Dr Rick

Sorry, I thought it was obvious:

Strawman fallacy one... ( a strawman, btw, is when you reformulate your opponent's argument to a different, easier one to refute than the one he used)



Strawman fallacy two...

You might be able to figure this one out: after claiming that God has a purpose that is "clearly" relayed in the Bible, you are asking someone to show that He does not. Hint: (it's the one left over after the other two have been explained from the post you originally dismissed as unsubstantial.)

They are the definitions of the arguement. The UPD relies on some type of necessity for evil. Any evil that is not necessary for the unknown devine purpose(s), would be unnecessary. The assertion that that these definitions and premises are "probably self-contradictory" is definitely nonsensical.

That's irrelevant; nothing in the UPD requires such a designation, because to assert the UPD one must first acknowledge that there is evil. It is contradictory to postulate that there is a divine neccessity for evil that requires an omni-god to allow it, and then claim that their is no evil.

There is a refutation to the PoE that no human experience is evil, but that's not the UPD.

Irrelevant responses are another type of fallacy, known as a non sequitur.

The refutation of the UPD does not require that we categorize which specific evils are necessary or not in the postulates. Once the definitions and postulates are formulated, they are applied to experiencial evidence, such as the imbalance in suffering between an Afghan and a So Cal baby, to determine if the evil could reasonably be necessary. The inductive PoE and the refutation of the UPD are not deductive or absolute. They argue that an omnigod is improbable, not impossible.

Finally, if one rejects that God's purpose is unknown, it is contradictory to assert an unknown purpose defense.

That was a response to your dodge:

when asked about the purpose of the disparity in evil after making a claim that gods purpose is "clear."

Where's the substance in that?

Posted after you posed the following question:

Evil is wrong, or it's not evil, imo ( that's why I find the UPD so wanting). Interrogatively implying one group of people need more of it than others is immoral and disgusting.

There are two fallacies here.

One of them is quite basic; it is called a lie:

...which you segwayed into a strawmen, as I never claimed that you believe pain and death are good.


Another lie:

...and another non-sequitur that has nothing to do with the UPD, which acknowledges evil in its premises.

You claimed that the an "'Omni' of any kind is irrelevant to the illustration" about the PoE. Either you don't know what you are talking about, or you just lied, knowing that "omni" is most certainly relevant to the PoE and its arguments. Take your pick

What you posted:

..is gibberish; meaningless chatter, wiht no apparent connection to the issues in this thread.

The response was directly to your challenge:

Your feigned ignorance (you posed the challenge to which I responded) as to the context of the post reflects upon you in an unflattering way.

Most of your arguments here, with all their fallacies and falsehoods, are decidedly unpersausive.

bd-from-kg

theophilus:

1. The AE and objective morality.

In your posts you argue again and again that a materialist (by which I gather you mean a non-theist of any description) cannot make objective moral judgments of any kind. The implication is that this invalidates the AE, since the non-theist has no basis for saying that anything is (or even seems to be) objectively evil.

I pointed out some time ago that this argument is completely bogus. It has been thoroughly refuted and isn’t taken seriously by any competent philosopher. Obviously you haven’t done your homework, and as a result you’re wasting a lot of time with this silly argument.

The AE (in any form) doesn’t depend on the existence of objective morality. It doesn’t assume that there is any such thing as “objective” right or wrong, good or bad. It depends only on the fact that theism, or at least the forms of theism at which the argument is directed, entails that there is, and moreover that it is to some extent known what kinds of acts are right/wrong and what sorts of states of affairs are good/evil. The AE is a kind of reductio ad absurdum argument (although the evidential versions don’t claim deductive certainty the way classic RAA arguments do). The logical structure of the argument can be made more explicit by including the premises:

(1) There is a transcendent, objective moral reality.

(2) God has given us knowledge (to a limited extent at least) of the contours of this transcendent moral reality (through revelation, an innate moral compass, or whatever).

Note that the AE is directed only at forms of theism that assert these premises in addition to asserting the existence of God.

The rest of the argument (of which there are a number of versions) proceeds as before, except that the premise asserting the existence (or seeming existence) of evil of some kind is replaced with one saying that according to the knowledge that God is claimed to have given us of the transcendent moral reality this or that feature of the universe is evil, or seems to be evil.

2. Unbelievers and knowledge of the transcendent moral reality

You seem be arguing in places that those who don’t believe in God do not have any knowledge of transcendent moral reality. But this is untenable for a number of reasons. First off, if we have no such knowledge prior to knowing God, how do we recognize God? How do we tell that we’re not really in contact with a malevolent being of some kind? And how can we know that we can trust God even if we know that we’ve found Him? Don’t we have to know in advance that a perfectly benevolent being will necessarily be truthful? And even if we know that we’ve found God and know that we can trust Him, why would we love Him if we didn’t have a love of Goodness implanted in our hearts?

Finally, if we don’t have an innate knowledge of Goodness, how can we have the knowledge of God that Christians insist everyone has? How can there be no “honest doubts” unless we know, deep down, not only that a supernatural being exists, but that He is good? After all, if we knew only that an extremely powerful, knowledgeable being exists, why would rebellion against this being be culpable? How could we be “without excuse”?

3. Presuppositionalism

Many of your arguments seem to imply that you’re a presuppositionalist. Perhaps the most telling example is:

Your repeated assertions that a nontheist can’t know anything about the “real world” (with the suggestion that a theist, or at least a Christian, doesn’t have the same problem) suggests the same thing.

So, are you a presuppositionalist?

theophilus

It is called (variously) The Transcendental Argument; the Argument from the Impossiblity of the Contrary, and (mistakenly) the Presuppositional argument.

I say mistakenly because all arguments are presuppositional. One must "presuppose" certain things about the nature of existence before we can make any statements.

It is not well understood here (although I've been doing it for about 4 years); which is understandable because it is not well understood among Christian apologist wannabes.

I do not want to start another thread because I do not want to have to respond to the challenges to the methodology created by this misunderstanding (that "presuppositionalism" is some unique apologetic idea).

All arguments are "presuppositional" in nature. That's why I do not challenge the unbelievers presupposition. I challenge his ability to give a meaningful explanation, based on his presupposition, for the nature of human experience, particularly the existence of immaterial aspects such as laws of thought (logic), laws of behavior (morality) and laws of nature (in a purely contingent universe).

The fact that they cannot give a meaningful, cogent, coherent explanation proves that they are "importing" some assumption which is not based on their atheistic (inherently materialistic) presupposition. In fact, they are borrowing from the worldview which is based on the presupposition that the creator God has revealed homself in the Bible and that his revelation is the only authoritative foundation for understanding human experience.
In doing this, i.e., borrowing from the Christian worldview, they betray that they really know that God is the author of their existence and experience and that their claim not to know him is a reflection of their rebellion agaisnt his legitimate authority over their lives.

BTW, this last part is not my opinion; it is what scripture says about the nature of those who claim to "disbelieve," so please don't anybody accuse me of claiming to know what they believe.

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by theophilus :

Ah, the long-abandoned transcendental argument. I'd be rather surprised if you found a paper propounding the transcendental argument for theism in, say, Religious Studies, Faith and Philosophy, or International Journal for Philosophy of Religion in the last ten years. I don't think you will. You can try other philosophy journals, too; the only thing I found that was even close was a 1998 paper that seems just to be explaining one of Descartes's arguments.

Here's my response anyway. I believe in an objective material epistemic foundation. They're just woven into the fabric of the universe. My foundation is more parsimonious than yours, so I win.

Here's a question: What is the explanation for God's existence? Is there one?

BurgDE

Dear Thomas,

I am not satisfied by your response to Theophalis. Materialism does not explain the richness and complexity of human experience.

For example, a young man was killed in a tragic car accident near our home this past spring. His death is perfectly understandable in terms of physics. I.e., the inertia of the Coca-Cola Truck made it impossible for the driver to stop his truck before colliding with oncoming traffic. In a strictly materialistic world we would simply learn from the accident so that travel would be safer, and humans would survive longer in the future. There would be no sorrow. But his death was tragic in the sense that he touched lives. His girlfriend misses him tremendously. And it is not just sex that she is missing. She can get sex from some other guy. The tragedy is in the special friendship that was cut short.

How does materialism explain sorrow, friendship, beauty, ...?
Perhaps you can refer me to some previous discussions.

Don Burgess

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by BurgDE :

Ah, but I'm not attempting to explain human experience with materialism. I'm simply attempting to explain epistemic foundations (for knowledge, logic, induction, rationality, the like) with an explanation that's consistent with materialism. This is the thrust of the presuppositionalist argument, and I've answered it.

But you do raise interesting alternate questions...

I don't agree that in a materialistic world, there'd be no sorrow. Sorrow would just be chemicals in the brain. We would still feel it in certain situations. How is that incoherent?

BurgDE

Let me try to be more clear. I do not see a survival value for sorrow: just learn from the accident and move on. Perhaps you can think of why evolution would select for the biochemical pathways that generate the feelings of sorrow. From a materialistic perspective sorrow is meaningless and a waste.

Thanks for your reply, Thomas.

Philosoft

I'm going to pre-empt this line of questioning, not because Thomas couldn't provide an acceptable answer, but because it's not relevant to the topic, much less the forum. Suffice to say, for our purposes, that you appear to misunderstand the nature of evolution and the ways in which behaviors emerge. This topic, if you are indeed curious, would be better approached in our Evolution & Creation forum.

Spenser

I don't buy that for an instant. I think the problem you are having is that you are making a presumption yourself. A presupposes B. (I'll keep this to PoE considering that is what the UPD is trying to discredit), God presupposed Objective Morality.

Boom, argument over. You have assumed that there is an Objective Morality. Considering the number of differing view points around the world and through out time, I'd say observed morality is subjective. So I don't assume that any such thing as objective morality does exist.

Now when taking on the PoE, an atheist does have to assume God (for the sake of the argument) to display his unlikeliness. Next you must assume that God would have 'objective morality' however, since Xians can't agree on morals (making it look all the more subjective) as demonstrated by simply looking at society, then the atheist must consider the Xian consensus on what is good and what is evil. The majority of Xians, plus most any one else on the planet would agree that needless suffering is evil. The planet is filled with suffering. The amount of suffering alone makes it difficult to conceive of it all being needed, however you'll probably just dismiss this statement as a mere assertion of mine.

You follow on by saying God has revealed himself in the Bible. (What about all the parts of the Bible that weren't VOTED in, were those not God's words or were hanging chads screwing the rest of us out of God's words?) Xians seem to believe that the bible is the basis for morality. They believe that the bible's morality is objective, even if they can't agree on which things are moral and immoral i.e. abortion, euthanasia, condoms, Harry Potter, Etc.

All we have is human consensus on what is moral and human consensus on what the bible says is moral. If we can identify things that these censuses consider evil, then find them in the world and observe seemingly no need for their occurrence then we can lend credit to PoE. Saying there is some unknown purpose, some reason only God knows, is a paper wall you are hiding behind because there is seemingly no reason. I use the word seemingly because it is possible that there is some unknown reason, but admitting the possibility doesn't make it so nor destroy PoE. You see, if only one person was suffering, it could be slightly more conceivable that there was some reason we didn't know. When millions upon millions are suffering, it makes some unknown purpose more ridiculous especially when the human intellect can imagine ways that these people could be learning morality without suffering to such extents. The raw amount of perceived evil in the world gives little credence to the concept of God, thought it my not disprove him, it makes it more reasonable to assume his lack of existence.

I'll go as far as to say that if God exists, and he has some unknown reason for the vast amounts of suffering in this world, that it is needlessly evil not to give us a better idea of why. Your most powerful Xian God cannot even convince a majority of the world of his existence, much less his own followers a complete list of objective morality. The Bible has caused more controversy in the world than most any other book imaginable, not to mention has been used to justify burning witches, starting inquisitions, the crusades, and single handedly taking the world into the 'Dark Ages.' If God is all powerful, all knowing and all good he is doing a horrible job of letting us all know what he expects from us and what we are to consider Good and Evil. I can conceive of a morally good world with minimal suffering (far less than exists currently) so therefore I'm left to believe that I am smarter than your all knowing God. Wow, I feel pretty smart now.

Anyway, starting to stray. Your TAG argument has been refuted before and I'm not aware of much of a drive for it anymore in the philosophical world. Your statement that "In fact, they are borrowing from the world view which is based on the presupposition that the creator God has revealed himself in the Bible and that his revelation is the only authoritative foundation for understanding human experience." is absurd considering all these concepts that make up the human experience predate the bible. How could they presuppose what is in the bible before it even existed? You play a mean word game that essentially says nothing, and the funniest part is that not only is TAG already a weak argument, you further damage it by presuming the word 'Christian' comes before the word 'God' in the argument. That just makes the argument open to parody further destroying its credibility... Enough!

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by BurgDE :

This might indeed be better in Evolution & Creation, but let me make one more response here. Atheism is not, and has never been, committed to materialism. But even if we suppose materialism is true, why is the existence of sorrow less surprising on the hypothesis of theism?