books for 'anthropology religion', you'll get a million good results. One of my favorites is this one .

Clutch

-- WVO Quine, 'On What There Is'

Philosoft

I believe Quine made the distinction between abstract things and concrete things. I hope so, because some of my noncognitivst ideas are Quine-based, I think.

Albert Cipriani

Catana:
Here it is, 2003, and you still haven't read Orwell's "1984"? To paraphrase:
-- Albert the Traditional Catholic
Albert's Rants

Albert Cipriani

Clutch:
This seems to me to be a confounding, not a compounding of words.

We can add apples and peaches and pears to get a compounding of the idea of fruit. But we get no semblance of an idea when we simply confound disparate ideas like stones, and clouds, and lotto numbers, or in this case, non-being, sense, it, and is not. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Albert's Rants

Clutch

Philosoft,

Quine goes on to demolish the "tangled doctrine" in question.

Philosoft

Thanks. I haven't read that book, but I do have Word and Object, which I haven't read, and Elementary Logic, which I have.

Clutch

Albert,

The awful argument of the opening post parallels a familiar confusion in thinking about non-existents. Quine is summarizing the confusion before debunking it. The confusion, plausibly the same in both cases, is based on the most naive sort of extensional semantics.

ie, "Apples are red" says something about apples. "Yao Ming is tall" says something about Yao Ming. By parity of reasoning, "Unicorns don't exist" says something about unicorns -- namely, that they don't exist. But who's the 'they', here? It sounds like we have to say of unicorns that they don't exist. How can we do that, if there are none? Hence Quine's quote. A collection of more interesting -- less trivial -- confusions often follow on from this, as attempts to avoid the problem.

By the way: I found your post to be virtually unintelligible. For a complaint about intelligibility, that's probably a bad thing.

K

Albert Cipriani:

Just for the sake of accuracy, I believe that came from Orwell. But it was from "Animal Farm" not "1984".