ahh... he "weighs in" does he? Like a feather?

But lack of evidence, if indeed evidence is lacking, is no grounds for atheism. No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism.

This is so bad.

This guy is a philosopher?

Lets find out why this is a terrible, terrible, terrible analogy, and he should have known better.

Two idea are put together here. Believing in god vs not believing in god.

Equated with…

Believing there are an even number of stars, or there are an odd number of stars.

It doesn’t make any sense to take a strong stance on whether there are an even or odd number of stars, but we can at least do the following.

We can easily confirm the existence of stars. We can all agree, or define what we mean when we say “stars”. We can then count them and agree what counts as a star and what is a galaxy. We can say that, within whatever error bars we want to set, there are THIS many stars visible in THIS patch of sky, using THIS method of tallying the stars.

Whether there are an even or odd number of stars in that patch of sky is essentially a 50/50 proposition and there is no strong evidence that I am aware of which indicates that we should find a result strongly favored in either category. Everything about stars is evidentiary and observable. Real, actionable knowledge with practical applications.

He’s trying to say that the existence or non existence of god is on equal footing with the question of whether there are an even or odd number of stars, and that is so horrendously off the mark it isn’t even wrong.

It assumes a whole lot about god just to get in the door.

First, what is god? Whose god? Which god of that particular culture? Who in that culture decides what that god is like? We don’t know WHAT this thing is supposed to be! Except that we should all nod our heads when someone sagely spoots out some bit of “knowledge” about what it is, where it is, and what it prefers or hates.

That is being put on equal footing with objects in the universe which we know a tremendous amount of information about. For instance, what they are made of, how they form, how they can die, why they are hot, why they are the colors they are, how they interact with the rest of the world, and reams and reams of other data which is all backed by solid empirical evidence.

Vs a concept which has no basis in reality, no equivalent phenomena witnessed exhibited by anything else, which means seven billion different things to seven billion different people who explain the concept which can only be assumed to exist based on highly suspect claims from untrustworthy sources. All of which stands in opposition to everything we know and can actually confirm about anything at all.

How can we assume the most powerful supernatural magical thing imaginable when we haven’t observed anything supernatural? How can we assume it has limitless power when there’s no indication it has limited power? Or that it even exists?

You want me to put the existence of a thing which violates the rules of everything we know on equal footing of whether there are an even or odd number of obviously extant, and in-principle countable objects?

“You see those points in the sky?”

“Yep.”

“Do you imagine there are an even or odd number of them?”

“Donno.”

“Yeah, so don’t go around saying that there’s an odd number of them, because the odds are basically even on it.”

“I never would. There’s no good reason for that argument.”



“You see that supernatural, omnipotent, anthropomorphic purpose for the existence of everything and anything?”

“ah… no.”

“that one, right there!” Points at a book.

“Ah… I see the book, sure.”

“The book that explains there’s a supernatural, omnipotent, anthropomorphic purpose for the existence of everything and anything!”

“Well, you just showed me a book, though, didn’t you. I agree that the book is there and I agree it SAYS that, but I don’t believe it.”

“Well don’t go around saying you don’t believe it because the odds are basically even that it exists!”

“Not according to basically anything I can name about what we know about how the world works. In fact it seems to me that the odds of that supernatural, omnipotent, anthropomorphic purpose for the existence of everything and anything is vanishingly small. Dismissibly small. ”

Johnson, you make such broad irrationally biased generalizations, often times you need to be dismissed as not having content.


Thanks, pal.

Johnson, you make such broad irrationally biased generalizations, often times you need to be dismissed as not having content.

Ant, stop making posts like this without engaging. It's a post with a single accusation and no support for the accusation(content). Then you say johnson is the one that needs to be dismissed as not having content. You couldn't be any more hypocritical if you tried.

A review of the article from Rationally Speaking.

http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/ ... as-it.html

Johnson, you make such broad irrationally biased generalizations, often times you need to be dismissed as not having content.

Anting.

Given this statement, a brief review of Ant's posts should provide an adequate definition of what "Anting" means in this context.

You show me garbage. I say it reeks. What's wrong with that?

Robert Tulip wrote:

geo wrote:The arguments against atheism always sound preposterous to me. I wonder if this clash of "comprehensive world-views" is what Plato meant in The Republic when he said, "there's an old quarrel between philosophy and poetry.”

Unfortunately when I read something by Plantinga a few years ago it made me vomit, so I will steer clear of his magical poetry. "Orthodox Protestant philosopher" is a contradiction in terms.

Plato had an ambiguous attitude about God. His primary concern was logical consistency, grounded in the view of Parmenides that the unity of reality is the way of truth and can be distinguished from the variety of views in what he calls the way of seeming. The unity of being is a logical concept of God for Plato. He explains this in The Sophist as a concern about pure ideas, something that cannot be understood by people who think only physical things are real.

Plato's dislike of poetry applies to writers like Plantinga who pretend their mythic fantasies are objective even though they rub the wrong way against the scientific framework of universal consistency.

Actually, I think this is an example of yet another point of historical misunderstanding on your part.
You've already proven yourself capable of either slanting or ignoring the actual historical record.

Plato was influenced primarily by Pathagorus and his school of thought which was unquestionably based on a religious way of life - a cosmos not random but ORDERED by MIND/GOD.

Plato's Timaeus is also highly relevant here when considering his thoughts on "natural philosophy" aka "science"

The Timaeus became a welcome read to both Christians AND Muslims for its Theological/natural philosophical pronouncements:

1) The world was created and NOT eternal
2) The world was created by a SINGLE God.
3) The world was created by intelligent design and NOT by random chance.

Also, to Plato, the realm of perfect forms was something outside of Man's mind, NOT inside.
If I am wrong about that, prove me wrong here.
For that matter, if you disagree with what I've written above, rather than mouth on with your opinions, prove me wrong with the actual historical record and not you own spin on history.

I love the way you try to draw a portrait of Plato as some budding atheist.
He was NOT sitting on some fence, ready to fall into the atheist camp. Once again, I'm calling out your shoddy history.

Plato was not a closet atheist, Robert. Not in the least. Stop taking him out of context. It's intellectually criminal of you.

(Keep in my I did not say Plato's God was the God of Christianity. What I am saying is that Plato professed the idea of A God behind Creation)

EDITED:

One more thing:

Plantinga believes that Man has a immaterial soul. If he makes you feel like vomiting, If you had been living in the time of Plato, he too would have made you vomit because of his belief in a immaterial soul.

ant wrote:Plato was influenced primarily by Pathagorus and his school of thought which was unquestionably based on a religious way of life - a cosmos not random but ORDERED by MIND/GOD.

ant, it would really help if your comments engaged directly with what you are supposedly critiquing, instead of this vague general allusory style. In my post that you quote, I said "The unity of being is a logical concept of God for Plato." That hardly presents Plato as an atheist in any simplistic sense. But there is a defensible argument that Plato was pantheistic, since the core of his philosophy was about use of logic to critique traditional superstition. The entire structure of Platonic philosophy arose from the Athenian execution of Socrates for atheism, for his supposedly impious teaching to question traditions.

A paper on this topic of the relation between myth and logic says

the momentous leap from 'mythos' to 'logos,' from fantastic tales about gods and the prehistorical past to a credible account of permanent nature, has been seen as key to Plato’s role in founding modern consciousness. Nonetheless, Plato used the word mythos in a double sense, to mean "lie" and "truth." On the one hand, Plato was the great demythologizer who "deconstructed" the myths of Homer and Hesiod, contrasting the fabricated myth with the true history. But, since people have to have myths, Plato was willing to construct new ones for them, and so he invented the drama of the philosophical soul and made it a reasonable, logical myth, to challenge the old myths of centaurs and so forth.

What this means is that Plato’s logic generates its own mythic structures, understood not as false superstitions but as true stories that give meaning to life. The mathematical order of the cosmos is one such true Platonic myth, reflecting Pythagorean spirituality, and does not involve any postulation of supernatural entities, despite the efforts of believers to coopt the high intellectual spiritual enlightenment for their institutional politics.

ant wrote: Plato's Timaeus is also highly relevant here when considering his thoughts on "natural philosophy" aka "science"

I am familiar with Timaeus. Plato’s idea of a demiurge, a subordinate divinity who created the world, presents nothing to suggest a magical supernatural approach, but rather invokes God in a deist way to interpret natural order.

ant wrote: To Plato, the realm of perfect forms was something outside of Man's mind, NOT inside.

Yes. An excellent book, God is a Mathematician, by Mario Livio, suggests that like Plato’s ideas, mathematical truth is discovered not invented. For ideas such as the good, the just, the true and the beautiful to be merely mental constructs they would be inside the mind, rather than discovered in the world, as the eternal pattern their instances participate in.

But Plato never uses the phrase “realm of perfect forms”. That is a Christian corruption of his accurate logical explanation of the real nature of ideas, spatialising essentially linguistic meaningful concepts that Plato saw as intelligible structures ordering the world. The fact that ideas are conceptual does not make them merely subjective and internal.

In Phaedo, Socrates says “that idea or essence, which we define as essence or true existence--whether essence of equality, beauty, or anything else… are each of them always what they are, having the same simple self-existent and unchanging forms, not admitting of variation at all, or in any way, or at any time.” The idea therefore has a form or structure, something quite different from the conventional theory that Plato postulated some ‘realm of forms’.

ant wrote: I love the way you try to draw a portrait of Plato as some budding atheist.

The fact is, philosophy began in Greece with the challenge that logic posed to mythology. That is why Socrates, Plato’s mentor, was forced to drink hemlock by the government of Athens, for bringing into doubt the conventional mythology of the Gods, in the name of reason. You can read about it in Phaedo and Apology and other dialogues. Today, this same conflict appears in the modern conflict between science and religion.

ant wrote: He was NOT sitting on some fence, ready to fall into the atheist camp. Once again, I'm calling out your shoddy history.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Socrates says “Socrates' accusers cited two "impious" acts: "failing to acknowledge the gods that the city acknowledges" and "introducing new deities". These two problems were the result of Socrates asking philosophical questions.”

ant wrote: Plato was not a closet atheist, Robert. Not in the least. Stop taking him out of context. It's intellectually criminal of you.

Really ant, is logic criminal? I suppose so from the point of view of believers in false myths such as the Christian God. Plato’s God is purely intellectual, rational and mathematical, understood as the conceptual source of ethical and aesthetic values. That is a model completely compatible with Spinoza and Einstein’s atheist/pantheist philosophical view that the term God is a synonym for nature, discovered in cosmic mathematical order.

ant wrote: (Keep in my I did not say Plato's God was the God of Christianity. What I am saying is that Plato professed the idea of A God behind Creation)

Only in the sense that ideas are behind the things they describe, with concepts understood as intelligible representations of perceptions. So again, this term “behind” gets wrongly spatialised by those who cannot understand Plato’s epistemology.

ant wrote: Plantinga believes that Man has a immaterial soul. If he makes you feel like vomiting, If you had been living in the time of Plato, he too would have made you vomit because of his belief in a immaterial soul.

The main thing I dislike about Plantinga is his absurd theory that evolution contradicts naturalism, the most pathetic piece of special pleading that I have ever seen from someone claiming to be rational.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Plan ... naturalism
Plantinga’s argument is that if evolution and naturalism are both true, human cognitive faculties evolved to produce beliefs that have survival value (maximizing one's success at the four F's: "feeding, fleeing, fighting, and reproducing"), not necessarily to produce beliefs that are true. Thus, since human cognitive faculties are tuned to survival rather than truth in the naturalism-evolution model, there is reason to doubt the veracity of the products of those same faculties, including naturalism and evolution themselves. On the other hand, if God created man "in his image" by way of an evolutionary process (or any other means), then Plantinga argues our faculties would probably be reliable.

The bolded theorem is absurd and desperate creationism unworthy of a philosopher. The existence of reptilian instincts in human DNA has nothing to do with the intellectual scientific process of the formulation of the theory of evolution, which is a sublime truth of nature.

Thus, since human cognitive faculties are tuned to survival rather than truth in the naturalism-evolution model

"Seeing the truth" in most demonstrable cases that are pertinent in tribal life increases survivability. What we should reasonably expect is that if there are instances where 'survival' and 'truth' have divested interests, it will be discovered in time through processes of induction and deduction. Which is exactly what we see. Many modern books deal with these deviations, such as Thinking, Fast and Slow by Kahneman(there are about a dozen such books at the bottom of the Booktalk home page). We all have biases and blind spots. They may have helped us survive in the distant past, but now they only act as barriers to quickly seeing the truth.

Without realizing it, Platinga gives strong ammunition to science. Since science is tailored specifically to eliminate the effect of these "survivability biases" on our conclusions. It is the primary reason science has been so successful. In a sense, we have to consider much of our knowledge prior to science as subject, since we didn't have any way to filter out the "survivability biases". This includes religions, aristotelian physics, metaphysics, etc.

Interbane wrote:We all have biases and blind spots. They may have helped us survive in the distant past, but now they only act as barriers to quickly seeing the truth.

Without realizing it, Platinga gives strong ammunition to science. Since science is tailored specifically to eliminate the effect of these "survivability biases" on our conclusions. It is the primary reason science has been so successful. In a sense, we have to consider much of our knowledge prior to science as subject, since we didn't have any way to filter out the "survivability biases". This includes religions, aristotelian physics, metaphysics, etc.

Yes, what a great foot-shooter moment. If we look at how our reptilian and fish etc ancestry over the last billion years and our primate ancestry of the last millions of years supports the construction of false memes that conduce to biological survival, and ask if this process applies more to religion or science, the obvious answer is that construction of useful imaginative fiction occurs mostly in religion. For Plantinga to raise an argument that actually destroys his conclusion makes me shake my head in awe that any sensible person could take him seriously.

I was working through Platinga's logic, and kept getting confused.

The gist of his argument is that if evolution shaped us, our beliefs would be tuned for survivability rather than the truth. Which means that our ideas on evolution cannot be trusted. Prima facia, this is a good argument to throw against those in the scientific majority who believe in evolution. But the problem is that Platinga believes we were created. So from his perspective, there is nothing that casts doubt on the scientists conclusion. That's because evolution didn't happen, so our beliefs are tuned to truth rather than survivability(from his perspective). See the problem?

I know Platinga is smart, so I must have something wrong here. Ant, you should defend his ideas, just as an exercise. Let's see where it leads.