BEANO

hi, Psycho Economist,
thank you for the welcome, and the response. here's my reply. you said:

the supernatural so much as it is a bottom-up set of assumptions that are necessary for empirical determinations of causation to work.

and this is part of the promblem. you're looking for a set of assumptions necessary for empirical determinations of causation, but don't have a working set of assumptions that should lead you to be committed to empirical determinations of causation to begin with. and that comes back to my former point-that naturalism does not provide the preconditions that would make sense of causality, or empiricism-but there isn't a naturalist alive who doesn't assume these preconditions. as a philosopher, i find this quite fascinating, but i also want to know how the naturalist can get away with philosophical unitelligability.

nice chatting, Psycho Economist. beano

BEANO

in a nutshell-naturalism cannot make sense of itself. it lacks the preconditions necesasary for any kind of reasoning whatsoever-inductive, deductive, conceptual-meaning for the words "premises" and "conclusions", causality, ethics, and on and on. in the end, it amounts to a subjective and arbitrary "truth claim". Psycho's analaysis of the message is well put (although in the future i may want to expand more on his two-point analysis-for the time being it is good).

The message, however, had more to do with the question of HOW is it philosophically justified to set naturalism over against Christianity in particular, or any other "truth claim" in general?

luvluv

I completely digress:

If so many forum members disagree with the mission statement of this website, why is it still the mission statement of this website?

John 3

You need to explain this point further. What do you mean? No, we havent discovered the Higgs-Boson yet but that doesnt mean we cant make rational conclusions based on sensory data. Though I geuss that depends on your definition of what "rational" is.

Clutch

Er... perhaps I didn't elaborate sufficiently on the word "argument". What you just gave were "conclusions". Are there any reasons to believe them?

Plump-DJ

My own two cents for what it's worth..

Haven't atheist philosophers given up on any sort of attempt at the justification of knowledge from a naturalist or non-theistic perspective?

Humans attempted to justify knowledge autonomously (that is without resource to God because who needs the bugger ay?) and they failed miserably. Philosopher after philosopher pointed out the inadequecy of each attempt bringing us to the current state where, without help, we cannt lay a foundation for knowledge.

[ November 11, 2002: Message edited by: Plump-DJ ]</p>

John 3

If they did then there not too knowledgable.

Keith Russell

Greetings:

Disproving 'God'?

(I was under the impression that unless something had been proved--or at least was supported by some pretty strong, non-contradictory, independently verifiable evidence--rational people didn't have to believe it.)

Keith.

BEANO

Xeren,

everything you might try to offer me as "truth" i have every right to reject on the basis that you are simply bio-chemical robot-a small piece of the naturalistic machinery-merely reacting to one for of stimuli or another. your every word is a reaction, your every thought (though i shouldn't perhaps call them "thoughts" at all) is simply a particular chemical combination in your grey matter. "truth" is simply a combination of all these factors in the individual only-for after all, however you came to believe what you believe cannot be the same for me (as we have very different forms of stimuli bombarding us). thus, each person is left within his own isolated, subjective little universe-nothing more then a part of the machinery.

as far as christianity goes, i meant to say that only the epistimological system offered by christian theism can save any notion of "truth" while naturalism cannot. it doesn't reduce man to a bag of biologicals and chemicals, but creatures created by, and in the image of God (which is the "precondition"for why we assume reason, assume order in the natural world-assume any number of things we take for granted). christian theism assumes a direct revelation from this God, of Himself, which grants a foundation for doing science or philosophy, whereas naturalism destroys any such basis as we are all unthinking peices of machinery-unable to transcend this action/reaction state that governs us.

BEANO

Xeren,

everything you might try to offer me as "truth" i have every right to reject on the basis that you are simply bio-chemical robot-a small piece of the naturalistic machinery-merely reacting to one for of stimuli or another. your every word is a reaction, your every thought (though i shouldn't perhaps call them "thoughts" at all) is simply a particular chemical combination in your grey matter. "truth" is simply a combination of all these factors in the individual only-for after all, however you came to believe what you believe cannot be the same for me (as we have very different forms of stimuli bombarding us). thus, each person is left within his own isolated, subjective little universe-nothing more then a part of the machinery.

as far as christianity goes, i meant to say that only the epistimological system offered by christian theism can save any notion of "truth" while naturalism cannot. it doesn't reduce man to a bag of biologicals and chemicals, but creatures created by, and in the image of God (which is the "precondition"for why we assume reason, assume order in the natural world-assume any number of things we take for granted). christian theism assumes a direct revelation from this God, of Himself, which grants a foundation for doing science or philosophy, whereas naturalism destroys any such basis as we are all unthinking peices of machinery-unable to transcend this action/reaction state that governs us.