Philosoft

I would bet good money you haven't encountered nearly enough atheists in your life to make this judgement. There are dozens (hundreds?) of regular posters on this board alone who are living counterexamples.

What does this mean? I don't want to believe in Christian theology because I don't want to believe in anything that doesn't have sufficient evidence and/or logical coherence. Is this a different "want" than the "want" you are talking about?
Has it? Or is it just that millions of people are much more emotionally satisfied with the psychological consequences of a father-figure deity and a universe that has a metaphysical explanation, however irrational? See, this works both ways.

Kuyper

quote:
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Originally posted by Kuyper
Free will is exactly what is at issue here. The 'either or' choice you presented is a false dichotomy...that was the point of my post. The way you presented the case sounds as if no choice we make has a bearing on the outcome. But it does, and that is where the free will aspect comes in. God's choice has always been clear: He chooses us!
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Kirk:

I said that ETERNITY is a DISPROPORTIONATE REWARD/PUNISHMENT for the actions of ONE lifetime! Or in the case of cardinal sins, for a single act! How in Hell (pun is intentional) does that impinge on FREE WILL!?!?! Eternal reward in heaven is just as disproportionate as eternal damnation in hell. Free will is not at issue. Stated another way (in fact the way I originally posted), giving a person the span of one lifetime to determine how they are going to spend the rest of eternity is not the act of a loving father. Compared to eternity, a lifetime is but the snap of your fingers. (ERGO: Reward/Punishment is DISPROPORTIONATE to the acts of a single lifetime.). I never claimed that man didn't get to choose...that's an entirely different argument. [/QUOTE]

Disproportinate with respect to what? How YOU think it should be? This is yet another example of "God wouldn't do things this way..." The eternal consequences of one's choices in this life are made clear. That we have the free will choose heaven or hell, then it clearly does depend on OUR choice.

quote: Kuyper:
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As to "grossly disproportionate" reward/punishment, on what basis can you or anyone else make that claim? I don't even know what you mean by "grossly disproportionate". Disproportionate with respect to what -- how you would prefer it? Its an entirely subjective notion.
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Kirk:

(see above)



I did and you didn't answer MY question. How is your comment anything other than your preference for how you would prefer it?


quote: Kuyper:
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My point about debate among scholars rests on the issues of exactly how/when/where we will find ourselves after this life. There's lots of disagreement on details there.
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Kirk:

I'm not talking about scholars. I'm talking about the millions of practicing Xtians, THEIRS being the DOMINANT belief. I have NEVER had a Xtian from any Catholic or any mainstream protestant denomination claim any ambiguity about the One lifespan followed by eternal afterlife in either heaven or hell proposition. Surely you're not going to fishtail on that, are you?



I think we're talking about two different things. If your original comment was referring only to the heaven or hell, then, no there isn't much disagreement there. I took your comment to refer to how Christians understand the concepts of heaven and hell...that's a bit different.


quote: Kuyper:
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Webster's definition doesn't necessarily coincide with the theological understanding of the term. Most of the theological teaching I've read on the term define it as I stated it.
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Kirk:
Webster's definition EXACTLY matches what I (and most all my protestant friends) were taught at our various sunday schools.


quote:Kuyper
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Dictionary definitions are useful, but not the end all either. There are nuances of meaning for lots of terms, depending on what dicipline they're being applied to.
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Kirk:
Squirm all you like; you've been nailed on this one.

I'm not 'squirming" nor have I been "nailed" on anything. Is that your purpose here, Kirk...to "nail" somebody? I thought we were having a lively discussion. If your purpose is to simply try to "nail" someone with this or that arguement, then I see little point in continuing the discussion.

As to this particular point, the theological concept of omnipresence is exactly as I stated it originally. Most Christians I know understand it that way, too.


quote: Kuyper:
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Theistics apologetics is what we're discussing here, is it not? So what's the point of criticizing it? Also, what you're doing is nothing more than atheistic apologetics. So? That's why we have debate!
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Kirk:

I argue that god doesn't answer ANY prayer. You respond with the std apologetic about why god doesn't answer SOME prayers. There is NO APOLOGY in my assertion, athiest or otherwise! What apology do YOU see in the assertion "god does not answer prayers"?

I was referring to your entire post and not just the one comment. You are, in fact, doing atheistic apologetics.


quote: Kuyper:
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....Perhaps you could tell me what you mean by "unanswered prayer"? Based on your comments so far, it seems to mean only "prayers that don't get answered the way I want them to"....
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Kirk:

When a person about to be murdered prays for their life, there is only ONE response that can honestly and unambiguously be regarded as positive.

Postive with respect to what...our perspective or God's? Suppose that the one praying to be spared were a young boy named Adolf Hitler? What's the greater good here...that the boy be spared so he can grow up and murder millions of others? You simply have no way to know from the perspective of eternity what the positive should or should not be. This is yet again a version of "No God would do things this way..." You're just not in a position to say that...and neither am I.

Quote:

Millions who begged god to spare them were NOT spared! ERGO: their prayers were not answered. Unless you want to defend the position that god DID answer, and the answer was an unqualified NO! IMHO, that response would make god a tyrant, or at least too fickle to depend on for anything. I spit in the face of a god who would do that, and if he banished me to hell for it, I would lead a rebellion from there and overthrow him once and for all! (And don't try to spin me with the idea that he answered their prayers by taking them up into heaven. That's nothing more than a hope that allows you to avoid facing the other two possibilities!)

And what sort of God would he be if he miraculously intervened every time something unpleasant were about to happen to any of us? You have a gross misunderstanding about the Christian concept of prayer...but that's the subject for another discussion.

Quote:

So, I am left with only two possibilities. Either god DID answer those people's prayers (making him a tyrant), or he didn't (validating my assertion)! Actually both choices are equally unacceptable. The most rational possibility is that there was no god there to answer prayers. I'm a combat veteran, and have seen the utter randomness (there's no other description for it) of who gets killed, who gets maimed, and who escapes unscathed...and I've seen it up close and personal. When you're face-to-face with that terrible reality, theist apologetics fade to utter banality.

And others have said there's no atheistis in foxholes. What's your point?

Your two choices are false because they depend on an incorrect understanding of prayer and the nature of our relationship to God. Your entire comment comes down to "I don't see how God could do things this way, therefore he doesn't exist". That's NOT an argument. That's only a prejudice.

K

K

Kenny:

.You haven't proven that there is no evidence for these things, and you most certainly haven't proven that those beliefs are rational.

I think I know that what you are trying to say. That the proof is circular. But I'm not talking about a proof. I'm talking about evidence. You said yourself that this has worked well for us. I call that EVIDENCE of it's utility. Now if you still believe that there is no evidence of the utility of memory, inductive reasoning, etc, on what grounds do you call belief in their utility rational? I believe this is the fundamental issue.

I have read your essay, and it seemed to me that you were saying a belief was warranted if that belief were true. But, I'll read it again and post later.

Theli

What kind of evidence are you looking for? Your question seems very strange, it would be like asking for evidence to support that right is not left. Please restate your question.

Theli

Believe in memory without evidence.
If we were to break down "evidence" into conceptual similarities and relations, that is I see something wich is similar to a concept of a circle I have in my mind, and I can from that I can conclude that I am infact seeing a circle.
Now... couldn't the same logic be applied to memories, in order to judge the truthfullness of them? I have a distinct memory that I re-painted my house blue the other week, and I then have a memory of the house being red a few minutes after I painted it. Would this not mean that one of my memories is false? And that I can confirm the truth by simply looking at the house? We shouldn't assume that our memories are true on the basis that we have no other choice, but on the basis that they are consistent.


Kenny...
I would thing that inductive reasoning is a product of repeated similarity in observations, not a basis for them. The basis is the observations, and success from inductive reasoning. As it is, we cannot define reality objectivly, but only in relation to ourselfs. "I saw a ball, I recognized the ball, I picked it up and I felt it, therefore it is real".

bd-from-kg

Theli:
You seem to be under the impression that your original statement is self-evident, or a matter of well-established definition, like “right is not left”. But it isn’t. This is actually a statement of a rather radical doctrine known as verificationism.

It’s important to distinguish this from the relatively mundane, uncontroversial claim that one is not justified in believing anything but the “model” or “theory” most consistent with the evidence we personally have available (and sometimes one is not justified in believing that). Verificationism does not say that this model is the one most likely to be truthful (i.e., to correspond to reality), or that it is the only one that we might be rationally justified in believing but that it is the one that that is most truthful.

Now perhaps you didn’t actually mean what you said, but there are actually some philosophers who do hold this doctrine, so let’s examine it for a moment.

First, there’s an ambiguity in the term “our observations”. Some verificationists mean that the model most consistent with all observations that ever have been (and some even add “or ever will be”) made is the most truthful; others mean it to apply strictly to observations that the individual in question has personally made. The latter version is especially radical, because it denies the existence of objective truth, at least about the “real world”. But in any case all of them are subject to a pretty conclusive refutation, which goes something like this.

Suppose that Max receives an important dispatch with vital intelligence about the enemy. He calls headquarters to tell them he’s bringing it over, and intends to do so. But by mistake he gets it mixed up with an unimportant paper, and he files it away in an obscure folder while putting the routine report in his pocket. On the way to headquarters he’s blown to smithereens. Sadly, no one notices the misfiled dispatch among his effects, and soon afterwards, when the war is over, it gets burned along with mountains of other stuff.

Now the question is, what’s the truth about what happened to the dispatch? Everyone who is even aware of the question – including Max himself – believes or believed, on the basis of the best evidence available, that it was on Max’s person when he was walking to headquarters, up to the moment when he was blown to smithereens. According to any version of verificationism, it follows that the truth is that it was on Max’s person. But this is nonsense; the truth is that it was burned after the war along with lots of useless trash. So verificationism (of whatever flavor) is false, unless one is willing to accept a radically nonstandard definition or understanding of “truth”.

A nice introductory discussion of verificationism (and a good bit of other interesting stuff) can be found in the Knowledge and Truth section of James Pryor’s lecture notes.

bd-from-kg

Theli:

Well, you might well choose to assume that your memories are true on this basis, but it’s just an assumption. A set of propositions can be completely consistent yet be false: look at Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year or Tolkien’s writings about Middle-Earth. both seem to be internally consistent (at least as consistent as my memories, which are far from being perfectly consistent); yet the first is false in many detail, and the second is pretty much completely false from beginning to end.

There’s another problem in the case of memory. It has been confirmed quite conclusively by now that our memories or what is now past are being constantly revised for various reasons. One of these reasons is that some of the older ones are inconsistent with recent observations. So the fact that our current memories appear to be reasonably consistent may simply be an artifact of this process of revision rather than an indication that they are accurate memories of what actually happened.

Also, if our memories are accurate, they should be consistent not only with one another, but with other people’s memories. But it’s notorious that this isn’t so. Eyewitness accounts of events as commonplace as a routine traffic accident often vary widely, and there is every reason to believe that in most cases the witnesses are giving an accurate report of what they remember.

Finally, there’s the awkward fact, alluded to earlier, that our own memories aren’t all that internally consistent. They only seem so because we revise them as soon as we notice an inconsistency.

So: (1) Consistency is neither a necessary nor a sufficient reason for trusting our memories; (2) Our memories aren’t all that consistent anyway, either with one another, or with other people’s. Yet we trust them anyway (to be reasonably reliable) because we have no choice this side of madness.

No. As I pointed out earlier, the Principle of Induction is (at least in part) a criterion for what constitutes evidence; for what constitutes a valid inference from past observations. Without it you simply cannot draw any conclusions from past evidence. You cannot conclude that the sun will probably rise in the east tomorrow, or that your house will probably still be on the same street when you come home tonight as when you left it this morning, or that regularities observed in the past are likely to continue into the future. You have to start with the Principle of Induction, or you can’t conclude anything at all about the future (including the general prediction that it will have some resemblance to the past) based on past experience. That’s what Kenny was trying to explain. This has all been well understood since Hume.

Theli

bd-from-kg...

Well, I don't know about selfevident, but it is a definition and to ask for evidence (as in proof) for a definition is strange.

I don't remember saying that this is the only thing we should believe in, but it is a basis for rational belief. And I didn't categorize my view on the subject in any way, so whatever verificationism might say need not be consistent with my view.

I don't know about this, we don't have just one giant model of reality and how our surroundings work, but bits and peices. I have some knowledge of electrons, but that doesn't correlate to my view on electricity in a lightswitch. The lightbulb (in my model) might aswell be fueled by juice, but I would still be able to work it. All things may be connected in reality, but I don't have that kind of overview.

Ofcourse there is no "objective truth", there is an objective reality, but as soon as we observe it and gather information from our observations it becomes conceptualized. Similarities and patterns does exist, but truths require concepts. For instance, my hand does objectively exist. I can see it, I can feel it, and there is a consistency in these observations. But it is not objectively "a hand".

Not excacly, they did not verify that it was on Max’s person (?) with any observation, they drew that conclution from whatever knowledge they had. I think whoever argues for verificationism is quite aware that people actually can be wrong if they don't recieve sufficient information. I'm not sure what you were trying to prove with this example, except that people can be wrong.
From what I understand, a model or a belief is rarelly ever "true" or "false", but carries a certain amount of truthfullness. Such truthfullness that can be confirmed through further consistent observations, and predictions based on that model.

Yes, but you would not be taking the leap to calling it "real". The book you read is consistent, it looks the same every time you read it, so you can conclude that it is the same book. But you don't observe what you read about, you observe the letters/words and can rightfully assume that they are real, but I'm confident that you don't see Gandalf walking around the room while reading it.

Well, I for one don't rely too much on my memories to provide a detailed concept, because of the fragmented nature memories. But consistent vivid memories I trust (to an extent) .

I don't see how this contradicts what I just stated. Are you saying that at one point we just decided to trust our memories on consistent observations, or is this an inborn part of our mind and it's process of conceptualizing our surroundings (dividing reality into things and events).

Thanks for the long reply, and I hope my post didn't get drawn out.

capnkirk

I have tired of playing verbal dodgeball with you. Maybe someday you will be able to address these perfectly logical challenges to Xtian assertians. Until then, I'm wasting time and effort. One cannot help an addict until that addict is ready to be helped. You will own your delusions as long as necessary. Meanwhile, I have accomplished my goal of demonstrating to the other posters here that you have not reached that point.

I am secure in my objections, you refuse to even consider them, and your responses are not availing. We are at an impasse.

This is CapnKirk. Beam me up Scotty!

P.S. That quip about there being no atheists in foxholes...is BS!! You've been debating one. I wasn't a confirmed atheist when I arrived in Vietnam, but I was long before I left...and in between I was shot at a lot! So until you can speak with some authority, you're just another FNG.

B. J. Kirk
Capt. USArmySF(ret)

(If you can't read the acronym, ask someone you know).

I just caught the big bird outta here!

K

Kuyper:

Have you had a chance to formulate a response to this yet?