anonymousj

Adrian Selby,

Is there a misstatement in the last sentence?


Clearly we have a disagreement on this point. I have addressed your effort to show that it is meaningless in an earlier post.

cheers,

anonymousj

tronvillain

anonymousj:

You have a valid argument for the existence of God, but such an argument is trivially easy to construct for the existence of anything.

You do not necessarily have a sound argument. Of course, you have avoided this by saying that in order to show that it is not a proof (if we accept the argument as valid and the conventional notion of a proof), "one must either show that one or more of the premises is false." This is true, but the opposite applies: in order to show that it is a proof one must show that all the premises are true.

Now, you attempted to stop that avenue of attack with "It is not part of the definition of 'proof' here that every premise in the argument must be proved." That something can be a proof without all of its premises having been shown to be true is correct, but doing so is the only way to show that it actually is a proof.

So, until you show that your premises are true all you have is something that, as far as we know, may or may not be a proof. All we can do is assign it a probability, and I assign it a very low probability based on its first premise.

Koyaanisqatsi

This is so utterly pointless I can't for the life of me figure out why I'm even bothering to post again here, but something you said is an often repeated fallacy around these parts (actually, everything you've said, IMO, but let's get specific):

Then explain how God could have created all there is--which necessarily includes God; i.e., self-creation--ex nihilo.

The "first cause" fallacy directly contradicts your claim; indeed it is predicated on the notion that God can in fact do anything including that which is logically impossible.

If God is only limited to that which is logically possible, then you've just proved God could not have created himself and "all there is" out of nothing since that is logically impossible.

I can't stand it when cult members abuse logic. What's the point? You know damn well that belief in magical fairy god kings is irrational by definition and that belief through faith demands that you completely and unreservedly jettison all logical thought, yet like moths to a light bulb you just keep butting your heads.

Why?

Your syllogism is a perfect example. It offers nothing relevant whatsoever as every single one of us has demonstrated ad nauseum. It is nothing more than a pointless exercise in semantics, yet you keep posting as if you've tripped up the whole logical community with your miraculous "proof."

Why? You haven't and everyone knows this, including you, a supposed teacher of logic, (unless you truly are that deluded) so what's the point? That you are capable of coming up with a trivial and irrelevant semantics argument that demonstrates little more than quaint word games people can play when the desired outcome is to purposefully distort the intended and/or contextual meanings of various words like "sound" and "proof," etc.?

Congratulations. You've demonstrated that you are capable of deliberately misapplying terminology in order to split semantic hairs.

Woo hoo.

Has this changed the fact that there exists no compelling evidence that a fairy tale from ancient Middle Eastern warrior-deity cults factually exists? No.

Has this changed the fact that your syllogism is trivial and that your premises remain unproved in exactly the same way that any substitution of the meaningless word "God" would result in?

If something exists, then SLFJSE#HN:LK exists.
Something exists.
Therefore, SLFJSE#HN:LK exists.

Who gives a shit? This obviously does not sufficiently demonstrate a factual truth claim about SLFJSE#HN:LK's actual existence one way or the other!

But I typed it, didn't I? It's there, isn't it?

Trivial, pointless, irrelevant.

tronvillain

Obviously you realize this, or you would be forced to accept any valid argument in which the premises could not be shown to be false as a proof. Since a proof of the nonexistence of God is easily constructed under those criteria (that the argument be valid and the premises not shown to be false) you cannot hold that you have a proof of the existence of God. Unless you would care to go around telling people that you have proof of both the existence and the nonexistence of God?

WJ

anonyj!

How are you! Long time no talk! Unless I'm misunderstanding the most basic argument (the essence of it), which is most certainly possible, I believe Kenny answered the question (along with your concurrance)on around lap 3 or so.

Since you are a FL teacher I'm assuming you would agree with the concept that FL/syllogism and its very method of deductive argumentation is not designed to verify the basic premise behind the assertions (which are made about a something). As was said, you already have to 'believe' or 'know', for the conclusion to have a meaning for which in this case, the concept of God is intended or supposed to invoke. If that is true, we are back to Kenny's point. Otherwise, it is an ontological issue, among other paradoxical axioms with regard to mathematics and what it means for something to exist... .

To that end, since the concept of the Being known as God is not germain to FL, I'm assuming that, in fact, is the only point you wish to make(?). If so, what follows for (deductive)logic? Is in-duction our only hope?

Walrus

Goliath

anonymousj,

You claim to have a valid logical proof for the existence of a god, but it rests upon an unproven assertion. Therefore you have proven nothing except the following:

Suppose that the following condition is true: If something exists, then God exists. Then, God exists.

You CANNOT (repeat: CANNOT) reduce this to:

God exists.

And you will NEVER be able to make said reduction UNTIL you prove your assertion that "If something exists, then God exists."

That is why your argument fails.

Sincerely,

Goliath

Synaesthesia

Anonymousj is a logic professor who dosn't recognize begging the question when he sees it!?

To paraphrase Bierce, "Education: That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding."

Kenny,
Since I personally have yet to see a formulation of the ontological argument that did not introduce the necessary existence of God in the premises, I would be very interested in seeing this. Have any previous threads on infidels.org had any such versions?

Regards,
Synaesthesia

Pomp

If this is going to turn into a brand new round of Biblical Equations nonsense and Douglas bashing, I'm going to ship it off to RR&P soon.

Principia

Moderators are powerful indeed. <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" />

SC

[ May 08, 2002: Message edited by: Scientiae ]</p>

tronvillain

The RRP thread can be found <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=47&t=000386&p=7" target="_blank">here</a>.