Problems with the Aquinasian "proofs" of God.

[Oxyaena]

Thomas Aquinas famously compiled in his magnum opus *Summa Theologica* a
list of "proofs" that he thought conclusively proved the existence of
God, not just any deity, but the Abrahamic God. Here I refute each and
every "proof" he has offered. Let's begin:

1) Argument from Design

This is one that has been refuted time and time again, that since the
world shows signs of design, then the world must've been designed. This
has cropped up innumerable times throughout the centuries, including
with William Paley's "divine watchmaker" mumbo jumbo, or the recent sham
of "Intelligent Design". One of the main problems with this is that
design doesn't necessarily indicate a designer, and the design of every
single organism on this planet, and the components of said organisms,
down to the molecular level, can be accounted for by evolution.
Evolution by natural selection is responsible for the bewildering
variety of organisms we find on this planet today, and that's leaving
alone such things as inanimate objects, elements, and the origins of
life itself, all of which we can reasonably say didn't involve any
divine intervention.

2) Argument from the first mover

Here Aquinas argues that God is the uncaused cause, by arguing that a
series of infinite regresses is impossible, he says that something or
someone must've been the cause for the existence of the universe, and
that someone is God. Of course there's no reason why that first mover
couldn't have been named Dumbo the Elephant, but he insists that the
Abrahamic God is the first mover. Aquinas is essentially committing the
logical fallacy of special pleading in this one, and there's no reason
to presuppose that the first mover was conscious or even alive, let
alone of a supernatural derivation, so why couldn't the first mover be
of natural origin? Aquinas never provides a satisfactory answer to this
question.

3) The Kalam Cosmological argument

Here Aquinas is essentially rehashing the previous "Argument from
design". The universe is in existence, and since everything in existence
must've had a cause for existing in the first place, that cause is God.
Here he is again committing the fallacy of special pleading, and as
mentioned above there's no reason to presuppose that the original cause
of the universe was supernatural, or even sentient.

4) Argument from contingency

Aquinas says that the universe doesn't have to exist, but it does exist,
so therefore its existence is contingent on something. A la another
variant of the previous four fallacious "arguments" he's already used.
It goes without saying that the "contingency" necessary for the universe
to exist in the first place, according to Aquinas, is the Abrahamic God,
but once again there's no reason to assume that contingency is the
Abrahamic God beyond special pleading.

5) Argument from Teleology

Yet another rehashing of the old "Argument from Design" chestnut. Here
he's saying that unintelligent objects can't move without being directed
to do so, and that director is the Abrahamic God according to Aquinas.
Once again I have to point out there's no reason to assume that the
original cause was the Abrahamic God, and there's plenty of reason to
assume that the original cause was natural in origin rather than
supernatural, so he once again commits the fallacy of special pleading.

Of course all Thomas Aquinas "proved" was at best the existence of a
deist god, assuming that a deity at all was responsible for the creation
and existence of the universe. A simple rebuttal to his fallacious
baloney is Occam's Razor, that the argument that the Abrahamic God was
responsible for the existence of the universe is less parsimonious than
a naturalistic cause for the existence of the universe.

[Robert Carnegie]

I think that a lot of the flaw is that the arguments
use words, which are imprecise things, really.

[Edna Freon]

Parsimony is a guide for judging an argument, not a fact of
nature. In the time of Aquinus, it was believed that Galen's
and Ptolemy's theories actually explained reality. Because
people were content with ox carts, automobiles were
impossible. Because of candles, electric light was sorcery.
The world has changed since then and judging that generation
to ours is as fallacious as anything they may have dreamed
up.

Bill

[Kent Jennings]

On Saturday, September 1, 2018 at 2:35:03 PM UTC-7, Robert Carnegie wrote:
> I think that a lot of the flaw is that the arguments
> use words, which are imprecise things, really.

You got it.

[jillery]

Precisely... at least as much as the medium allows.

--
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Attributed to Voltaire

[jonathan]

On 9/1/2018 3:34 PM, Oxyaena wrote:


Your post most definitely affirms the cliche that
a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. At least
....try to understand what he claimed before attempting
to debunk.

You don't even know the meaning of the word proof, taking
it literally is a typical strawman tactic when one
can't win a debate honestly.

> Thomas Aquinas famously compiled in his magnum opus *Summa Theologica* a
> list of "proofs"

NO HE DIDN'T.

"In the Summa theologiciae presentation, Aquinas deliberately
switched from using the term demonstrabile (a logical or
mathematical proof) to using probile (an argument or test
or proving ground). [6] A more accurate translation
would be...

"The existence of God can be argued for in five ways."


Proofs or Ways?

Many scholars and commenters caution in treating the Five Ways
as if they were modern logical proofs.

Reasons include:

Purpose: The purpose of the Summa theologica is to help Dominicans
not enrolled in the university prepare for their priestly duties
of preaching and hearing confessions[3] by systematizing
Catholic truth utilizing mainly Aristotelean tools.

Precis: Aquinas subsequently revisited the various arguments
of the Five Ways in much greater detail. The simple list in
the Summa theologica is not written to be clear (to a 21st
Century reader) and complete, and should be considered a sketch
or summary of the idea, suitable for presentation in a lecture
or a quick browse.

Via Negativa: Aquinas held that we are unable to apprehend
(the Divine substance) by knowing what it is. Yet we are able
to have some knowledge of it by knowing what it is not.
(SCG I.14) Consequently, to understand the Five Ways as
Aquinas understood them we must interpret them as Negative theology
that list what God is not (i.e. not a moved mover, not a
caused causer, etc.) It invites logical fallacy to use
the statements as positive definitions rather than negative exclusions.[4]

Name: Each Way concludes not with "It is proven" or "therefore
God exists" etc., but with a formulation that "this everyone
understands as God" or "to which everyone gives the name of God"
or "this all men speak of as God" or "this being we call God" etc.

In other words, the Five Ways do not attempt to prove God exists,
they attempt to demonstrate what we call God, which is a
subtly different thing. Some commentators go as far as saying
that He did not write them as demonstrations of God’s existence
but arguments for something we already accept.[23]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ways_(Aquinas)#Proofs_or_Ways?

> that he thought conclusively proved the existence of
> God, not just any deity, but the Abrahamic God. Here I refute each and
> every "proof" he has offered. Let's begin:
>
> 1) Argument from Design
>
> This is one that has been refuted time and time again, that since the
> world shows signs of design, then the world must've been designed. This
> has cropped up innumerable times throughout the centuries, including
> with William Paley's "divine watchmaker" mumbo jumbo, or the recent sham
> of "Intelligent Design".

That's incorrect, his argument isn't the same at all.

"The implication is that if something has a goal
or end towards which it strives, it is either
*because it is intelligent* or because something
intelligent is guiding it.[22]

It must be emphasized that this argument is distinct
from the design argument associated with William Paley
and the Intelligent Design movement."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ways_(Aquinas)#Quinta_Via:_Argument_from_Final_Cause_or_Ends

One of the main problems with this is that
> design doesn't necessarily indicate a designer, and the design of every
> single organism on this planet, and the components of said organisms,
> down to the molecular level, can be accounted for by evolution.
> Evolution by natural selection is responsible for the bewildering
> variety of organisms we find on this planet today, and that's leaving
> alone such things as inanimate objects, elements, and the origins of
> life itself, all of which we can reasonably say didn't involve any
> divine intervention.
>
> 2) Argument from the first mover
>
> Here Aquinas argues that God is the uncaused cause, by arguing that a
> series of infinite regresses is impossible, he says that something or
> someone must've been the cause for the existence of the universe, and
> that someone is God. Of course there's no reason why that first mover
> couldn't have been named Dumbo the Elephant,
> but he insists that the
> Abrahamic God is the first mover. Aquinas is essentially committing the
> logical fallacy of special pleading in this one, and there's no reason
> to presuppose that the first mover was conscious or even alive, let
> alone of a supernatural derivation, so why couldn't the first mover be
> of natural origin? Aquinas never provides a satisfactory answer to this
> question.

Biologist Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion argues against
the Five Ways.

In Why there almost certainly is a God: Doubting Dawkins,
philosopher Keith Ward claims that Richard Dawkins mis-stated
the five ways, and thus responds with a straw man. Ward defended
the utility of the five ways (for instance, on the fourth argument
he states that all possible smells must pre-exist in the mind
of God, but that God, being by his nature non-physical, does
not himself stink) whilst pointing out that they only constitute
a proof of God if one first begins with a proposition that the
universe can be rationally understood. Nevertheless, he argues
that they are useful in allowing us to understand what God will
be like given this initial presupposition.[34]

Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart says that
Dawkins "devoted several pages of The God Delusion to a discussion
of the 'Five Ways' of Thomas Aquinas but never thought to avail
himself of the services of some scholar of ancient and medieval
thought who might have explained them to him ... As a result,
he not only mistook the Five Ways for Thomas's comprehensive
statement on why we should believe in God, which they most
definitely are not, but ended up completely misrepresenting
the logic of every single one of them, and at the most
basic levels."[35] Hart said of Dawkins treatment of
Aquinas' arguments that:

Not knowing the scholastic distinction between primary and
secondary causality, for instance, [Dawkins] imagined that
Thomas's talk of a "first cause" referred to the initial
temporal causal agency in a continuous temporal series of
discrete causes. He thought that Thomas's logic requires
the universe to have had a temporal beginning, which Thomas
explicitly and repeatedly made clear is not the case.

He anachronistically mistook Thomas's argument from universal
natural teleology for an argument from apparent "Intelligent Design"
in nature. He thought Thomas's proof from universal "motion"
concerned only physical movement in space, "local motion,"
rather than the ontological movement from potency to act.

He mistook Thomas's argument from degrees of transcendental
perfection for an argument from degrees of quantitative
magnitude, which by definition have no perfect sum.
(Admittedly, those last two are a bit difficult for
modern persons, but he might have asked all the same.)"[35]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ways_(Aquinas)#Popular

[Burkhard]

Oxyaena wrote:
> Thomas Aquinas famously compiled in his magnum opus *Summa Theologica* a
> list of "proofs" that he thought conclusively proved the existence of
> God, not just any deity, but the Abrahamic God. Here I refute each and
> every "proof" he has offered. Let's begin:

Couple of problems with that I'd say. First, Aquinas is much more
careful himself when he describes the status of the arguments. They are
most certainly not proofs as it was understood then, as an deductively
valid inference from self-evident axioms only - and he says in
particular that our finite mind could not possible have this type of
self-evident insight ("Sed contra, nullus potest cogitare oppositum...,
!, Question 2, Article 1)

Rather, what they do is to explore the consequences of the then widely
shared Aristotelian worldview, and shows that is is at the very least
consistent with the existence of a single creator deity. It won't
convince anyone who does not accept already these premises, nor does it
tries to.

And no, the four arguments are not offered as in support of the
Christian deity specifically. The 5 ways are in the first part of the
first Book of the Summa, the Christian specific bits are only in the
third.

>
> 1) Argument from Design
>
> This is one that has been refuted time and time again,

Arguably, but it is a bit odd to mention it when discussing one of the
first to make it that explicit. The refutations came rather later.

Also, are you following here the Summa in your order of things? The fist
argument in the Summa is the unmoved mover, and I'm not sure where you
see an argument form design either here or elsewhere in the Summa.

that since the
> world shows signs of design, then the world must've been designed. This
> has cropped up innumerable times throughout the centuries, including
> with William Paley's "divine watchmaker" mumbo jumbo, or the recent sham
> of "Intelligent Design". One of the main problems with this is that
> design doesn't necessarily indicate a designer, and the design of every
> single organism on this planet, and the components of said organisms,
> down to the molecular level, can be accounted for by evolution.
> Evolution by natural selection is responsible for the bewildering
> variety of organisms we find on this planet today, and that's leaving
> alone such things as inanimate objects, elements, and the origins of
> life itself, all of which we can reasonably say didn't involve any
> divine intervention.
>
> 2) Argument from the first mover
>
> Here Aquinas argues that God is the uncaused cause, by arguing that a
> series of infinite regresses is impossible, he says that something or
> someone must've been the cause for the existence of the universe, and
> that someone is God. Of course there's no reason why that first mover
> couldn't have been named Dumbo the Elephant, but he insists that the
> Abrahamic God is the first mover.

cite please.

Aquinas is essentially committing the
> logical fallacy of special pleading in this one, and there's no reason
> to presuppose that the first mover was conscious or even alive, let
> alone of a supernatural derivation, so why couldn't the first mover be
> of natural origin? Aquinas never provides a satisfactory answer to this
> question.
>
> 3) The Kalam Cosmological argument
>
> Here Aquinas is essentially rehashing the previous "Argument from
> design".

You mean the argument from an unmoved mover? Not quite, though they are
similar. As I said above, the main purpose of the ST here is to show how
Aristotelian world-view is not just consistent with theism, but leads to
it. Aristotle distinguishes different forms of causality, and Aquinas
simply works through them. So together the two arguments take the form:
There are five and only five causal relation between things, as per
Aristotle. The first leads to a single starting point like this, and the
second leads to a single starting point like that - so whatever way you
reason, you and up with a single starting point. Intuitively, the first
deals with the way objects change (I once had hair, now I I'm bald), the
second with causation between two different object (I turned our garage
into a bedroom)

Gross simplification mind, and one could argue against Aristotle here
that this might be a distinction without a difference, but from Aquinas
perspective bot arguments are necessary - if only the first type of
causation lead to a single starting point, then the toehr chain might
offer an alternative not affects by this

The universe is in existence, and since everything in existence
> must've had a cause for existing in the first place, that cause is God.
> Here he is again committing the fallacy of special pleading, and as
> mentioned above there's no reason to presuppose that the original cause
> of the universe was supernatural, or even sentient.
>
> 4) Argument from contingency
>
> Aquinas says that the universe doesn't have to exist, but it does exist,
> so therefore its existence is contingent on something. A la another
> variant of the previous four fallacious "arguments" he's already used.
> It goes without saying that the "contingency" necessary for the universe
> to exist in the first place, according to Aquinas, is the Abrahamic God,
> but once again there's no reason to assume that contingency is the
> Abrahamic God beyond special pleading.

No, that really has little to do with what Aquinas argues. First, there
is nowhere in that argument a reference to the Abrahamic god- as with
the others, the aim is a consistency test together with a conceptual
explanation: We call God the the of entity that...." which you find
explicitly at the end of each demonstration.

As to the argument from contingency itself, it is rather more
interesting for TO purposes, as in a way was seen as a major obstacle by
several Darwin precursors, and in some respects Darwin too. It is a
probabilistic argument closely related to the Doomsday argument: If
everything is possible, then giving enough time, everything should
happen - including the extinction of everything. But what we observe is
that a) things exists and b) not everything exists. So there must be
some other constraint.

As I said, some Darwin precursors faced the same problem - if new
species come into being in a purely random process, we should expect
lots of "weird" things that can't be classified neatly. The additional
constraint, in this case, is of course natural selection as a
stabilizing force. But that took some discovering. The argument from
contingency simply gives reasons why a purely random universe does not
fit with the observations, and in particular in this way also supports
the previous arguments (which assume ordered causality).

> 5) Argument from Teleology
>
> Yet another rehashing of the old "Argument from Design" chestnut. Here
> he's saying that unintelligent objects can't move without being directed
> to do so, and that director is the Abrahamic God according to Aquinas.

Erm, no, again. Again no reference to the Abrahamic god. And also not a
Paleyan design argument. According to Aristotle, everything that happens
can also be described as following a "final cause", it's destiny if you
like, or something that follows from its nature. Stones e.g. fall to the
ground because that;s where they ought to be, according to their nature.
Since only intelligent beings are known to come up with purposes, and we
did not give stones etc their purposes, some other intelligence must have.

This argument does not say things look designed, and in particular does
not talk like Paley about intricate parts etc etc. One advantage that
has is that unlike with Paley's design argument, it does not follow that
there are lots of undesigend things (Paley's pebble on the beach) which
would be an issue for many theists. Rather, everything has a "final
cause" or purpose, and that must come from somewhere. In a more modern
form, it is similar to an argument that says: laws are made by
intelligent beings that express a desired end state (like criminal law)
nature obeys laws, therefore an intelligence must have made them.

> Once again I have to point out there's no reason to assume that the
> original cause was the Abrahamic God, and there's plenty of reason to
> assume that the original cause was natural in origin

At the time when Aquinas was writing? You realize, don't you, that that
was quite some time ago?

rather than
> supernatural, so he once again commits the fallacy of special pleading.
>
> Of course all Thomas Aquinas "proved" was at best the existence of a
> deist god, assuming that a deity at all was responsible for the creation
> and existence of the universe. A simple rebuttal to his fallacious
> baloney is Occam's Razor, that the argument that the Abrahamic God was
> responsible for the existence of the universe is less parsimonious than
> a naturalistic cause for the existence of the universe.

Well, possibly, but for that you'd have to show two things, neither of
them trivial.

The first would be to show that the Razor is ontologically valid, i.e.
that Occam optimal theories are more likely true than those that aren't.
Now, Occam had a reason to believe this: since simplicity is more
prefect than complexity (modern ID folks take note), a perfect god would
only create a universe that's as simple as possible.

For rather obvious reasons, that justification won't work if the razor
is used as an argument to show that there is no deity.

Are there other reasons? Small libraries have been written on this, but
the general consensus seems to be: not for the general principle. There
are good pragmatic, and even aesthetic, reasons to prefer the simpler
theory, but it is not generally truth-tracking.

To give you a flavour of the problems people encounter that try to
justify the razor: Assume there are 4 people on a remote island, Peter,
Paul, Mary and John. John is killed. Which of the two theories is more
likely true: 1) "Peter or Paul or Mary killed John" vs 2) "Peter killed
John".

now, there are more or less ad-hoc ways to remove such counterexamples
(relevance logics e.g. prohibit disjunctive weakening), but the result
is a much less general and, ironically, extremely complex version of the
razor for which a justification in probabilistic terms "may" just the
possible.

In biology, Francis Crick warned against the razor, and a very good and
balanced discussion is Elliott Sober's monograph "Ockham's Razors: A
User's Manual".

Now, if we assume for arguments sake that you can find an appropriate
justification for the razor, you'd have to show that theistic theories
are really not razor optimal. For this you'd have to decide first which
version of the razor you use - e.g. are you counting entities, or types
of entities? To illustrate, if you take the first approach, a theory
that says Napoleon was defeated by 25000 British soldiers would be
better than one that says he was defeated by 25001 British soldiers and
also much better than one that says he was defeated by 25000 British
soldiers and 50000 Prussians.

If you take the second reading, they would be equivalent, as they both
only use the same number - one - of type or category: soldiers.

But a explanation that he was defeated by 25.000 British soldiers and
150 cannons would be razor suboptimal, as would be 25000 soldiers and
main battle tanks, and would be 25000 soldiers and an army of invisible
killer ghosts.

The first version has the advantage that it has a clear-cur criterion,
and the disadvantage that it is in most cases wrong (there really were
50000 Prussians at Waterloo, and they were needed for the victory, even
though they came late).
The second version is more plausible, but notoriously vague, as it now
depends on what you count as "the same type". Are Prussian and British
Soldiers the same type? Soldiers and cannons? Soldiers and ghosts? All
that without question begging - so if you draw the line at "ghosts", you
need to give independent reasons for that choice.

So you'd then have to decide which reading you chose, and show your
work. Issues would be if one deity is not a much simpler explanation,
under either reading, then infinitely many possible universes that at
least some cosmological theories postulate. Generally, "god did it"
seems to score high on simplicity grounds.





>

[Oxyaena]

On 9/2/2018 4:24 AM, Burkhard wrote:
[snip]

Which is why I`m better off discussing science than philosophy. Point taken.

[Oxyaena]

On 9/2/2018 4:24 AM, Burkhard wrote:

> Oxyaena wrote:
>> Thomas Aquinas famously compiled in his magnum opus *Summa Theologica* a
>> list of "proofs" that he thought conclusively proved the existence of
>> God, not just any deity, but the Abrahamic God. Here I refute each and
>> every "proof" he has offered. Let's begin:
>
> Couple of problems with that I'd say. First, Aquinas is much more
> careful himself when he describes the status of the arguments. They are
> most certainly not proofs as it was understood then, as an deductively
> valid inference from self-evident axioms only - and he says in
> particular that our finite mind could not possible have this type of
> self-evident insight ("Sed contra, nullus potest cogitare oppositum...,
> !, Question 2, Article 1)

Which is why Aquinas' viewpoint is flawed from the outset, for we can't
discuss something we can't comprehend, and I view it as a logical
cop-out because our minds are powerful enough to be able to comprehend
and discuss, at the very least, the logical aspects of a deity.

>
> Rather, what they do is to explore the consequences of the then widely
> shared Aristotelian worldview, and shows that is is at the very least
> consistent with the existence of a single creator deity. It won't
> convince anyone who does not accept already these premises, nor does it
> tries to.
>
> And no, the four arguments are not offered as in support of the
> Christian deity specifically. The 5 ways are in the first part of the
> first Book of the Summa, the Christian specific bits are only in the third.
>

I would have to disagree. Aquinas was a religious apologist working for
the Church, so even if his 5 different "arguments" weren't used to
support the existence of the God of Abraham, by inference one could
logically extrapolate that they were, either directly or indirectly,
created to support the existence of the Christian deity.

>>
>> 1) Argument from Design
>>
>> This is one that has been refuted time and time again,
>
> Arguably, but it is a bit odd to mention it when discussing one of the
> first to make it that explicit. The refutations came rather later.
>
> Also, are you following here the Summa in your order of things?

No.



> The first argument in the Summa is the unmoved mover, and I'm not sure where you

> see an argument form design either here or elsewhere in the Summa.

Which I refuted down below.

>
>
> that since the
>> world shows signs of design, then the world must've been designed. This
>> has cropped up innumerable times throughout the centuries, including
>> with William Paley's "divine watchmaker" mumbo jumbo, or the recent sham
>> of "Intelligent Design". One of the main problems with this is that
>> design doesn't necessarily indicate a designer, and the design of every
>> single organism on this planet, and the components of said organisms,
>> down to the molecular level, can be accounted for by evolution.
>> Evolution by natural selection is responsible for the bewildering
>> variety of organisms we find on this planet today, and that's leaving
>> alone such things as inanimate objects, elements, and the origins of
>> life itself, all of which we can reasonably say didn't involve any
>> divine intervention.
>>
>> 2) Argument from the first mover
>>
>> Here Aquinas argues that God is the uncaused cause, by arguing that a
>> series of infinite regresses is impossible, he says that something or
>> someone must've been the cause for the existence of the universe, and
>> that someone is God. Of course there's no reason why that first mover
>> couldn't have been named Dumbo the Elephant, but he insists that the
>> Abrahamic God is the first mover.
>
> cite please.

Aquinas was working for the Church as a religious apologist, so by
logical inference from his viewpoint the first mover was the God of Abraham.


>
[snip rest, I'll address later, duty calls]

[Burkhard]

Oxyaena wrote:
> On 9/2/2018 4:24 AM, Burkhard wrote:
>> Oxyaena wrote:
>>> Thomas Aquinas famously compiled in his magnum opus *Summa Theologica* a
>>> list of "proofs" that he thought conclusively proved the existence of
>>> God, not just any deity, but the Abrahamic God. Here I refute each and
>>> every "proof" he has offered. Let's begin:
>>
>> Couple of problems with that I'd say. First, Aquinas is much more
>> careful himself when he describes the status of the arguments. They are
>> most certainly not proofs as it was understood then, as an deductively
>> valid inference from self-evident axioms only - and he says in
>> particular that our finite mind could not possible have this type of
>> self-evident insight ("Sed contra, nullus potest cogitare oppositum...,
>> !, Question 2, Article 1)
>
>
> Which is why Aquinas' viewpoint is flawed from the outset, for we can't
> discuss something we can't comprehend,

If that were true no scientific progress would be possible. It always
starts with something we do not comprehend, and then bootstraps until we
comprehend it at least better.

And sometimes, the result can also be an impossibility result - cf e.g.
Goedel's theorem. It might have the whiff of a paradox, but we can
sometimes show that there are limits to what we can show.

and I view it as a logical
> cop-out because our minds are powerful enough to be able to comprehend
> and discuss, at the very least, the logical aspects of a deity.

You are shifting the goalposts here from "offering a proof of X" to
"analyze the logical consequences if there is such an X". He is, to a
degree, doing the latter, while saying that the former is not on the table.

Apart from that, it is sound scientific methodology to state explicitly
at the beginning of your research the imitations that your chosen
methods brings with it - that's not a "cop out", that is I'd say best
practice. (though of course our creationists more often than not quote
mine it to argue that science knows nothing and it is all conjecture)

You seem to do the same here in reverse, essentially now chastising him
for not being as dogmatic as you would prefer him to be, and more aware
of the limits of his methods than you'd would want him to be.

>
>
>>
>> Rather, what they do is to explore the consequences of the then widely
>> shared Aristotelian worldview, and shows that is is at the very least
>> consistent with the existence of a single creator deity. It won't
>> convince anyone who does not accept already these premises, nor does it
>> tries to.
>>
>> And no, the four arguments are not offered as in support of the
>> Christian deity specifically. The 5 ways are in the first part of the
>> first Book of the Summa, the Christian specific bits are only in the
>> third.
>>
>
>
> I would have to disagree. Aquinas was a religious apologist working for
> the Church, so even if his 5 different "arguments" weren't used to
> support the existence of the God of Abraham, by inference one could
> logically extrapolate that they were, either directly or indirectly,
> created to support the existence of the Christian deity.

Sorry, that makes no sense for lots of reasons. Even if a person has a
job does not mean that everything they do is directly related to that
job. Richard Dawkins held the chair in zoology when writing the God
delusion. While there are lots of reasons to be critical of this oeuvre,
claiming that it fails to enhance our understanding of the contribution
of parasitism to the evolution of sex would be misguided.

And even if one were to argue that it forms part of a project to prove
the Christian god, to argue that the specific claims do not achieve this
would be an example of the distributive fallacy.

As an analogy, if a police officer as first step of a crime
investigation establishes whether the rock that hit the victim was
likely handled by a human or the result of a rockslide, then this is of
course a perfectly good and scientifically sound issue. Criticizing him
at that stage for doing a test that can't possibly tell you which human
is the culprit is obviously misguided, even if this is ultimately his job

>
>
>>>
>>> 1) Argument from Design
>>>
>>> This is one that has been refuted time and time again,
>>
>> Arguably, but it is a bit odd to mention it when discussing one of the
>> first to make it that explicit. The refutations came rather later.
>>
>> Also, are you following here the Summa in your order of things?
>
> No.

fair enough. But where in the Aquinas text do you see an argument from
design?

>
>
>
>> The first argument in the Summa is the unmoved mover, and I'm not sure
>> where you
>> see an argument form design either here or elsewhere in the Summa.
>
>
> Which I refuted down below.

I would probably put an "attempted" in there somewhere :o)

[Bob Casanova]

On Tue, 4 Sep 2018 14:06:19 +0100, the following appeared in
talk.origins, posted by Burkhard <b.sc...@ed.ac.uk>:

>Oxyaena wrote:
>> On 9/2/2018 4:24 AM, Burkhard wrote:
>>> Oxyaena wrote:
>>>> Thomas Aquinas famously compiled in his magnum opus *Summa Theologica* a
>>>> list of "proofs" that he thought conclusively proved the existence of
>>>> God, not just any deity, but the Abrahamic God. Here I refute each and
>>>> every "proof" he has offered. Let's begin:
>>>
>>> Couple of problems with that I'd say. First, Aquinas is much more
>>> careful himself when he describes the status of the arguments. They are
>>> most certainly not proofs as it was understood then, as an deductively
>>> valid inference from self-evident axioms only - and he says in
>>> particular that our finite mind could not possible have this type of
>>> self-evident insight ("Sed contra, nullus potest cogitare oppositum...,
>>> !, Question 2, Article 1)
>>
>>
>> Which is why Aquinas' viewpoint is flawed from the outset, for we can't
>> discuss something we can't comprehend,
>
>If that were true no scientific progress would be possible. It always
>starts with something we do not comprehend,

Just a note: He said "can't", not "don't". They are not
synonymous, and "can't" is doctrine, explicit or implicit,
for many religions.

--

Bob C.

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science,
the one that heralds new discoveries, is not
'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'"

- Isaac Asimov

[Peter Nyikos]

On Saturday, September 1, 2018 at 3:35:03 PM UTC-4, Oxyaena wrote:
> Thomas Aquinas famously compiled in his magnum opus *Summa Theologica* a
> list of "proofs" that he thought conclusively proved the existence of
> God, not just any deity, but the Abrahamic God. Here I refute each and
> every "proof" he has offered. Let's begin:

Have you (re-)read his argument in the last decade? It looks like you
are talking about second or third hand arguments, or even just relying
on people who are fooled by the words into thinking they are talking
about Thomistic arguments.

> 1) Argument from Design
>
> This is one that has been refuted time and time again,

Strawmen posing as the real thing have been refuted, but that's
all you can say for sure.

You can't even trust books like Wallace Matson's _The Existence of God_,
which should have been titled, _Why I Don't Believe in the Existence of
God_. He misrepresents arguments over and over again, perhaps out
of ignorance.

> that since the
> world shows signs of design, then the world must've been designed.

Good luck in finding anyone less stupid than Ray Martinez who
argues in this way.

>This
> has cropped up innumerable times throughout the centuries, including
> with William Paley's "divine watchmaker" mumbo jumbo,

...which you are lampooning up there.

> or the recent sham of "Intelligent Design".

So tell me why Behe's _The Edge of Evolution_ is a sham.

Never looked at it? Don't blame yourself, blame all the regulars
of t.o. who haven't looked at it seriously. I'm one who fit that
description until less than a year ago, partly put off by the
pretentious title. It amazed me how Behe essentially abandons his
Irreducible Complexity gimmick and talks about the odds against
specific, well known mutations like some in "the trench warfare"
between humans and the malaria parasite.

He shows great courage in risking the alienation of his main buyers,
by repeatedly claiming that this or that is evidence for common descent.

> One of the main problems with this is that
> design doesn't necessarily indicate a designer,

Keep driving a stake through the heart of your knocked-down strawman.
I'm going for some popcorn. :-)

> and the design of every
> single organism on this planet, and the components of said organisms,
> down to the molecular level, can be accounted for by evolution.

You are ignoring the elephant in the room - abiogenesis, and the fact
that Urey-Miller, Fox, and the people who are all ga ga over deep
ocean vents haven't even gotten out of the bottom sub-basement of
a mile high skyscraper. The best ideas are still working their way
up to the tenth floor.

> Evolution by natural selection is responsible for the bewildering
> variety of organisms we find on this planet today, and that's leaving
> alone such things as inanimate objects, elements, and the origins of
> life itself, all of which we can reasonably say didn't involve any
> divine intervention.

Reasonably speculate, sure. The only reason I think unguided abiogenesis
took place in our universe is that I think our universe is only one
of an unimaginably huge number in a multiverse beyond our comprehension.
In such a realm, anything that can happen, will happen with a probability
approaching 1.

>
> 2) Argument from the first mover
>
> Here Aquinas argues that God is the uncaused cause, by arguing that a
> series of infinite regresses is impossible, he says that something or
> someone must've been the cause for the existence of the universe, and
> that someone is God.

Rather, an entity worthy of the name God. Burkhard has corrected you
on this foolish notion of the Abrahamic God being argued for.

Where did you get this notion, anyway?


Here is something to help you understand the real force of the first
mover argument. Suppose there is a universe somewhere of the sort
envisioned by Hoyle. [The Big Bang has been at least as convincingly
shown as "birds are dinosaurs," so I am phrasing things this way.]

And suppose someone in that universe got to thinking where the first
living thing came from. The most obvious answer is that there was
no such thing, that living things have always existed and each
living thing comes from another -- just as everyone has ever seen.

And hence, there is no mystery about how life began -- it always was
and always will be, carried from one planet to another by comets
in the way envisioned by Hoyle and Wickramasinghe. Nothing to explain,
no "elephant in the room," evolution starting with living things being
sufficient to account for every living thing.

Do you get the idea that there is something vaguely unsatisfactory
about this? If not, the people of that universe could make the same
claim for intelligence: there is literally no such thing as
scientific research, because all knowledge has been in existence
forever, and one need only consult the appropriate written sources.


I think all your arguments, including the ones I deleted below,
are not worth thinking about until you can cope with this last
scenario.


Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina
http://people.math.sc.edu

[Oxyaena]

On 9/4/2018 10:26 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:

> Never looked at it? Don't blame yourself, blame all the regulars
> of t.o. who haven't looked at it seriously. I'm one who fit that
> description until less than a year ago, partly put off by the
> pretentious title. It amazed me how Behe essentially abandons his
> Irreducible Complexity gimmick and talks about the odds against
> specific, well known mutations like some in "the trench warfare"
> between humans and the malaria parasite.

"There is no evolutionary expectation that complex protein-protein
interactions will evolve in a parasite adapting to a new drug. Any
mutation that improves fitness is acceptable, regardless of what it
does. Behe's probability calculations, on which his entire argument
rests, are flatly wrong because they assume that adaptation cannot occur
one mutation at a time. He uses chloroquine resistance of malaria (CQR)
as an example, saying that the parasite always must have two mutations
arising together to evolve resistance. As Ken Miller shows, this
assumption is false, because one of the two mutations that Behe claims
are "required" for CQR is not actually required (Chen et al. 2003,
reference accidentally omitted from Miller's piece). It is therefore
bogus to take the 1/1020 number as the estimate of the probability of
the evolution of a single binding site for CQR. And it is even more
bogus to use this as a generic estimate for the evolutionary probability
of getting any protein-protein binding site. The probability
calculations are also wrong because Behe's argument is based on
specifying a priori exactly which mutations have to occur to be
adaptive: the identical pair of mutations that occur in
chloroquine-resistant malaria. He neglects the possibility (indeed, the
certainty) that many other mutations that cause interactions between
proteins and other molecules can also be adaptive." -
http://216.119.105.232/articles/Coyne.cfm

[snip off-topic irreleventia]

[Oxyaena]

On 9/4/2018 9:06 AM, Burkhard wrote:
> Oxyaena wrote:
>> On 9/2/2018 4:24 AM, Burkhard wrote:
>>> Oxyaena wrote:
>>>> Thomas Aquinas famously compiled in his magnum opus *Summa
>>>> Theologica* a
>>>> list of "proofs" that he thought conclusively proved the existence of
>>>> God, not just any deity, but the Abrahamic God. Here I refute each and
>>>> every "proof" he has offered. Let's begin:
>>>
>>> Couple of problems with that I'd say. First, Aquinas is much more
>>> careful himself when he describes the status of the arguments. They are
>>> most certainly not proofs as it was understood then, as an deductively
>>> valid inference from self-evident axioms only - and he says in
>>> particular that our finite mind could not possible have this type of
>>> self-evident insight ("Sed contra, nullus potest cogitare oppositum...,
>>> !, Question 2, Article 1)
>>
>>
>> Which is why Aquinas' viewpoint is flawed from the outset, for we can't
>> discuss something we can't comprehend,
>
> If that were true no scientific progress would be possible. It always
> starts with something we do not comprehend, and then bootstraps until we
> comprehend it at least better.

Notice I wrote "can't", not "don't". And I didn't mean it literally
either, it was a complaint about people who always try to use the "God
works in mysterious ways" escape hatch. I don't agree with that
viewpoint, and you should know that by now considering the myriad
different discussions we've had on the subject.

>
> And sometimes, the result can also be an impossibility result - cf e.g.
> Goedel's theorem. It might have the whiff of a paradox, but we can
> sometimes show that there are limits to what we can show.
>
> and I view it as a logical
>> cop-out because our minds are powerful enough to be able to comprehend
>> and discuss, at the very least, the logical aspects of a deity.
>
> You are shifting the goalposts here from "offering a proof of X" to
> "analyze the logical consequences if there is such an X". He is, to a
> degree, doing the latter, while saying that the former is not on the table.

No, I am not, it was a response to what you wrote. I`m not shifting the
goalposts at all, what I wrote above was a mere correlation to what I
wrote about the "God works in mysterious ways" escape hatch, that even
if we cannot "offer a proof of X", we should at least still be able to
discuss the logical consequences of X.

The *Summa Theologica* to this day is still one of the cornerstones of
Catholic theology, so I'd consider it a very different situation from
the Dawkins one.

>
> And even if one were to argue that it forms part of a project to prove
> the Christian god, to argue that the specific claims do not achieve this
> would be an example of the distributive fallacy.

Have you never read the *Summa*? Of course it was written as a result of
religious apologetics, the Catholic Church to this day still has it as a
cornerstone of their theology.

>
> As an analogy, if a police officer as first step of a crime
> investigation establishes whether the rock that hit the victim was
> likely handled by a human or the result of a rockslide, then this is of
> course a perfectly good and scientifically sound issue. Criticizing him
> at that stage for doing a test that can't possibly tell you which human
> is the culprit is obviously misguided, even if this is ultimately his job
>
>>
>>
>>>>
>>>> 1) Argument from Design
>>>>
>>>> This is one that has been refuted time and time again,
>>>
>>> Arguably, but it is a bit odd to mention it when discussing one of the
>>> first to make it that explicit. The refutations came rather later.
>>>
>>> Also, are you following here the Summa in your order of things?
>>
>> No.
>
> fair enough. But where in the Aquinas text do you see an argument from
> design?

Several different times, it's one of the five "proofs" offered by Aquinas.

>
>>
>>
>>
>>> The first argument in the Summa is the unmoved mover, and I'm not sure
>>> where you
>>> see an argument form design either here or elsewhere in the Summa.
>>
>>
>> Which I refuted down below.
>
> I would probably put an "attempted" in there somewhere :o)

I wouldn't. Everything must have a cause, and if the Unmoved Mover
doesn't have a cause, that causes a logical paradox, for everything must
have a cause and yet the Unmoved Mover doesn't have a cause according to
Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.

[Peter Nyikos]

On Tuesday, September 4, 2018 at 10:50:02 PM UTC-4, Oxyaena wrote:
> On 9/4/2018 10:26 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>
> > Never looked at it? Don't blame yourself, blame all the regulars
> > of t.o. who haven't looked at it seriously. I'm one who fit that
> > description until less than a year ago, partly put off by the
> > pretentious title. It amazed me how Behe essentially abandons his
> > Irreducible Complexity gimmick and talks about the odds against
> > specific, well known mutations like some in "the trench warfare"
> > between humans and the malaria parasite.
>
>
> "There is no evolutionary expectation that complex protein-protein
> interactions will evolve in a parasite adapting to a new drug. Any
> mutation that improves fitness is acceptable, regardless of what it
> does. Behe's probability calculations, on which his entire argument
> rests, are flatly wrong because they assume that adaptation cannot occur
> one mutation at a time.

There is no such sweeping assumption. And the following statement
is a non sequitur of the most silly sort:

> He uses chloroquine resistance of malaria (CQR)
> as an example, saying that the parasite always must have two mutations
> arising together to evolve resistance. As Ken Miller shows, this
> assumption is false, because one of the two mutations that Behe claims
> are "required" for CQR is not actually required (Chen et al. 2003,
> reference accidentally omitted from Miller's piece).

Did you really think this nitpick is actually relevant to
Coyne's across-the-board claim?

> It is therefore
> bogus to take the 1/1020 number as the estimate of the probability of
> the evolution of a single binding site for CQR.

So Behe didn't know that CQR required only one mutation. So what?

> And it is even more
> bogus to use this as a generic estimate for the evolutionary probability
> of getting any protein-protein binding site.

Can you find where Behe did any such sweeping conclusion
from one instance, CQR? The absence of any hint as to page
numbers makes this and every other claim Coyne makes about
the book highly suspicious.

> The probability
> calculations are also wrong because Behe's argument is based on
> specifying a priori exactly which mutations have to occur to be
> adaptive:

Au contraire, Behe gives oodles of examples of ways Plasmodium
can evade various measures, and of humans mutating to produce
new ones within themselves. The whole message of almost everything that Behe
writes about malaria in the book is that both the parasite and the human
mutations constitute a form of "trench warfare" in which each
side damages its overall phenotypes in order to combat the opponent.
The analogy is described in colorful words:

At its usual worst, trench warfare is fought by attrition.
If the enemy can be stopped or slowed down by burning
your own bridges and bombing your own radio towers
and oil refineries, then away they go. Darwinian trench
warfare does not lead to progress -- it leads to the
Stone age.
...
In its real war with malaria, the human genome is only diminished.
pp. 42-43

>the identical pair of mutations that occur in
> chloroquine-resistant malaria. He neglects the possibility (indeed, the
> certainty) that many other mutations that cause interactions between
> proteins and other molecules can also be adaptive." -

This lie suggests that Jerry Coyne is relying on second hand
"information" spewed by such implacable foes of Behe as Kenneth Miller.

> http://216.119.105.232/articles/Coyne.cfm
>
> [snip off-topic irreleventia]

It was off topic only in the sense that this whole thread
is off topic.

I'll let you describe that sense, since you are snipping
things that are highly embarrassing to your whole case
against Thomas Aquinas.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina

http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos/

PS The fact that you had to rely on such a flawed
statement about Behe's book all but proves that
you are very unfamiliar with it.

[Burkhard]

OK, if you didn't mean it as a response to the very specific point that
i quotes form Aquinas, that anything like a formal proof is impossible,
but as a response to "other people" that's fine. But it leaves the issue
that you characterize his project as providing "proof" (your scare
quotes) where he says pretty explicitly the opposite.

I don't agree with that
> viewpoint, and you should know that by now considering the myriad
> different discussions we've had on the subject.
>
>
>
>>
>> And sometimes, the result can also be an impossibility result - cf e.g.
>> Goedel's theorem. It might have the whiff of a paradox, but we can
>> sometimes show that there are limits to what we can show.
>>
>> and I view it as a logical
>>> cop-out because our minds are powerful enough to be able to comprehend
>>> and discuss, at the very least, the logical aspects of a deity.
>>
>> You are shifting the goalposts here from "offering a proof of X" to
>> "analyze the logical consequences if there is such an X". He is, to a
>> degree, doing the latter, while saying that the former is not on the
>> table.
>
>
> No, I am not, it was a response to what you wrote. I`m not shifting the
> goalposts at all, what I wrote above was a mere correlation to what I
> wrote about the "God works in mysterious ways" escape hatch, that even
> if we cannot "offer a proof of X", we should at least still be able to
> discuss the logical consequences of X.

Here is why I still think you shift the goalposts (or maybe simply start
talking about something different altogether):

You initial claim: Aquinas provides a "list of "proofs" that he thought

conclusively proved the existence of God"

Me: no, if you look at the Summa I, Question 2, Article 1, the part that
starts "Sed contra, nullus potest cogitare oppositum..., he says the
exact opposite, that such a conclusive proof would be impossible

You then: that's a cop out, "our minds are powerful enough to be able to

comprehend and discuss, at the very least, the logical aspects of a deity"

But nothing that Aquinas or I said denies "that" possibility, and indeed
I'd say the entire 5 ways are an explication of the logical
implications. What is rejected is your notion that the Summa aims at a
proof.

The first part of my argument addressed your argument as written -
where you talk about the person, not the work. That had more than a
whiff of an ad hominem/poisoning the well. The second part of my reply
below deals with what you might have meant, but not said. That would
indeed be about the Summa as a work. It is still not convincing, but for
different reasons.

>
>
>
>>
>> And even if one were to argue that it forms part of a project to prove
>> the Christian god, to argue that the specific claims do not achieve this
>> would be an example of the distributive fallacy.
>
>
> Have you never read the *Summa*? Of course it was written as a result of
> religious apologetics, the Catholic Church to this day still has it as a
> cornerstone of their theology.

You should have read on. I don't deny that the Summa is a work of
apologetics, I'm saying that you are committing the distributive
fallacy. The fact that a book, (theory, argument etc) has the property X
does not mean that every proper part of H should have that property X as
well. I had given you an example below

Nowhere in the Summa does Augustinus claim that the 5 path on their own
lead to a Christian deity, that's left to other parts of the book.

>
>
>>
>> As an analogy, if a police officer as first step of a crime
>> investigation establishes whether the rock that hit the victim was
>> likely handled by a human or the result of a rockslide, then this is of
>> course a perfectly good and scientifically sound issue. Criticizing him
>> at that stage for doing a test that can't possibly tell you which human
>> is the culprit is obviously misguided, even if this is ultimately his
>> job
>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> 1) Argument from Design
>>>>>
>>>>> This is one that has been refuted time and time again,
>>>>
>>>> Arguably, but it is a bit odd to mention it when discussing one of the
>>>> first to make it that explicit. The refutations came rather later.
>>>>
>>>> Also, are you following here the Summa in your order of things?
>>>
>>> No.
>>
>> fair enough. But where in the Aquinas text do you see an argument from
>> design?
>
>
> Several different times, it's one of the five "proofs" offered by Aquinas.

So you claim - but you've now accepted that it is not the first one, and
I've addressed the four others directly, none of them is the design
inference either. So which of the five "proofs", in your view, is based
on the design inference? Preferably with citation to the Summa, just in
case you are using a non-standard ordering of the paths again.

>
>
>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> The first argument in the Summa is the unmoved mover, and I'm not sure
>>>> where you
>>>> see an argument form design either here or elsewhere in the Summa.
>>>
>>>
>>> Which I refuted down below.
>>
>> I would probably put an "attempted" in there somewhere :o)
>
> I wouldn't. Everything must have a cause, and if the Unmoved Mover
> doesn't have a cause, that causes a logical paradox, for everything must
> have a cause and yet the Unmoved Mover doesn't have a cause according to
> Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.

That would be a refutation, if this were the argument they are making. I
don't think they do, even though you might find it presented this way in
some not-so-good secondary literature or modern day apologetics.

In a nutshell, the argument runs like this:
1) All the things we observe have a cause, more specifically an
efficient cause.
2) In a causal relation, the cause or agent precedes temporally the
effect or patient. (that rules out self-causation and loops)
3) Axiomatic: infinite causal chains are impossible (which is equivalent
to "the universe had a beginning")

2 and 3 are axioms and not further justified. But 1 is simply a
contingent statement reporting an observed pattern. So it's not as you
claim "must have a cause", as self-evident truth, but "do have a cause",
as a contingent characteristic of material objects (and indeed according
to both of them, also some non-material objects, such as numbers).

From these three it follows that there should be also one object that
has no cause. That does not contradict 1), so there is no paradox, it
only follows that this object is not one of those that we have observed
so far.

So from this a number of characteristics of this object follow: is not
normally observed, is self sufficient (does not rely on other objects to
exist) and is in the causal chain for every observed object. And on this
Aquinas concludes that "this type of property are also what we predicate
of god". So rather than a formal proof of existence, it explicates some
of the properties such an object has, and notes that the characteristics
of the Aristotelian first mover are also characteristics that we would
predicate of a deity.

That's not more paradoxical than to conclude that if your security
system filmed everything taller than 1m, there is a footprint behind the
security camera, and no person on the film, there must have been someone
whom the cameras did not observe and who is smaller than 1m.

Does this uniquely identify that Christian god? No, and neither does
this at this point matter. It only shows so far that this entity has at
least also some of those characteristics that are normally predicated of
the Christian god (and rules out e.g. Zeus, because Zeus is caused by
Chronos).

There is however a related issue that is a problem for this path: It
does not require a single first mover. The argument is perfectly
consistent with a multitude of as yet unobserved non-caused causers. So
the problem is not that it does not uniquely identify the Christian god
as the one monotheistic deity among competitors for that job, but that
it does not lead to a unique start point int the first place - Goedel's
much later formal proof tries to address that. Aquinas does not discuss
this issue, and might not even have seen it - but if he had he might
have evoked Occam's razor (and he would have had the epistemological
warrant for it, of course): one unobserved object is bad enough, having
millions of them is worse.

[Oxyaena]

If I did shift the goalposts then I had no intention to, it was merely a
response to what you wrote and I saw it as clarifying my position.

>
> You initial claim: Aquinas provides a "list of "proofs" that he thought
> conclusively proved the existence of God"
>
> Me: no, if you look at the Summa I, Question 2, Article 1, the part that
> starts "Sed contra, nullus potest cogitare oppositum..., he says the
> exact opposite, that such a conclusive proof would be impossible
>
> You then: that's a cop out, "our minds are powerful enough to be able to
> comprehend and discuss, at the very least, the logical aspects of a deity"
>
> But nothing that Aquinas or I said denies "that" possibility, and indeed
> I'd say the entire 5 ways are an explication of the logical
> implications. What is rejected is your notion that the Summa aims at a
> proof.

Obviously the Catholic Church thought it proved the existence of a
deity, since the *Summa* is one of the cornerstones of Catholic theology.

In my view I still addressed the arguments that Aquinas brought up, even
while criticizing him over his employment and possible motives, so it
isn't an ad hominem for I did address his arguments, even if you think
what I wrote was flawed. An ad hominem consists solely of insulting the
creator of the argument while not addressing the argument itself, in my
rebuttals I tend to do both, is it mean-spirited? Yes? Is it logically
fallacious? No. And often times what I write is accurate, from the
perspective of the actual refuting or the insulting.

>
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>> And even if one were to argue that it forms part of a project to prove
>>> the Christian god, to argue that the specific claims do not achieve this
>>> would be an example of the distributive fallacy.
>>
>>
>> Have you never read the *Summa*? Of course it was written as a result of
>> religious apologetics, the Catholic Church to this day still has it as a
>> cornerstone of their theology.
>
> You should have read on. I don't deny that the Summa is a work of
> apologetics, I'm saying that you are committing the distributive
> fallacy. The fact that a book, (theory, argument etc) has the property X
> does not mean that every proper part of H should have that property X as
> well. I had given you an example below

Okay, I concede your point, but the five principles Aquinas offered work
towards the greater goal of supporting the existence of the Abrahamic
God, specifically the Christian version of said deity.

>
> Nowhere in the Summa does Augustinus claim that the 5 path on their own
> lead to a Christian deity, that's left to other parts of the book.

Augustinus? Typo alert. I`m sure you meant Aquinas, for Thomas Aquinas
and Augustine of Hippo, while both noted Catholic theologians and
philosophers, were two completely separate individuals, living almost a
millennium apart from each other. And while it is true that Aquinas does
not claim such a thing, if you look at it from a holistic perspective
then one can logically infer that his 5 principles were part of the
overall path to supporting the existence of the God of Abraham, even if
they themselves weren't. Why else include them in the *Summa*? You may
criticize me for being overly suspicious, but my inferences are
logically valid.

>>
>>
>>>
>>> As an analogy, if a police officer as first step of a crime
>>> investigation establishes whether the rock that hit the victim was
>>> likely handled by a human or the result of a rockslide, then this is of
>>> course a perfectly good and scientifically sound issue. Criticizing him
>>> at that stage for doing a test that can't possibly tell you which human
>>> is the culprit is obviously misguided, even if this is ultimately his
>>> job
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> 1) Argument from Design
>>>>>>
>>>>>> This is one that has been refuted time and time again,
>>>>>
>>>>> Arguably, but it is a bit odd to mention it when discussing one of the
>>>>> first to make it that explicit. The refutations came rather later.
>>>>>
>>>>> Also, are you following here the Summa in your order of things?
>>>>
>>>> No.
>>>
>>> fair enough. But where in the Aquinas text do you see an argument from
>>> design?
>>
>>
>> Several different times, it's one of the five "proofs" offered by
>> Aquinas.
>
> So you claim - but you've now accepted that it is not the first one, and
> I've addressed the four others directly, none of them is the design
> inference either. So which of the five "proofs", in your view, is based
> on the design inference? Preferably with citation to the Summa, just in
> case you are using a non-standard ordering of the paths again.

Most, if not all, of them are variants of the "argument from design",
for Aquinas states that everything must have a creator, therefore
someone or something created everything. Existence itself is evidence
for God's existence in Aquinas' eyes.

>
>>
>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> The first argument in the Summa is the unmoved mover, and I'm not sure
>>>>> where you
>>>>> see an argument form design either here or elsewhere in the Summa.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Which I refuted down below.
>>>
>>> I would probably put an "attempted" in there somewhere :o)
>>
>> I wouldn't. Everything must have a cause, and if the Unmoved Mover
>> doesn't have a cause, that causes a logical paradox, for everything must
>> have a cause and yet the Unmoved Mover doesn't have a cause according to
>> Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.
>
> That would be a refutation, if this were the argument they are making. I
> don't think they do, even though you might find it presented this way in
> some not-so-good secondary literature or modern day apologetics.
>
> In a nutshell, the argument runs like this:
> 1) All the things we observe have a cause, more specifically an
> efficient cause.
> 2) In a causal relation, the cause or agent precedes temporally the
> effect or patient. (that rules out self-causation and loops)
> 3) Axiomatic: infinite causal chains are impossible (which is equivalent
> to "the universe had a beginning")
>
> 2 and 3 are axioms and not further justified. But 1 is simply a
> contingent statement reporting an observed pattern. So it's not as you
> claim "must have a cause", as self-evident truth, but "do have a cause",
> as a contingent characteristic of material objects (and indeed according
> to both of them, also some non-material objects, such as numbers).

All of which are an argument from design, for design indicates that the
thing designed had a causative origin, whatever that original cause may be.

>
> From these three it follows that there should be also one object that
> has no cause. That does not contradict 1), so there is no paradox, it
> only follows that this object is not one of those that we have observed
> so far.





>
> So from this a number of characteristics of this object follow: is not
> normally observed, is self sufficient (does not rely on other objects to
> exist) and is in the causal chain for every observed object. And on this
> Aquinas concludes that "this type of property are also what we predicate
> of god". So rather than a formal proof of existence, it explicates some
> of the properties such an object has, and notes that the characteristics
> of the Aristotelian first mover are also characteristics that we would
> predicate of a deity.

Which brings us to my original point. Why can't the first mover be of
natural derivation, rather than supernatural derivation? Now obviously
someone from Aquinas' point of view cannot accept that, for his position
presupposes that a deity is the unmoved mover, rather than something of
a natural origin, and in my view Aquinas doesn't do enough to refute the
notion, merely dismissing it without actually refuting it. In my view
it's a perfectly valid notion, and one that Aquinas fails to address,
that the Unmoved Mover doesn't necessarily have to be a deity, the
original cause may have been of natural derivation.

>
> That's not more paradoxical than to conclude that if your security
> system filmed everything taller than 1m, there is a footprint behind the
> security camera, and no person on the film, there must have been someone
> whom the cameras did not observe and who is smaller than 1m.
>
> Does this uniquely identify that Christian god? No, and neither does
> this at this point matter. It only shows so far that this entity has at
> least also some of those characteristics that are normally predicated of
> the Christian god (and rules out e.g. Zeus, because Zeus is caused by
> Chronos).

But it doesn't rule out gods like Raven from the mythology of the
indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, nor does it rule
out natural causes as well, such as dark energy being a potential reason
for the inflation of the universe.

--
"A wizard did it." - Ancient proverb

[Mark Isaak]

On 9/6/18 7:58 AM, Burkhard wrote:
> [snip debate]

This issue with multiple non-caused causers sometimes shows up in myth.
I remember a myth from natives of Madagascar in which the Creator God
says to another being, "Where in heck did you come from?"

--
Mark Isaak eciton (at) curioustaxonomy (dot) net
"Omnia disce. Videbis postea nihil esse superfluum."
- Hugh of St. Victor

[Burkhard]

Why would the latter imply the former? There are numerous ways in which
treaty can be of theological relevance short of proving the existence of
a deity. One is to demonstrate internal coherence. The other would be to
show that other things follow if one were, arguendo, to accept the
existence of a deity. A third would be to show the consistency with one
body of learning (e.g. in this case catholic doctrine) with another
body of work that is considered important (here, Aristotelian physics).

The Summa tries to do all of these three at different places, that alone
makes it an important theological text.

more brain fart than typo, can't even blame the spellchecker for this,
sorry, all my fault.

I`m sure you meant Aquinas, for Thomas Aquinas
> and Augustine of Hippo, while both noted Catholic theologians and
> philosophers, were two completely separate individuals, living almost a
> millennium apart from each other. And while it is true that Aquinas does
> not claim such a thing, if you look at it from a holistic perspective
> then one can logically infer that his 5 principles were part of the
> overall path to supporting the existence of the God of Abraham, even if
> they themselves weren't.

sure, no problem with that.But that still means it is invalid to
criticize the principles for not providing the arguments for the
specifically Christian deity as you do. Again, my analogy to the police
officer works. The test he carries out to determine if "some" human did
it are valid and indeed necessary, even though they can't tell him which
human was the perpetrator.

That at the very least stretches the meaning of "design argument" beyond
its limits and also does nto fit to how you yourself characterised it.
The design argument in its rough form is as you state: "things look
designed therefore they are designed". The more detailed version is:
things we know are designed have properties A, B and C (interlocking
parts, complexity etc) and from this it follows that nature, also having
properties A, B and C, must be designed.

That is, among others, the structure of Paley's design inference. None
of the path has anything remotely similar, and in particular they do not
use an analogy from things known to be designed and therefore
designed-looking to other objects.

Eh no? Designed objects have no special status in this inference, and do
not feature in the text either, neither in Aquinas nor Aristotle. The
illustrations you find there are things like the sun causing plants to
grow, or animals procreating and causing offspring. That's the point
Aristotle is making . For every object, we can ask: why is this here,
and for every object, we can give an answer in terms of any of the five
types of causation.

>
>
>
>>
>> From these three it follows that there should be also one object that
>> has no cause. That does not contradict 1), so there is no paradox, it
>> only follows that this object is not one of those that we have observed
>> so far.
>
>
>
>
>
>>
>> So from this a number of characteristics of this object follow: is not
>> normally observed, is self sufficient (does not rely on other objects to
>> exist) and is in the causal chain for every observed object. And on this
>> Aquinas concludes that "this type of property are also what we predicate
>> of god". So rather than a formal proof of existence, it explicates some
>> of the properties such an object has, and notes that the characteristics
>> of the Aristotelian first mover are also characteristics that we would
>> predicate of a deity.
>
>
> Which brings us to my original point. Why can't the first mover be of
> natural derivation, rather than supernatural derivation?

As far as Aquinas is concerned, you simply have it ass
backwards,probably because you still misread it as a proof. Aquinas and
Aristotle describe what type of properties that first mover has,
whatever or whoever it is. Aquinas then concludes as way of conceptual
explanation: and these properties are the type of properties that we
traditionally also ascribe to god, but not to ordinary objects. That
makes, by definition, the first mover a god. Nowhere in the text do you
find talk about natural vs supernatural.

Now obviously
> someone from Aquinas' point of view cannot accept that, for his position
> presupposes that a deity is the unmoved mover, rather than something of
> a natural origin,

If it has an origin, it has a cause though, so this is at least loose
talk. You need as first mover something that came into existence without
being caused by anything else. That makes it sufficiently different fro
all physical objects that we observe to put it into a special category
of entities. If you call these "supernatural" is then an issue of
semantics only.

and in my view Aquinas doesn't do enough to refute the
> notion, merely dismissing it without actually refuting it. In my view
> it's a perfectly valid notion, and one that Aquinas fails to address,
> that the Unmoved Mover doesn't necessarily have to be a deity, the
> original cause may have been of natural derivation.

Depends again what you mean with derivation. If it is derived form
something else, it is not the first. You need something that is entirely
self-sufficient.

>
>
>>
>> That's not more paradoxical than to conclude that if your security
>> system filmed everything taller than 1m, there is a footprint behind the
>> security camera, and no person on the film, there must have been someone
>> whom the cameras did not observe and who is smaller than 1m.
>>
>> Does this uniquely identify that Christian god? No, and neither does
>> this at this point matter. It only shows so far that this entity has at
>> least also some of those characteristics that are normally predicated of
>> the Christian god (and rules out e.g. Zeus, because Zeus is caused by
>> Chronos).
>
> But it doesn't rule out gods like Raven from the mythology of the
> indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska,

Depends a bit on the details. It would rule out Raven in Tlingit, as he
is "Son of Kit-ka'ositiyi-qa" - with other words caused by
someone/something else. Other accounts leaves open if Raven has an
origin, though they do indicate that he did not create everything
(typically, "a" world only, and in doing so he encounters other entities
-e.g. Ganu'k (Petrel)

nor does it rule
> out natural causes as well, such as dark energy being a potential reason
> for the inflation of the universe.

Depends. Is dark energy something of which we could not possibly ask:
what caused it to exist"? If we can, then it is just one more causal
link. but not its start.

[Peter Nyikos]

Belaboring the obvious.

> I remember a myth from natives of Madagascar in which the Creator God
> says to another being, "Where in heck did you come from?"

Source?

Anyway, it is far more sophisticated philosophically for the Creator
God to ask, "Where the heck did I come from?" More precisely,
"To what do I owe my existence and the mind-boggling powers I have?"

That is part of the ultimate Existentialist question.


I've seen it claimed from time to time that Aquinas was an existentialist,
but that's always explained with the dry-as-dust formula, "Believing that
existence takes precedence over essence," whatever that means.


Does anyone reading this have any deeper understanding of this claim
about Aquinas?


Peter Nyikos

[Peter Nyikos]

On Thursday, September 6, 2018 at 2:25:03 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
> Oxyaena wrote:
> > On 9/6/2018 10:58 AM, Burkhard wrote:
> >> Oxyaena wrote:
> >>> On 9/4/2018 9:06 AM, Burkhard wrote:
> >>>> Oxyaena wrote:

> >>>>> Which is why Aquinas' viewpoint is flawed from the outset, for we
> >>>>> can't
> >>>>> discuss something we can't comprehend,
> >>>>
> >>>> If that were true no scientific progress would be possible. It always
> >>>> starts with something we do not comprehend, and then bootstraps
> >>>> until we
> >>>> comprehend it at least better.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> Notice I wrote "can't", not "don't". And I didn't mean it literally
> >>> either, it was a complaint about people who always try to use the "God
> >>> works in mysterious ways" escape hatch.
> >>
> >> OK, if you didn't mean it as a response to the very specific point that
> >> i quotes form Aquinas, that anything like a formal proof is impossible,
> >> but as a response to "other people" that's fine. But it leaves the issue
> >> that you characterize his project as providing "proof" (your scare
> >> quotes) where he says pretty explicitly the opposite.
> >>
> >>
> >> I don't agree with that
> >>> viewpoint, and you should know that by now considering the myriad
> >>> different discussions we've had on the subject.

If those "myriads" are anything like this discussion, I would hate
to see their outcomes.

> >>>> And sometimes, the result can also be an impossibility result - cf e.g.
> >>>> Goedel's theorem. It might have the whiff of a paradox, but we can
> >>>> sometimes show that there are limits to what we can show.
> >>>>
> >>>> and I view it as a logical
> >>>>> cop-out because our minds are powerful enough to be able to comprehend
> >>>>> and discuss, at the very least, the logical aspects of a deity.

I've seen no evidence of that kind of competence in Oxyaena, in the
one-sided discussion we've had on this thread so far.

The Catholic Church is not monolithic enough to have that kind of "thought,"
although numerous simplifications on the secondary level [1] do
use the word "proof" in logically indefensible ways. And the Summa
was controversial within the Catholic Church until about the beginning
of the 20th century.

[1] and perhaps much higher levels, given the siege mentality of
American Catholics until Vatican II. All of which gives a rather
narrow "launch window" for what Oxyaena thinks is "obvious."

>
> Why would the latter imply the former? There are numerous ways in which
> treaty can be of theological relevance short of proving the existence of
> a deity. One is to demonstrate internal coherence. The other would be to
> show that other things follow if one were, arguendo, to accept the
> existence of a deity. A third would be to show the consistency with one
> body of learning (e.g. in this case catholic doctrine) with another
> body of work that is considered important (here, Aristotelian physics).
>
> The Summa tries to do all of these three at different places, that alone
> makes it an important theological text.

All very true.


<snip of something to which Oxyaena gave no reaction>

> >>>>>> And no, the four arguments are not offered as in support of the
> >>>>>> Christian deity specifically. The 5 ways are in the first part of the
> >>>>>> first Book of the Summa, the Christian specific bits are only in the
> >>>>>> third.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> I would have to disagree. Aquinas was a religious apologist working
> >>>>> for
> >>>>> the Church, so even if his 5 different "arguments" weren't used to
> >>>>> support the existence of the God of Abraham, by inference one could
> >>>>> logically extrapolate that they were, either directly or indirectly,
> >>>>> created to support the existence of the Christian deity.
> >>>>
> >>>> Sorry, that makes no sense for lots of reasons. Even if a person has a
> >>>> job does not mean that everything they do is directly related to that
> >>>> job. Richard Dawkins held the chair in zoology when writing the God
> >>>> delusion. While there are lots of reasons to be critical of this
> >>>> oeuvre,
> >>>> claiming that it fails to enhance our understanding of the contribution
> >>>> of parasitism to the evolution of sex would be misguided.

That's a bit strained. A more relevant comparison is with someone
trying to show that mammals are descended from therapsids, and
to note that elsewhere he tries to show Homo is descended from
Australopithecus. The latter has NO bearing on the validity
of his arguments for the former.

> >>>
> >>> The *Summa Theologica* to this day is still one of the cornerstones of
> >>> Catholic theology, so I'd consider it a very different situation from
> >>> the Dawkins one.

On the other hand, even though some people would consider the
body of evidence that mammals are descended from therapsids
(or, as Oxyaena would put it, "Mammalia is a clade within
Therapsida") to be a cornerstone of mammalian origins, that
says nothing about whether the people who built that cornerstone
had some problems with their methodology.

> >> The first part of my argument addressed your argument as written -
> >> where you talk about the person, not the work.

Note your own use of the word "where". Did you forget below that you
had used it?

> >> That had more than a
> >> whiff of an ad hominem/poisoning the well. The second part of my reply
> >> below deals with what you might have meant, but not said. That would
> >> indeed be about the Summa as a work. It is still not convincing, but for
> >> different reasons.
> >
> >
> > In my view I still addressed the arguments that Aquinas brought up,

That "address" was deeply flawed, and Oxyaena snipped my analysis of that,
responding instead with an illogical quote from Coyne which also has turned
out to be completely FALSE, according to the following in-depth
series of criticisms of Coyne's source, Kenneth Miller.

http://www.discovery.org/a/23731/

> > even while criticizing him over his employment and possible motives, so it
> > isn't an ad hominem for I did address his arguments,

This is completely illogical, and I'm surprised you didn't address
it, Burkhard. Just because someone does not indulge *exclusively* in
ad hominem arguments, that does not mean that this person is completely
exonerated of all ad hominem arguments.

> >even if you think
> > what I wrote was flawed. An ad hominem consists solely of insulting the
> > creator of the argument while not addressing the argument itself,

See above about the smuggling of "solely" into this last sentence.

> > in my
> > rebuttals I tend to do both, is it mean-spirited? Yes? Is it logically
> > fallacious? No.

Yes, it is, because it consisted mostly of knocking down strawmen
that really had nothing to do with Aquinas's actual arguments.

> And often times what I write is accurate,

I have yet to see anything that is both accurate and beyond an abysmally
superficial level that betrays a complete lack of sophistication in
philosophy.

I'm telling you this, Burkhard, because telling it to Oxyaena is
likely to meet with the same massive deletia and deeply flawed
quotemining that mark the only response Oxyaena has made to me
so far on this thread.

> >>>> And even if one were to argue that it forms part of a project to prove
> >>>> the Christian god, to argue that the specific claims do not achieve
> >>>> this
> >>>> would be an example of the distributive fallacy.
> >>>

> >>> Have you never read the *Summa*?

Considering what Oxyaena writes next, I doubt that Oxyaena
has even looked at the relevant item,

"It would seem that God does not exist"

and Thomas Aquinas's rebuttal. I think Oxyaena's sources consist of
atheistic boilerplate, far less sophisticated even than philsosophy
professor Wallace A. Matson's ridiculously over-rated book,
_The Existence of God_.

Note the words, "philosophy professor." If that book is Matson's
magnum opus, he is not worthy of being called a philosopher.

> >>> Of course it was written as a result of
> >>> religious apologetics, the Catholic Church to this day still has it as a
> >>> cornerstone of their theology.

Note the complete lack of any talk about the contents of the Summa
in what has become a broken record routine.

> >> You should have read on. I don't deny that the Summa is a work of
> >> apologetics, I'm saying that you are committing the distributive
> >> fallacy. The fact that a book, (theory, argument etc) has the property X
> >> does not mean that every proper part of H should have that property X as
> >> well. I had given you an example below
> >
> >
> > Okay, I concede your point, but the five principles Aquinas offered work
> > towards the greater goal of supporting the existence of the Abrahamic
> > God, specifically the Christian version of said deity.

See my analogy about mammals and Australopithecus, or the following
refinement: the thesis that "mammals are therapsids" stands or falls
on its own merits even if it works towards the greater goal of
"humans are therapsids."


Remainder deleted, to be replied to later -- perhaps only next
week. I have a lot on my plate today, and plan to take the weekend
off as usual.


Peter Nyikos
Professor, Department of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

[Burkhard]

That really started with Etienne Gilson and Jaques Maritain, though
today the leading "existential Thomist" is arguably John Knasas. If you
read Aquinas like that, you tend to emphasize the different to
Aristotle, others emphasize the continuity.

But broadly speaking, "essence" is what makes one thing different from
another, what separates (ad with that also limits) them. But god, for
Thomas, is not "different" from anything, so can't have "an" essence.
(Goedel's formal proof of god works along these lines)Instead, god is
pure existence - and everything else exists to the degree it partakes in
god's existence, and in the process acquires an essence. Hence
existence first, essence second.

With Sartre's existentialism this shares little more than the word, and
Maritain in particular was disdainful of this "modern" essentialism.


>
>
> Peter Nyikos
>

[Oxyaena]

On 9/5/2018 3:04 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> On Tuesday, September 4, 2018 at 10:50:02 PM UTC-4, Oxyaena wrote:
>> On 9/4/2018 10:26 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>
>>> Never looked at it? Don't blame yourself, blame all the regulars
>>> of t.o. who haven't looked at it seriously. I'm one who fit that
>>> description until less than a year ago, partly put off by the
>>> pretentious title. It amazed me how Behe essentially abandons his
>>> Irreducible Complexity gimmick and talks about the odds against
>>> specific, well known mutations like some in "the trench warfare"
>>> between humans and the malaria parasite.
>>
>>
>> "There is no evolutionary expectation that complex protein-protein
>> interactions will evolve in a parasite adapting to a new drug. Any
>> mutation that improves fitness is acceptable, regardless of what it
>> does. Behe's probability calculations, on which his entire argument
>> rests, are flatly wrong because they assume that adaptation cannot occur
>> one mutation at a time.
>
> There is no such sweeping assumption. And the following statement
> is a non sequitur of the most silly sort:

How is it a non-sequitur, or are you unfairly dismissing it as usual
whenever confronted with something that contradicts your preconceived
notions.

>
>> He uses chloroquine resistance of malaria (CQR)
>> as an example, saying that the parasite always must have two mutations
>> arising together to evolve resistance. As Ken Miller shows, this
>> assumption is false, because one of the two mutations that Behe claims
>> are "required" for CQR is not actually required (Chen et al. 2003,
>> reference accidentally omitted from Miller's piece).
>
> Did you really think this nitpick is actually relevant to
> Coyne's across-the-board claim?

How is it a nit-pick? Clarify.

>
>
>> It is therefore
>> bogus to take the 1/1020 number as the estimate of the probability of
>> the evolution of a single binding site for CQR.
>
> So Behe didn't know that CQR required only one mutation. So what?

It goes against the whole premise of his spiel against the evolution of
malaria resistance in humans being the product of natural selection.
Have you not been paying attention to the last century of developments
in genetics and evolutionary biology? If we apply Occam's Razor there
need be no divine intervention in the evolution of malaria resistance in
humans, for it is more parsimonious for natural causes to be the reason,
and besides, we can't falsify the "possibility" of divine intervention
in evolution so it shouldn't even be considered a serious proposal, just
like how DP isn't falsifiable.


>
[snip rambling]

>
> Peter Nyikos
> Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
> University of South Carolina
> http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos/
>
> PS The fact that you had to rely on such a flawed
> statement about Behe's book all but proves that
> you are very unfamiliar with it.
>

Did you even read the article on which that passage was quoted from,
because it seems like you didn't and are spewing inane horseshit out of
the side of your neck to cover up your lack of reading the damn thing.

[Oxyaena]

Perhaps you should actually try reading them rather than wildly
insulting me every goddamn minute, you insult addict.

>
>>>>>> And sometimes, the result can also be an impossibility result - cf e.g.
>>>>>> Goedel's theorem. It might have the whiff of a paradox, but we can
>>>>>> sometimes show that there are limits to what we can show.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> and I view it as a logical
>>>>>>> cop-out because our minds are powerful enough to be able to comprehend
>>>>>>> and discuss, at the very least, the logical aspects of a deity.
>
> I've seen no evidence of that kind of competence in Oxyaena, in the
> one-sided discussion we've had on this thread so far.

Perhaps it would be better to stop committing ad hominems against me and
actually address what I wrote, otherwise your competence is extremely
sub-par compared to mine, for I have discussed the logical properties of
a deity many times, including on the Problem of Evil. How come you never
responded to that post? Because it demonstrates that I am far more
knowledgeable about philosophy than you would like to admit?

Why not try actually addressing what I wrote rather than acting like a
cowardly sycophant towards Burkhard and insulting me at every opportunity?

>
> [1] and perhaps much higher levels, given the siege mentality of
> American Catholics until Vatican II. All of which gives a rather
> narrow "launch window" for what Oxyaena thinks is "obvious."

Please specify as to what I think is "obvious". You're not capable of
reading minds, you sophomoric ignoramus, and neither are you very rational.

What's the problem with that?

> to be a cornerstone of mammalian origins, that
> says nothing about whether the people who built that cornerstone
> had some problems with their methodology.

None of this is relevant to my analysis of the fundamental Aquinasian
axioms about the existence of a deity.

>
>
>>>> The first part of my argument addressed your argument as written -
>>>> where you talk about the person, not the work.
>
> Note your own use of the word "where". Did you forget below that you
> had used it?
>
>
>>>> That had more than a
>>>> whiff of an ad hominem/poisoning the well. The second part of my reply
>>>> below deals with what you might have meant, but not said. That would
>>>> indeed be about the Summa as a work. It is still not convincing, but for
>>>> different reasons.
>>>
>>>
>>> In my view I still addressed the arguments that Aquinas brought up,

\

>
>
>>> even while criticizing him over his employment and possible motives, so it
>>> isn't an ad hominem for I did address his arguments,
>
> This is completely illogical, and I'm surprised you didn't address
> it, Burkhard. Just because someone does not indulge *exclusively* in
> ad hominem arguments, that does not mean that this person is completely
> exonerated of all ad hominem arguments.

Hey you hypocritical piece of shit, how is it illogical?

>
>
>>> even if you think
>>> what I wrote was flawed. An ad hominem consists solely of insulting the
>>> creator of the argument while not addressing the argument itself,
>
> See above about the smuggling of "solely" into this last sentence.
>

Just because you don't like the definition of ad hominem doesn't mean
that's not the fucking definition:

"n. Marked by or being an attack on an opponent's character rather than
by an answer to the contentions made." -
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ad%20hominem

>
>>> in my
>>> rebuttals I tend to do both, is it mean-spirited? Yes? Is it logically
>>> fallacious? No.
>
> Yes, it is, because it consisted mostly of knocking down strawmen
> that really had nothing to do with Aquinas's actual arguments.
>
>
>> And often times what I write is accurate,
>
> I have yet to see anything that is both accurate and beyond an abysmally
> superficial level that betrays a complete lack of sophistication in
> philosophy.

Psychological projection noted.

>
> I'm telling you this, Burkhard, because telling it to Oxyaena is
> likely to meet with the same massive deletia and deeply flawed
> quotemining that mark the only response Oxyaena has made to me
> so far on this thread.

Psychological projection noted.



>[snip mindless bullshit and personal attacks]
>
>

[Burkhard]

I love malagasy religions. I could not quite remember a story just like yours, but this one from the Merina people gets close Id say.

It is in my view a particularly beautiful dualist theology, where you have at least 2 non-caused causers:

"At the beginning of time there was Zanahary, the Supreme Being, who created the Earth. There was nothing on it at first, it was empty and desolate.
Suddenly Ratovantany, the Self-Created One, took root in the ground and shot up out of the earth, like a plant. This took Zanahary by surprise so, being curious, he came down from the sky to take a closer look at this new god of the Earth.

When he found him, he was delighted to see that Ratovantany was making clay statues of animals and humans and was laying them out to dry in the sun. Ratovantany was very sad however, as he was unable to bring his images to life. Feeling sorry for him, Zanahary offered to help, by breathing life into them. When he saw how beautiful these new living creatures were, he begged Ratovantany to allow him to take them back up to Heaven with him.

Ratovantany loved his creatures too and refused to let his creation go. Eventually, they came to an agreement that, as Zanahary breathed life into humans, he would also take the life back when the creation died. Their bodies, however, were always to remain on Earth with Ratovantany. This is why, when people die in Madagascar, their bodies are always placed in the ground to be looked after by Ratovantany, while their souls soar up to Heaven, to be joined with Zanahary, the Supreme Being. "

Unlike the dualism you find in Manichaeism, some forms of Christianity, it doesn't talk the body down, and gives it co-euqal place.

[Mark Isaak]

That is a close variant of the myth I was thinking of, from the Sakalava
people.
[André Dandouau, _Contes Populaires des Sakalava et des Tsimihety de la
Région d’Analalava_ (Algiers: Jules Carbonel, 1922), 149-153.]
And I misremembered it slightly. It was not the first creator who
wondered where the second creator came from, but a servant of the first
creator.

[Peter Nyikos]

Were ANY of the Greek Gods credited with creating the universe?
Ouranos and Gaia would be the logical candidates, since they
emerged from Chaos, and all other gods were descended from them.

> > > There is however a related issue that is a problem for this path: It
> > > does not require a single first mover. The argument is perfectly
> > > consistent with a multitude of as yet unobserved non-caused causers. So
> > > the problem is not that it does not uniquely identify the Christian god
> > > as the one monotheistic deity among competitors for that job, but that
> > > it does not lead to a unique start point int the first place - Goedel's
> > > much later formal proof  tries to address that. Aquinas does not discuss
> > > this issue, and might not even have seen it - but if he had he might
> > > have evoked Occam's razor (and he would have had the epistemological
> > > warrant for it, of course): one unobserved object is bad enough, having
> > > millions of them is worse.
> >
> > This issue with multiple non-caused causers sometimes shows up in myth.
> > I remember a myth from natives of Madagascar in which the Creator God
> > says to another being, "Where in heck did you come from?"
> >
> > --
> > Mark Isaak eciton (at) curioustaxonomy (dot) net
> > "Omnia disce. Videbis postea nihil esse superfluum."
> > - Hugh of St. Victor
>
> I love malagasy religions. I could not quite remember a story just like yours, but this one from the Merina people gets close Id say.
>
> It is in my view a particularly beautiful dualist theology, where you have at least 2 non-caused causers:
>
> "At the beginning of time there was Zanahary, the Supreme Being, who created the Earth. There was nothing on it at first, it was empty and desolate.
> Suddenly Ratovantany, the Self-Created One, took root in the ground and shot up out of the earth, like a plant. This took Zanahary by surprise so, being curious, he came down from the sky to take a closer look at this new god of the Earth.
>
> When he found him, he was delighted to see that Ratovantany was making clay statues of animals and humans and was laying them out to dry in the sun. Ratovantany was very sad however, as he was unable to bring his images to life. Feeling sorry for him, Zanahary offered to help, by breathing life into them. When he saw how beautiful these new living creatures were, he begged Ratovantany to allow him to take them back up to Heaven with him.
>
> Ratovantany loved his creatures too and refused to let his creation go. Eventually, they came to an agreement that, as Zanahary breathed life into humans, he would also take the life back when the creation died. Their bodies, however, were always to remain on Earth with Ratovantany. This is why, when people die in Madagascar, their bodies are always placed in the ground to be looked after by Ratovantany, while their souls soar up to Heaven, to be joined with Zanahary, the Supreme Being. "

That's a really beautiful story. I'm puzzled by the term "Self-Created",
though. Why is it applied to Ratovantany and not to Zanahary?

The story reminds me of the Nicene Creed, to which the Roman Catholic
and Orthodox adhere, along with perhaps some Protestants. It
talks about:

God, the Almighty Father, creator of heaven and earth, and of
all things, visible and invisible. And in Jesus Christ...Begotten,
not made...through [whom] all things were made...
... The Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life

The last line is reminiscent of the role of Zanahary in the myth.

> Unlike the dualism you find in Manichaeism, some forms of Christianity, it doesn't talk the body down, and gives it co-euqal place.

I think Judaism and Islam do give it co-equal place.

On the other hand, Judaism at some time moved away from the religion
of Genesis 1, where God is called by the plural Elohim,
and when it comes to creation, Elohim says "let us make
man in our own image...

The Nicene Creed is widely believed in the Roman Catholic Church
to be based, in some part, on this view of God. Of course
the Trinity is rejected by Jews and Unitarians, and devout
Muslims even view it as blasphemy to say that Allah had a Son.
No Muslim would ever dream of addressing Allah as "Abba,"
the way Jesus did.


Peter Nyikos

[Burkhard]

Depends a lot, as always, which tradition you take. Homeric, Orphic and
Hesiodic are very different in this regard. We should also keep apart
the issue if they have created (and if so what) from whether they are
created/caused in return.

If you take Hesiod you could say that Chaos itself is a deity -
personified enough to have children after all. (Though not Gaia - while
she comes after Chaos, they are both "spontaneously created")

In another version, since Chaos existed before Chronos, Time, (not to be
confused with Cronos the Titan) it's even problematic to say he existed
forever - making the issue of "who caused Chaos" moot.

Slightly closer to conventional deities would be the union of Chronos
and Ananke - Time and Necessity. In the Orphic tradition, she is not
caused by anything else, but is self -formed (which sort of links her to
the Malagasy saga below). They are entwined like a serpent around the
primal egg of creation (which in the Orphic tradition comes from wind
and Chaos, in another tradition is made by Chronos) - when their
pressure crushes the egg, the parts become earth, sky and sea and form
the ordered universe - so you could call this creation of the (ordered)
universe. As an aside, the union of Necessity, Chaos and Time as
original creators is much easier to reconcile with modern physics than
the Genesis deity - Hawkins and his quantum fluctuations sounds just
like it.

Another candidate would be Nyx - in Hesiod, she originates from Chaos,
at or near the beginning of creation, but according to the Orphic
tradition, she is sometimes the first principle from which everything
else arises. In some versions, in her aspect as a bird, she hatches the
cosmic egg.

Gaia and Uranos are another candidate couple as you say, but only Gaia
is an uncaused causer in this case, as she is also Uranos mother.

And finally there would be Phanes - the god that came from the cosmic
egg. According to one tradition, he is the creator of "ordinary" life,
and the first deity that is intelligible ("can be heard by") humans:
prótis itón ti echoúsis kaí sýmmetron prós anthrópon akoás

Well, you could say that between them, they offer two answers to the
problem of first cause: Zanahary existed always, so was not caused at
all by anything else. Ratovantany by contrast came later, but caused
himself, by burying himself deep into the soil as a seed, and from there
springing forth. (Aquinas and Aristotle would not be happy with that,
self-causation is for them a logical contradiction)

But that might be to import too much of the Greek-Christian discussion.
In the Malagasy myth, "self-created" is I think the literal translation
of the name, so a bit like an epithet (another is 'the lord who owns" as
opposed to Zanahary "the lord who creates"). What it signals is that
even though he came later than Zanahary, he was not created by him, but
created himself.

>
> The story reminds me of the Nicene Creed, to which the Roman Catholic
> and Orthodox adhere, along with perhaps some Protestants. It
> talks about:
>
> God, the Almighty Father, creator of heaven and earth, and of
> all things, visible and invisible. And in Jesus Christ...Begotten,
> not made...through [whom] all things were made...
> ... The Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life
>
> The last line is reminiscent of the role of Zanahary in the myth.
>
>

>> Unlike the dualism you find in Manichaeism, some forms of Christianity, it doesn't talk the body down, and gives it co-equal place.

[Peter Nyikos]

That makes all the difference in the world. One could easily imagine
one of the seraphim asking Lucifer, a cherubim very unlike the seraphim
in Roman Catholic lore, "where in heck did you come from?" -- especially
after Lucifer rebelled against God and came to be known as Satan.

But of course, in Catholic lore, "the Lord God made them all," as
the line in "The Ancient Mariner" goes. What's the situation
in the Sakalava myth? Did the first creator create the servant?


By the way, Burkhard assigns two complementary roles to the two
creators in the myth he relates. Do these three -- first and second
creators, and the servant of the first -- similarly come to
a harmonious agreement to split up the work of creation in the
Sakalava myth?


Peter Nyikos

[Peter Nyikos]

On Thursday, September 6, 2018 at 11:00:04 AM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
> Oxyaena wrote:
> > On 9/4/2018 9:06 AM, Burkhard wrote:
> >> Oxyaena wrote:
> >>> On 9/2/2018 4:24 AM, Burkhard wrote:

> >>>> Also, are you following here the Summa in your order of things?
> >>>
> >>> No.
> >>
> >> fair enough. But where in the Aquinas text do you see an argument from
> >> design?

IIRC it is in the reply to Objection 2, and all too brief. The two
main objections were chosen with masterly insight. To this day they
are the two main arguments against God's existence:

(1) The problem of suffering (and evil, but without suffering evil
is meaningless) and

(2) the sufficiency of Nature as an explanation for the
design we see. It is this second that is one of the cornerstones
of the anti-creationism that we see all through talk.origins.

The main reason I am an intellectual agnostic is that I find the
existence of a multiverse with a potentially infinite number of
universes (our own being one of the ones most hospitable to life)
more believable than a God who does not depend on anything else
for His existence and powers.


<snip for focus>


[about the first of the five arguments:]

> In a nutshell, the argument runs like this:
> 1) All the things we observe have a cause, more specifically an
> efficient cause.
> 2) In a causal relation, the cause or agent precedes temporally the
> effect or patient. (that rules out self-causation and loops)
> 3) Axiomatic: infinite causal chains are impossible (which is equivalent
> to "the universe had a beginning")

Or, in modern terms, "the Multiverse of All There Is Or Could Be" --
let's call it the "ultimate multiverse" had a beginning.

>
> 2 and 3 are axioms and not further justified.

True, but we might come to the conclusion of Axiom 3 after a little
prodding. For all I know, the ultimate multiverse might include
something like the steady-state universe of Fred Hoyle and
Wickramasinghe. And life might only come from other life in
this universe-without-beginning: life always existed and always
will exist, and there is never any abiogenesis because by the
time a planet is suitable for life, comets or intelligent beings
will bring it there, and its presence eats up the nutrients that
could be used by prebiotic entities.

That's already a bit hard to take, but now I'll up the ante.
Intelligent life, and knowledge, has always existed because
each new planetary system is close enough to ones with
spacefaring intelligent beings that random movements will
bring it within easy traveling distance at some point
before intelligent life finishes evolving.

As a result, there is no such thing as scientific research,
except for information as to what events take place on
this or that planet. Even this is not a contribution
to science *per se* since infinitely many other planets
have had histories identical to that of any given one,
and all those histories have been recorded somewhere all through
the existence of the steady state universe.

If you've confronted this weird scenario before, you may
not think it adds any impetus to Axiom 3, but when I thought
of it the first time, about a week ago, it seemed that it almost
cries out for an explanation of how such a universe could have
come about. Which actually brings us back to the Argument for Design,
but it also seems to argue for a beginning to such a universe.


I've snipped the rest, which soon segued into the "multiple
creator" theme which we have already started discussing.


A penny for your thoughts.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

U. of South Carolina
http://people.math.sc.edu

[Edna Freon]

Aquinas has been out of favor for some time now so why are
his opinions of interest now? All we really need to know
that he was pre-scientific and, therefore, completely
irrelevant to his generation. The concept of multiple
universes is entirely unverifiable which makes it
unscientific. Anything non-science is ipso facto, erroneous
so there's not much to ponder in this thread.

Bill

[Burkhard]

shush, the adults are talking on this thread, play elsewhere child.

[Oxyaena]

On 9/12/2018 7:03 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> On Thursday, September 6, 2018 at 11:00:04 AM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
>> Oxyaena wrote:
>>> On 9/4/2018 9:06 AM, Burkhard wrote:
>>>> Oxyaena wrote:
>>>>> On 9/2/2018 4:24 AM, Burkhard wrote:
>
>>>>>> Also, are you following here the Summa in your order of things?
>>>>>
>>>>> No.
>>>>
>>>> fair enough. But where in the Aquinas text do you see an argument from
>>>> design?
>
> IIRC it is in the reply to Objection 2, and all too brief. The two
> main objections were chosen with masterly insight. To this day they
> are the two main arguments against God's existence:

I covered the Problem of Evil in one my OPs, which you (unsurprisingly)
never replied to.

>
> (1) The problem of suffering (and evil, but without suffering evil
> is meaningless) and

The Problem of Evil is only a problem towards personal, anthropomorpic,
omnipotent and omnibenevolent deities like the God of Abraham, and
doesn't apply to all gods like Apep or Tezcatlipoca (I'll explain
Mesoamerican morals and belief systems down below). If God is
omniscient, then he would've known about the Fall, and therefore would
know that trillions of people would be condemned to eternal torment, so
the best logical position for a Christian to take is that God is
inherently evil (there are a sect of theists who do believe so, they're
called "misotheists"), which is inherently contradictory with the
Christian position that God is "good".

On the topic of the Mexica, the Mexica (now known as "Aztecs") believed
in a dual philosophy, that everything is inherently of dual nature, that
something can be simultaneously "good" and "evil" at the same time, for
example Tezcatlipoca, while by all accounts a nasty being, was also the
protector of slaves and servants, and anyone who mistreated their
servants or slaves risked his wrath.

>
> (2) the sufficiency of Nature as an explanation for the
> design we see. It is this second that is one of the cornerstones
> of the anti-creationism that we see all through talk.origins.

That's the other one, why do we need a deity to explain anything when
the universe we live in matches a universe that came about by natural
rather than supernatural means?


>
[snip gushing about the multiverse]

>
> A penny for your thoughts.
>
>
> Peter Nyikos
> Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
> U. of South Carolina
> http://people.math.sc.edu
>

--
"The last Christian died on the Cross." - Friedrich Nietzschie

[Burkhard]

Peter Nyikos wrote:
> On Thursday, September 6, 2018 at 11:00:04 AM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
>> Oxyaena wrote:
>>> On 9/4/2018 9:06 AM, Burkhard wrote:
>>>> Oxyaena wrote:
>>>>> On 9/2/2018 4:24 AM, Burkhard wrote:
>
>>>>>> Also, are you following here the Summa in your order of things?
>>>>>
>>>>> No.
>>>>
>>>> fair enough. But where in the Aquinas text do you see an argument from
>>>> design?
>
> IIRC it is in the reply to Objection 2, and all too brief.

Also from what you say below you mean the part that starts "Since nature
works for a determinate end under the direction of a higher agent,
whatever is done by nature must needs be traced back to God, as to its
first cause"?

While this is a argument that concludes with a designer, maybe, I would
not call it an argument from design as it is normally understood. That's
the same issue I have with Oxyaena - not every argument that tries to
show design is what we normally call a design argument. Only arguments
of the Paley form (ABC are known to be designed and have property X, D
also has property X, therefore it is designed) are arguments "from"
design, i.e. reason by analogy from certain observed properties

That does not seem to be something Aquinas argues. Answer 2 is as you
say rather brief, and not very satisfactory, but in essence restates
Aristotle: things are what they are because of their teleological nature.

Not while staying true to Aquinas' understanding of the concept, I'd
say. To cal lit an Axiom that is not further justified was not meant as
a criticism. As far as Aquinas or Aristotle are concerned, "mission
accomplished" means exactly that, that you end up with a set of
self-evidently true propositions.

Any attempt to further justify them, as you I think try to do below,
would indicate that there is something wrong with them - if they are
justifiable, then you haven;t reached yet the starting point.

For all I know, the ultimate multiverse might include
> something like the steady-state universe of Fred Hoyle and
> Wickramasinghe.

I tend to and getting drawn into this issue too deeply, as I know my
limitations, and advanced physics is one of them. But to the extend I'm
following you here, isn't that a very mathematician's way to think about
infinity (where lots of "infinities" are of course really not all that
large, and can "fit into" larger infinities. As intriguing the thought
of an infinitely old universe within a "larger" multiverse makes
conceptual sense, but don't know if it works in physics.

And life might only come from other life in
> this universe-without-beginning: life always existed and always
> will exist, and there is never any abiogenesis because by the
> time a planet is suitable for life, comets or intelligent beings
> will bring it there, and its presence eats up the nutrients that
> could be used by prebiotic entities.

The first part would be something Kalkidas can sign up to, he always
argued that the existence of life must mean that there always was life.
I'm not sure on the "because" part. That one seems to mix "ordinary
causative account" with something categorically different.

For me it also gets to close to a boundary violation between
metaphysical and physical thinking - what is the "epistemological
status" of this thought experiment? An explication of the term infinity
(for Thomasian purposes), a new type of metaphysics, or an somewhat
unusual take on current scientific cosmological thinking?

As to the first reading (which is the one I'd be most comfortable with),
I don't think it works with Aquinas, for the reason I indicated above:
before Cantor there was (in the western tradition - in India Surya
Prajnapti developed ides like this back in 300 BC) simply no vocabulary
to "reify" infinities in sets.

So for Aristotle and Aquinas, the underpinning thinking is "native
physics" (in the non pejorative sense as coined by Patrick Hayes or
Kenneth Forbus, but in the tradition of Whitehead, Avenarius and Mach):
If something moves, it must have a cause that was earlier. This cause
was a movement, which therefore must have a cause that was earlier etc.
If there were arguendo an infinite chain, it would take us infinitely
long to get there, so nothing would have ever begun, so we should not
observe anything moving. Again, this sees "infinite" literally as
"never reaching an end", and you can't form an object (not even an
object of thought) that treats this infinite chains as "one thing", the
way we would do in set theory.

If this is "good enough" for an axiom is another issue - someone who was
rather concerned about the validity of this way of thinking was Duns
Scotus, who in De Primo Principio tried to shift Aquinas away from
something that looked too much like a materialistic basis to a proper
metaphysical understanding of infinity. Being the "subtle doctor", the
resulting argument is, well subtle...

[Jews=Eternal Conspirators]

On Sunday, September 2, 2018 at 5:10:02 AM UTC-4, Oxyaena wrote:
> On 9/2/2018 4:24 AM, Burkhard wrote:

> [snip]
>
> Which is why I`m better off discussing science than philosophy. Point taken.


Philosophy gave birth to science as we know it....Both science and philosophy use rational arguments to make their case.

[Jews=Eternal Conspirators]

On Saturday, September 1, 2018 at 8:40:03 PM UTC-4, Kent Jennings wrote:
> On Saturday, September 1, 2018 at 2:35:03 PM UTC-7, Robert Carnegie wrote:
> > I think that a lot of the flaw is that the arguments
> > use words, which are imprecise things, really.
>
> You got it.


Every argument, yours included, uses words....Do you know any alternative to words as medium?

[Jews=Eternal Conspirators]

On Saturday, September 1, 2018 at 8:40:03 PM UTC-4, Kent Jennings wrote:
> On Saturday, September 1, 2018 at 2:35:03 PM UTC-7, Robert Carnegie wrote:
> > I think that a lot of the flaw is that the arguments
> > use words, which are imprecise things, really.
>
> You got it.

WHO'RE YOU BY THE WAY?

[Robert Carnegie]

Mathematics. For instance, can God create a stone
so heavy that he can't lift it? No, because a stone
has only a finite weight, x, and we assume that
x is not too heavy for God to lift. x < G. Easy.

[Oxyaena]

But that doesn't undermine the paradox, because stones have a finite
wight, god *can't* create a stone so heavy that he can't lift it,
therefore he is not omnipotent. Mathematics places limits on God, and if
God has limits then he isn't all-powerful.

[Burkhard]

Interpretative dance! But then music and math are more or less the same
thing

[Robert Carnegie]

There's an apparent paradox here, but it is only
a verbal contradiction, a confusion of words.
Try this: can God lift a triangle that has four corners?
No, because there isn't and can't be any such thing.
I'm reasonably sure that God also doesn't exist,
but that isn't today's point. (That would imply
that he can't lift any stone at all. You never see
him doing that anyway.)

Let's try one about logic In heaven where God and the
angels live, when it's time for a shave, God shaves
everyone who doesn't shave himself. This seems a
reasonable arrangement. But then does God shave himself?
If he does - then he doesn't! If he doesn't - then
he does! It's a simple question, but it can't be
answered! But really it's a trick; my opinion - and there are others - is that whether God shaves himself or shaves
Michael or Gabriel is indeed a simple question, but there
is no case where God shaves everyone in heaven who doesn't
shave himself. So when I said that he does that, I lied.
That's all that the trouble is: just a lie. And what
trouble it makes when you believe it.

Strictly I didn't say that God does not shave anyone
who shaves himself, but let's pretend that I did.
I left it out because it is clumsy and draws attention
to this being apparently a difficult logic puzzle.
Also, when this puzzle is told, it usually isn't about
God - but since we were just talking about him...

[Mark Isaak]

> answered! [...]
I'm not sure, but I think you just proved that God is a woman.

[Oxyaena]

On 9/13/2018 10:04 PM, Robert Carnegie wrote:
> On Thursday, 13 September 2018 21:40:03 UTC+1, Oxyaena wrote:
>> On 9/13/2018 4:05 PM, Robert Carnegie wrote:
>>> On Thursday, 13 September 2018 20:05:03 UTC+1, Jews=Eternal Conspirators wrote:
>>>> On Saturday, September 1, 2018 at 8:40:03 PM UTC-4, Kent Jennings wrote:
>>>>> On Saturday, September 1, 2018 at 2:35:03 PM UTC-7, Robert Carnegie wrote:
>>>>>> I think that a lot of the flaw is that the arguments
>>>>>> use words, which are imprecise things, really.
>>>>>
>>>>> You got it.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Every argument, yours included, uses words....Do you
>>>> know any alternative to words as medium?
>>>
>>> Mathematics. For instance, can God create a stone
>>> so heavy that he can't lift it? No, because a stone
>>> has only a finite weight, x, and we assume that
>>> x is not too heavy for God to lift. x < G. Easy.
>>>
>>
>> But that doesn't undermine the paradox, because stones have a finite
>> wight, god *can't* create a stone so heavy that he can't lift it,
>> therefore he is not omnipotent. Mathematics places limits on God, and if
>> God has limits then he isn't all-powerful.
>
> There's an apparent paradox here, but it is only
> a verbal contradiction, a confusion of words.
> Try this: can God lift a triangle that has four corners?
> No, because there isn't and can't be any such thing.

Which places a limit on God's power, therefore he is not all-powerful if
he is constrained by the laws of mathematics. In a way, mathematics and
logical limitations are the death knell for the claim that God is
omnipotent. Can God create a four-sided triangle? Obviously he can't,
but let's pretend for the sake of argument he *can*. Then would it still
be a triangle, given that a triangle by definition *must* have three
sides? One can see it in the root of the word triangle ("tri" from
Proto-Indo-European "treyes", angle from Germanic, well, "angle",
meaning three angles), so if a triangle can only have three sides, but
God tries to create a four-sided triangle, that would create a logical
paradox, therefore either way, if he *can* create a four-sided triangle
it is no longer a triangle, and if he *can't* create a four sided
triangle, then he is constrained by the laws of mathematics and logic
and therefore is not all-powerful.

> I'm reasonably sure that God also doesn't exist,
> but that isn't today's point. (That would imply
> that he can't lift any stone at all. You never see
> him doing that anyway.)

I think most, if not all (Peter is debatable), of the posters to this
thread are in agreement that the God of Abraham is a fictional character.

>
> Let's try one about logic In heaven where God and the
> angels live, when it's time for a shave, God shaves
> everyone who doesn't shave himself. This seems a
> reasonable arrangement. But then does God shave himself?
> If he does - then he doesn't! If he doesn't - then
> he does! It's a simple question, but it can't be
> answered! But really it's a trick; my opinion - and there are others - is that whether God shaves himself or shaves
> Michael or Gabriel is indeed a simple question, but there
> is no case where God shaves everyone in heaven who doesn't
> shave himself. So when I said that he does that, I lied.
> That's all that the trouble is: just a lie. And what
> trouble it makes when you believe it.
>
> Strictly I didn't say that God does not shave anyone
> who shaves himself, but let's pretend that I did.
> I left it out because it is clumsy and draws attention
> to this being apparently a difficult logic puzzle.
> Also, when this puzzle is told, it usually isn't about
> God - but since we were just talking about him...
>

Or her...

[Oxyaena]

On 9/13/2018 1:54 PM, Burkhard wrote:
> Peter Nyikos wrote:
>> On Thursday, September 6, 2018 at 11:00:04 AM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
>>> Oxyaena wrote:
>>>> On 9/4/2018 9:06 AM, Burkhard wrote:
>>>>> Oxyaena wrote:
>>>>>> On 9/2/2018 4:24 AM, Burkhard wrote:
>>
>>>>>>> Also, are you following here the Summa in your order of things?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> No.
>>>>>
>>>>> fair enough. But where in the Aquinas text do you see an argument from
>>>>> design?
>>
>> IIRC it is in the reply to Objection 2, and all too brief.
>
>
> Also from what you say below you mean the part that starts "Since nature
> works for a determinate end under the direction of a higher agent,
> whatever is done by nature must needs be traced back to God, as to its
> first cause"?
>
> While this is a argument that concludes with a designer, maybe, I would
> not call it an argument from design as it is normally understood. That's
> the same issue I have with Oxyaena -

Looks like Peter was being a hypocrite when calling me an "ignoramus".

[Bob Casanova]

On Thu, 13 Sep 2018 12:06:58 -0700 (PDT), the following
appeared in talk.origins, posted by "Jews=Eternal
Conspirators" <santorump...@gmail.com>:

Someone who *doesn't* use a bigoted phrase for a handle?
--

Bob C.

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science,
the one that heralds new discoveries, is not
'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'"

- Isaac Asimov

[Bob Casanova]

On Thu, 13 Sep 2018 22:42:46 -0700, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by Mark Isaak
<eciton@curiousta/xyz/xonomy.net>:

>I'm not sure, but I think you just proved that God is a woman...

....with hairy legs and armpits.

[Oxyaena]

On 9/14/2018 2:24 PM, Bob Casanova wrote:
> On Thu, 13 Sep 2018 12:06:58 -0700 (PDT), the following
> appeared in talk.origins, posted by "Jews=Eternal
> Conspirators" <santorump...@gmail.com>:
>
>> On Saturday, September 1, 2018 at 8:40:03 PM UTC-4, Kent Jennings wrote:
>
>>> On Saturday, September 1, 2018 at 2:35:03 PM UTC-7, Robert Carnegie wrote:
>
>>>> I think that a lot of the flaw is that the arguments
>>>> use words, which are imprecise things, really.
>
>>> You got it.
>
>> WHO'RE YOU BY THE WAY?
>
> Someone who *doesn't* use a bigoted phrase for a handle?
>

So, in other words, someone who's not a troll?

[Robert Carnegie]

Thinking some more, and considering the bible story of
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feeding_the_multitude>
I suppose that the miracle kind of God could take
a triangle and give a corner each to 5000 people.
But then it wouldn't be a triangle any more. Unless
God turned it back into a triangle.

Sometimes, it seems, God makes things difficult like that.
But it doesn't mean that mathematics doesn't apply.
In fact, the mathematics clearly are important in this story. If he arranged dinner for twelve close friends,
would we get the story then... well, I suppose we do.

[Peter Nyikos]

On Thursday, September 13, 2018 at 2:00:03 PM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
> Peter Nyikos wrote:
> > On Thursday, September 6, 2018 at 11:00:04 AM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
> >> Oxyaena wrote:
> >>> On 9/4/2018 9:06 AM, Burkhard wrote:
> >>>> Oxyaena wrote:
> >>>>> On 9/2/2018 4:24 AM, Burkhard wrote:
> >
> >>>>>> Also, are you following here the Summa in your order of things?
> >>>>>
> >>>>> No.
> >>>>
> >>>> fair enough. But where in the Aquinas text do you see an argument from
> >>>> design?
> >
> > IIRC it is in the reply to Objection 2, and all too brief.
>
>
> Also from what you say below you mean the part that starts "Since nature
> works for a determinate end under the direction of a higher agent,
> whatever is done by nature must needs be traced back to God, as to its
> first cause"?

Sorry, I was going on a memory decades old and it looks I confused its
ideas with some in the book of Wisdom (of Solomon), which is in the
Septuagint but not the Masoretic text. See 13:1-9 especially:

7. For they seek busily among his works, but are distracted by what
they see, because the things seen are fair.
8. But again, not even these are pardonable.
9. For if they so far succeeded in knowledge that they could
speculate about the world,
how did they not more quickly find its LORD?

> While this is a argument that concludes with a designer, maybe, I would
> not call it an argument from design as it is normally understood.

I agree, if that is all there is to it.

<snip for focus>

That is indeed a criticism, if they thought such a concise statement
as "Axiom 3" self-evident". We mathematicians have no trouble thinking
about negative numbers or infinite regress; it is only when we look
at practical consequences, far over and above mere physical motion,
that things get to look bizarre.

>
> Any attempt to further justify them, as you I think try to do below,
> would indicate that there is something wrong with them - if they are
> justifiable, then you haven;t reached yet the starting point.

We mathematicians don't think anything is self-evident except for
the very simplest axioms of set theory-- not of geometry, Bolyai and Lobachevski dispached them.

Do you know of the huge controversy at the beginning of the 20th
century about the Axiom of Choice? That seems to most people to
be a self-evident truth, but the fact that it gives no explicit
formula for the set it describes [1] caused a lot of great mathematicianss
problems, including L.E.J. Brouwer and Hermann Weyl.

[1] a set that meets each nonempty set in a given collection in
exactly one element; no more, no less.

>
>
> For all I know, the ultimate multiverse might include
> > something like the steady-state universe of Fred Hoyle and
> > Wickramasinghe.
>
> I tend to and getting drawn into this issue too deeply, as I know my
> limitations, and advanced physics is one of them. But to the extend I'm
> following you here, isn't that a very mathematician's way to think about
> infinity (where lots of "infinities" are of course really not all that
> large, and can "fit into" larger infinities. As intriguing the thought
> of an infinitely old universe within a "larger" multiverse makes
> conceptual sense, but don't know if it works in physics.

I see no reason why it might not.

> > And life might only come from other life in
> > this universe-without-beginning: life always existed and always
> > will exist, and there is never any abiogenesis because by the
> > time a planet is suitable for life, comets or intelligent beings
> > will bring it there, and its presence eats up the nutrients that
> > could be used by prebiotic entities.
>
> The first part would be something Kalkidas can sign up to, he always
> argued that the existence of life must mean that there always was life.
> I'm not sure on the "because" part. That one seems to mix "ordinary
> causative account" with something categorically different.

This is a Gedankenexperiment, so that doesn't bother me.

> For me it also gets to close to a boundary violation between
> metaphysical and physical thinking - what is the "epistemological
> status" of this thought experiment? An explication of the term infinity
> (for Thomasian purposes), a new type of metaphysics, or an somewhat
> unusual take on current scientific cosmological thinking?

Unusual, but then the Big Bang theory was thought to be very
unusual at first. Einstein even said something like, "Your mathematics
is impeccable, but your physical insight is abominable."

Einstein and most physicists who did not subscribe to a Creator
of our universe DID believe our universe went back
forever. How they managed to avoid thinking about scenarios like
the one I've cooked up is beyond me.

> As to the first reading (which is the one I'd be most comfortable with),
> I don't think it works with Aquinas, for the reason I indicated above:
> before Cantor there was (in the western tradition - in India Surya
> Prajnapti developed ides like this back in 300 BC) simply no vocabulary
> to "reify" infinities in sets.

It is highly counterintuitive to think that every philosopher
and every mathematician agreed with Aristotle in rejecting a
"completed infinity." How did Epicurus think the universe began?
And how did so many physicists come to think the universe was eternal?

> So for Aristotle and Aquinas, the underpinning thinking is "native
> physics" (in the non pejorative sense as coined by Patrick Hayes or
> Kenneth Forbus, but in the tradition of Whitehead, Avenarius and Mach):
> If something moves, it must have a cause that was earlier. This cause
> was a movement, which therefore must have a cause that was earlier etc.
> If there were arguendo an infinite chain, it would take us infinitely
> long to get there, so nothing would have ever begun,

That is pure sophistry. OK, negative numbers were never thought of
*per se* but they certainly used positive numbers in such everyday
phrases as "____________ years ago." And the Hindus had such
enormous numbers, too.


Anyway, we with our modern insights can certainly conceive of such
possibilities, and while Axiom 3 is no longer self-evident in
the abstract, it could still be compelling. Perhaps it can be as compelling
as the "arrow of time": the fact that events like eating and defecating
and jumping off diving boards, while "theoretically reversible",
make no sense as events intelligible to hypothetical participants;
and so we cannot accept actual reversal.

[Yes, Hawking somehow managed to convince himself at one point that if the
universe were to stop expanding and begin to contract, then
time would flow backwards. He eventually had to admit that he
had been wrong, but I wonder whether it was because he got a
dose of common sense or simply found an error in his calculations.]

> so we should not
> observe anything moving. Again, this sees "infinite" literally as
> "never reaching an end", and you can't form an object (not even an
> object of thought) that treats this infinite chains as "one thing", the
> way we would do in set theory.

Do you think Axiom 3 *is* self-evident??

>
> If this is "good enough" for an axiom is another issue - someone who was
> rather concerned about the validity of this way of thinking was Duns
> Scotus, who in De Primo Principio tried to shift Aquinas away from
> something that looked too much like a materialistic basis to a proper
> metaphysical understanding of infinity. Being the "subtle doctor", the
> resulting argument is, well subtle...

Nowadays it is plain old physics. As a famous scientist once said,
"The universe is not only queerer than we imagine; it is queerer
than we CAN imagine."

I'm leaving in the rest of what I wrote below, just in case I've stimulated
some new ideas this time around.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ. of South Carolina

[Oxyaena]

Yes, but even if God turned it back into a triangle the object he
created beforehand was no longer a triangle, hence the laws and
limitations of logic and mathematics still apply, simply because, in
this instance, of the Law of Identity
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_identity), that is, the premise
that X is X or that a triangle is a triangle and nothing else. A shape
with 5,000 angles isn't a triangle due to the Law of Identity.

>
> Sometimes, it seems, God makes things difficult like that.
> But it doesn't mean that mathematics doesn't apply.
> In fact, the mathematics clearly are important in this story. If he arranged dinner for twelve close friends,
> would we get the story then... well, I suppose we do.
>

[David Greig]

On 2018-09-14, Bob Casanova <nos...@buzz.off> wrote:
> On Thu, 13 Sep 2018 12:06:58 -0700 (PDT), the following
> appeared in talk.origins, posted by "Jews=Eternal
> Conspirators" <santorump...@gmail.com>:
>
>>On Saturday, September 1, 2018 at 8:40:03 PM UTC-4, Kent Jennings wrote:
>
>>> On Saturday, September 1, 2018 at 2:35:03 PM UTC-7, Robert Carnegie wrote:
>
>>> > I think that a lot of the flaw is that the arguments
>>> > use words, which are imprecise things, really.
>
>>> You got it.
>
>>WHO'RE YOU BY THE WAY?
>
> Someone who *doesn't* use a bigoted phrase for a handle?

Is this Harshman's fanboi?

--D.

[Bob Casanova]

On Fri, 14 Sep 2018 15:36:00 -0400, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by Oxyaena <oxy...@is.king>:

He/she/it might *not* be a troll, and might actually hold
the belief his/her/its "handle" indicates.

[Bob Casanova]

On Sat, 15 Sep 2018 18:21:53 -0000 (UTC), the following
appeared in talk.origins, posted by David Greig
<dgr...@beagle.ediacara.org>:

Me? No. The jerk with the anti-Semite handle? Damfino.

What does Harshman have to do with it?

[Oxyaena]

On 9/16/2018 2:33 PM, Bob Casanova wrote:
> On Sat, 15 Sep 2018 18:21:53 -0000 (UTC), the following
> appeared in talk.origins, posted by David Greig
> <dgr...@beagle.ediacara.org>:
>
>> On 2018-09-14, Bob Casanova <nos...@buzz.off> wrote:
>
>>> On Thu, 13 Sep 2018 12:06:58 -0700 (PDT), the following
>>> appeared in talk.origins, posted by "Jews=Eternal
>>> Conspirators" <santorump...@gmail.com>:
>
>>>> On Saturday, September 1, 2018 at 8:40:03 PM UTC-4, Kent Jennings wrote:
>>>
>>>>> On Saturday, September 1, 2018 at 2:35:03 PM UTC-7, Robert Carnegie wrote:
>
>>>>>> I think that a lot of the flaw is that the arguments
>>>>>> use words, which are imprecise things, really.
>
>>>>> You got it.
>
>>>> WHO'RE YOU BY THE WAY?
>
>>> Someone who *doesn't* use a bigoted phrase for a handle?
>
>> Is this Harshman's fanboi?
>
> Me? No. The jerk with the anti-Semite handle? Damfino.
>
> What does Harshman have to do with it?
>

StanFast had an unhealthy obsession with Harshman and constantly
attacked even in posts that had nothing to do with (reminds me of a
certain mathematician...).

--
"He who fights monsters shall see to it that he does not become a
monster, for he who gazes into the abyss often finds that the abyss
gazes back also." - Friedrich Nietzche

[Bob Casanova]

On Sun, 16 Sep 2018 14:58:51 -0400, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by Oxyaena <oxy...@is.king>:

>On 9/16/2018 2:33 PM, Bob Casanova wrote:
>> On Sat, 15 Sep 2018 18:21:53 -0000 (UTC), the following
>> appeared in talk.origins, posted by David Greig
>> <dgr...@beagle.ediacara.org>:
>>
>>> On 2018-09-14, Bob Casanova <nos...@buzz.off> wrote:
>>
>>>> On Thu, 13 Sep 2018 12:06:58 -0700 (PDT), the following
>>>> appeared in talk.origins, posted by "Jews=Eternal
>>>> Conspirators" <santorump...@gmail.com>:
>>
>>>>> On Saturday, September 1, 2018 at 8:40:03 PM UTC-4, Kent Jennings wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>> On Saturday, September 1, 2018 at 2:35:03 PM UTC-7, Robert Carnegie wrote:
>>
>>>>>>> I think that a lot of the flaw is that the arguments
>>>>>>> use words, which are imprecise things, really.
>>
>>>>>> You got it.
>>
>>>>> WHO'RE YOU BY THE WAY?
>>
>>>> Someone who *doesn't* use a bigoted phrase for a handle?
>>
>>> Is this Harshman's fanboi?
>>
>> Me? No. The jerk with the anti-Semite handle? Damfino.
>>
>> What does Harshman have to do with it?
>>
>
>StanFast had an unhealthy obsession with Harshman

Damn, is this *that* idiot again?

> and constantly
>attacked even in posts that had nothing to do with (reminds me of a
>certain mathematician...).

Maybe he too "has a little list"...

[Peter Nyikos]

On Sunday, September 16, 2018 at 3:00:03 PM UTC-4, Oxyaena wrote:
> On 9/16/2018 2:33 PM, Bob Casanova wrote:
> > On Sat, 15 Sep 2018 18:21:53 -0000 (UTC), the following
> > appeared in talk.origins, posted by David Greig
> > <dgr...@beagle.ediacara.org>:
> >
> >> On 2018-09-14, Bob Casanova <nos...@buzz.off> wrote:
> >
> >>> On Thu, 13 Sep 2018 12:06:58 -0700 (PDT), the following
> >>> appeared in talk.origins, posted by "Jews=Eternal
> >>> Conspirators" <santorump...@gmail.com>:
> >
> >>>> On Saturday, September 1, 2018 at 8:40:03 PM UTC-4, Kent Jennings wrote:
> >>>
> >>>>> On Saturday, September 1, 2018 at 2:35:03 PM UTC-7, Robert Carnegie wrote:
> >
> >>>>>> I think that a lot of the flaw is that the arguments
> >>>>>> use words, which are imprecise things, really.
> >
> >>>>> You got it.
> >
> >>>> WHO'RE YOU BY THE WAY?
> >
> >>> Someone who *doesn't* use a bigoted phrase for a handle?
> >
> >> Is this Harshman's fanboi?
> >
> > Me? No. The jerk with the anti-Semite handle? Damfino.
> >
> > What does Harshman have to do with it?
> >
>
> StanFast had an unhealthy obsession with Harshman

Perhaps he took the following too literally:

Challenged, you change the subject. That's not sensible.
I'd like to know who you are, what you have done with
John Harshman, and why you are posting in his name.
Charles Brenner in:
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/yM3vszXTTTc/Uh54CtvUBKkJ

Unlike Stanfast, Charles Brenner was showing a very healthy humorous
attitude towards the mercurial Harshman, who sometimes indulges
in dirty evasive tactics, and sometimes (although increasingly
rarely these days) posts solid on-topic stuff .

> and constantly
> attacked even in posts that had nothing to do with (reminds me of a
> certain mathematician...).

... whom you attacked in many posts that had nothing to do with you.

And keep in mind that I also *praise* people in posts that they
had nothing to do with. I mentioned just such a post here, where
Bill Rogers was the recipient of the praise,
to what should have been your embarrassment:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/zFfUhJZG1dk/kYREDlA_CAAJ
Subject: Re: OT: Pure bullshit
Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2018 10:29:19 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <d5818832-46af-48d7...@googlegroups.com>


But your posting persona is almost completely incapable of
embarrassment.

>
> --
> "He who fights monsters shall see to it that he does not become a
> monster, for he who gazes into the abyss often finds that the abyss
> gazes back also." - Friedrich Nietzche

And you, the person behind the handle "Oxyaena", have not only
gazed into the abyss but have descended part way into it,
and some day the abyss will gaze back at you in your current
frame of mind, the way it VERY BELATEDLY gazed back at you
after you almost destroyed sci.bio.paleontology with your
voluminous spam, in your Th*******on frame of mind.

You have claimed that most of those spam posts were by Ed Conrad,
but was it not YOU, spoofing an email address of Ed Conrad,
who was responsible? You have shown yourself to be an expert
at spoofing e-mail addresses, after all.


I, on the other hand, haven't the foggiest idea how one
goes about spoofing an e-mail address, and haven't the slightest
wish to learn how.


Peter Nyikos

[Oxyaena]

Do you know what Nietzche meant by the term "abyss"? Like you I *do*
indeed think it applies to me, but not in the way you think. You are the
"monster" in question, being the troll that has managed to irk me the
most, and in a somewhat personal manner as well, and I am the man who
fights monsters, and I shall see to it that I do *not* become like you
while fighting your trolling ways.

>
> You have claimed that most of those spam posts were by Ed Conrad,
> but was it not YOU, spoofing an email address of Ed Conrad,
> who was responsible?

What the hell does this have to do with anything? After March 2014 I
left Usenet for personal reasons I shan't disclose, all of the crap
posted to sbp between March of 2014 and November of 2014 was by someone
else, presumably Ed Conrad. Before March of 2014 most of those spam
posts were by me, and this has nothing to do with the current thread
anyways.

> You have shown yourself to be an expert
> at spoofing e-mail addresses, after all.

It's easy, you just go to the "email" section of your newsreader and
type in whatever email you want, there's nothing complicated about it.
How the hell this confuses you I have no fucking clue.

>
>
> I, on the other hand, haven't the foggiest idea how one
> goes about spoofing an e-mail address, and haven't the slightest
> wish to learn how.

I just told you. What, you forgot what using a newsreader was like after
succumbing to Stockholm Syndrome with NGG?


>
>
> Peter "Dunce cap" Nyikos
>

[Peter Nyikos]

On Thursday, September 13, 2018 at 4:40:03 PM UTC-4, Oxyaena wrote:
> On 9/13/2018 4:05 PM, Robert Carnegie wrote:
> > On Thursday, 13 September 2018 20:05:03 UTC+1, Jews=Eternal Conspirators wrote:
> >> On Saturday, September 1, 2018 at 8:40:03 PM UTC-4, Kent Jennings wrote:
> >>> On Saturday, September 1, 2018 at 2:35:03 PM UTC-7, Robert Carnegie wrote:
> >>>> I think that a lot of the flaw is that the arguments
> >>>> use words, which are imprecise things, really.
> >>>
> >>> You got it.
> >>
> >>
> >> Every argument, yours included, uses words....Do you
> >> know any alternative to words as medium?
> >
> > Mathematics. For instance, can God create a stone
> > so heavy that he can't lift it? No, because a stone
> > has only a finite weight, x, and we assume that
> > x is not too heavy for God to lift. x < G. Easy.
> >
>
> But that doesn't undermine the paradox, because stones have a finite
> wight, god *can't* create a stone so heavy that he can't lift it,
> therefore he is not omnipotent.

This sophomoric talk about omnipotence is NOT the real reason
I long ago ceased to believe in an omnipotent entity. I'd
tell you the real reason, but that would be like casting pearls
before swine.

However, I have a list of 25 people [1] whom I would tell the real reason
if they wanted to know it, because they seem like honest, sincere
people to me. I have posted that list several times, and your
benefactor Casanova has had a lot of fun pretending it doesn't
exist, as have you. He prefers to bullshit about a "little list"
that is part of an elaborate virtual reality that he has been at work
creating for a long time. And you have bought into that fictitious
creation of his.


[1] One of them is Robert Carnegie. I've seen too little
of Kent Jennings to know whether he belongs on the list,
but I haven't seen anything that disqualify him yet.

> Mathematics places limits on God, and if
> God has limits then he isn't all-powerful.

Theologians like Aquinas have ways around that sophistry, including the
fact that "omnipotent" was never meant to designate a self-contradictory
concept. They have freely admitted that there are a great many
things that God cannot, therefore, do.

That reminds me: one reason that I haven't responded to your middle school
level talk about the Problem of Pain is that
I haven't taken seriously the existence of a God that
is omnipotent and/or omniscient, and/or omnibenevolent for decades.

I've even made that plain many times, but you are so obsessed
with your vendetta against me that you seldom bother looking
at my posts where I am not criticizing you or someone you
admire (like jillery) or replying directly to you. There is
a great deal that you don't know about me and which has long
been a matter of public record in talk.origins and sci.bio.paleontology.


Peter Nyikos

[zencycle]

Hence the problem of anthropomorphizing god.

[Oxyaena]

On 9/17/2018 2:24 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> On Thursday, September 13, 2018 at 4:40:03 PM UTC-4, Oxyaena wrote:
>> On 9/13/2018 4:05 PM, Robert Carnegie wrote:
>>> On Thursday, 13 September 2018 20:05:03 UTC+1, Jews=Eternal Conspirators wrote:
>>>> On Saturday, September 1, 2018 at 8:40:03 PM UTC-4, Kent Jennings wrote:
>>>>> On Saturday, September 1, 2018 at 2:35:03 PM UTC-7, Robert Carnegie wrote:
>>>>>> I think that a lot of the flaw is that the arguments
>>>>>> use words, which are imprecise things, really.
>>>>>
>>>>> You got it.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Every argument, yours included, uses words....Do you
>>>> know any alternative to words as medium?
>>>
>>> Mathematics. For instance, can God create a stone
>>> so heavy that he can't lift it? No, because a stone
>>> has only a finite weight, x, and we assume that
>>> x is not too heavy for God to lift. x < G. Easy.
>>>
>>
>> But that doesn't undermine the paradox, because stones have a finite
>> wight, god *can't* create a stone so heavy that he can't lift it,
>> therefore he is not omnipotent.
>
> This sophomoric talk about omnipotence is NOT the real reason
> I long ago ceased to believe in an omnipotent entity. I'd
> tell you the real reason, but that would be like casting pearls
> before swine.

Perhaps if you stopped insulting me and actually attempted to converse
with me I wouldn't be so hostile towards you, and BTW none of what I had
written is 'sophomoric' because they are real problems theists have to
deal with, just because you dismiss what I wrote doesn't mean that the
paradox doesn't exist.

>
> However, I have a list of 25 people [1] whom I would tell the real reason

Do you really think anyone gives a shit about your "little list"?

> if they wanted to know it, because they seem like honest, sincere
> people to me. I have posted that list several times, and your
> benefactor Casanova has had a lot of fun pretending it doesn't
> exist, as have you. He prefers to bullshit about a "little list"

Do you *like* sounding like a windbag? How about you stop insulting
others in posts they have nothing to do with and stop boasting about
yourself and post something actually relevant to the thread for once.

> that is part of an elaborate virtual reality that he has been at work
> creating for a long time. And you have bought into that fictitious
> creation of his.

Is it too hard to *not* libel anyone for once?

>
>
> [1] One of them is Robert Carnegie. I've seen too little
> of Kent Jennings to know whether he belongs on the list,
> but I haven't seen anything that disqualify him yet.
>
>
>> Mathematics places limits on God, and if
>> God has limits then he isn't all-powerful.
>
> Theologians like Aquinas have ways around that sophistry, including the

How is it sophistry?

> fact that "omnipotent" was never meant to designate a self-contradictory
> concept. They have freely admitted that there are a great many
> things that God cannot, therefore, do.

Do you think that matters to your average theist?

>
> That reminds me: one reason that I haven't responded to your middle school
> level talk about the Problem of Pain is that

"Problem of Pain"? You mean "Problem of Evil"? And how is noting that
the Problem of Evil only applies to personal, anthropomorpic,
omnibenevolent deities like the God of Abraham "middle-school level
talk"? Stop patronizing me, douche bag, you look ridiculous for doing so.

> I haven't taken seriously the existence of a God that
> is omnipotent and/or omniscient, and/or omnibenevolent for decades.

How is anything that concerns you relevant to the discussion I was
having with Robert Carnegie? Grow up.

>
> I've even made that plain many times, but you are so obsessed
> with your vendetta against me that you seldom bother looking
> at my posts where I am not criticizing you or someone you
> admire (like jillery) or replying directly to you. There is
> a great deal that you don't know about me and which has long
> been a matter of public record in talk.origins and sci.bio.paleontology.

None of this is relevant to the actual topic, troll. Grow up.


>
>
> Peter Nyikos
>

[Oxyaena]

[snip horseshit]

> But your posting persona is almost completely incapable of
> embarrassment.

The irony here is delicious.

[snip horseshit]

[Burkhard]

Ah, back to Aquinas again :o) Though in this case the Summa contra
gentiles, Book 2, Section 25 where he discusses the four sided triangle.

As for the answer, he gives one in the Summa Theologica:

"All confess that God is omnipotent; but it seems difficult to explain
in what His omnipotence precisely consists: for there may be doubt as to
the precise meaning of the word 'all' when we say that God can do all
things. If, however, we consider the matter aright, since power is said
in reference to possible things, this phrase, "God can do all things,"
is rightly understood to mean that God can do all things that are possible;"

So essentially, his answer would be people who argue this misunderstand
what "omnipotent" really means. Since the scriptural basis for
omnipotence is anyway extremely limited (the term is only used once, in
Revelations, and maybe implied by Luke 1:37 which Aquinas uses, but
there the context makes it clear that it just means "nobody else could
have done this") that seems fair enough, and the vast majority of
Christian theologians followed this line.

Quite a number went even further. For people at the time of Christ,
"omnipotent" simply meant "all available power" and was in this meaning
also predicated of the emperors, merely indicating that they had all the
powers available in the empire, and no balance of powers as the republic
had tried to achieve. Some philosophers and theologians propose to read
it just like that, as a honorific, not a description. McTaggart e.g.
called it 'a piece of theological etiquette", and similar idea is
found in Hobbes. (McTaggart was personally an atheists, but a rather
unusual one, and stanch defender of the Anglican church.) More recently
Peter Geach argued this position in what is probably the best summary of
the debate, his "Omnipotence" paper from 1973 in Philosophy. Within
Christianity broadly understood, open theism and process theology reject
omnipotence altogether.

There have been a few who argued that God is not even subject to the
laws of logic - Here on TO, only Ray disagreed and claimed God can also
do logically impossible things, and that alone gives you a good idea
that the idea is probably extremely heterodox. The only more influential
thinker I can think of who held this position was Descartes.

What is slightly more interesting then is a) the reason why even a deity
is bound by the laws of logic and b) how one should define as precisely
as possible what "omnipotent" then should mean. The latter alone has
created a small cottage industry of papers, quite a number of them by
perfectly secular philosophers, because it can also tease out our
intuitions about the nature of laws. If for instance you are a Quinean,
then you should think of the laws of logic as merely particularly
general and well confirmed empirical laws, and that then makes it
difficult to argue for the distinction between a power to violate
physical laws and one to violate laws of logic. As so often with 20th
century logicans and analytical philosophers, you get eve more confusing
thought experiments than the 4 sided triangle - my favourite is "McEar"
a person who can do only one thing, that is to scratch his ear. IIRC
this would lead with some formal definitions of omnipotence to the
conclusion that he is omnipotent too, but please don't ask me about the
details :o)

Personally, I think Aquinas and the traditional response could have been
more self-assured on this: God may or may not adhere to the laws of
logic, but we, as humans, most certainly must. The laws of logic are not
"out there", part of the empirical world, they are an artefact of
language use, and with that human thought. That means we are restricted
in what we can meaningful say. And the paradoxes might look
superficially like meaningful sentences, but because they violate laws
of logic, really on inspection aren't. (In an unlikely alliance, this
was argued by C S Lewis, and strongly endorsed by Anthony Flew). As a
test in the triangle case, you could ask: what would you observe if god
had made a four sided triangle? - if you post a test, you should be able
to say when the test was met. But any answer you give will simply show
that you misunderstand the word "four" or "triangle". Or as Wittgenstein
put it: "When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the
question be put into words." That was the position Dizzy Phillips tool,
and to me it seems still the best way to address the issue.

In that sense it is also wrong to say we, let alone gods, are "bound" by
the laws of logic. This is simply the misleading result of a semantic
shift. The term "law" was originally predicated of human laws, where
"being bound by" makes perfectly sense. It was then by analogy extended
to laws of nature - and quite a lot of philosophers of science would
today say that even this was a problematic meaning shift. For them, it
reifies laws in an unacceptable way, and the whole concept of "being
bound by laws of nature" is merely a confusion created by the similarity
to laws of nations. There is no "there" out there that binds us, we
simply observe very strong patterns. The laws of logic are even less
something that "binds" you, they simply describe the limits of what can
be meaningfully expressed in language, they are a communication artefact.

[Burkhard]

Oxyaena wrote:
> On 9/13/2018 1:54 PM, Burkhard wrote:
>> Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>> On Thursday, September 6, 2018 at 11:00:04 AM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
>>>> Oxyaena wrote:
>>>>> On 9/4/2018 9:06 AM, Burkhard wrote:
>>>>>> Oxyaena wrote:
>>>>>>> On 9/2/2018 4:24 AM, Burkhard wrote:
>>>
>>>>>>>> Also, are you following here the Summa in your order of things?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> No.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> fair enough. But where in the Aquinas text do you see an argument
>>>>>> from
>>>>>> design?
>>>
>>> IIRC it is in the reply to Objection 2, and all too brief.
>>
>>
>> Also from what you say below you mean the part that starts "Since nature
>> works for a determinate end under the direction of a higher agent,
>> whatever is done by nature must needs be traced back to God, as to its
>> first cause"?
>>
>> While this is a argument that concludes with a designer, maybe, I would
>> not call it an argument from design as it is normally understood. That's
>> the same issue I have with Oxyaena -
>
> Looks like Peter was being a hypocrite when calling me an "ignoramus".

Not that I intend to follow the exchange you two have started, again,
but just for clarification: I wrote a rather long and detailed answer to
your post. Would not have done this if I thought you were ignorant of
these issues, or if your post was simply dumb. I did it because I found
it an interesting discussion to be head. If I think someone is stupid, I
tend to indicate this more unambiguously..

I obviously disagreed with your analysis, but that is a rather different
issue. And I have the advantage to do this for a living - and also had
insider training. One of the chaps who taught me about Aquinas later
became a big cheese in Rome :o)

[zencycle]

On Tuesday, September 18, 2018 at 11:00:03 AM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
>
> Not that I intend to follow the exchange you two have started, again,
> but just for clarification: I wrote a rather long and detailed answer to
> your post. Would not have done this if I thought you were ignorant of
> these issues, or if your post was simply dumb. I did it because I found
> it an interesting discussion to be head. If I think someone is stupid, I
> tend to indicate this more unambiguously..
>
> I obviously disagreed with your analysis, but that is a rather different
> issue. And I have the advantage to do this for a living - and also had
> insider training. One of the chaps who taught me about Aquinas later
> became a big cheese in Rome :o)

I just have to say, I've followed this exchange between you and oxyaena (and others) with great interest, and found your posts to be incredibly enlightening. I was actually wondering what your credentials might be, so I'm glad you alluded to it.

[Oxyaena]

Thanks, I guess. You've had insider training, I haven't, and neither has
Peter, but from the viewpoint of a layman I`m most definitely *not*
ignorant about these issues.

> or if your post was simply dumb. I did it because I found
> it an interesting discussion to be head. If I think someone is stupid, I
> tend to indicate this more unambiguously..
>
> I obviously disagreed with your analysis, but that is a rather different
> issue.

Yes, that is a different issue. For the record I disagree with your
analysis, and if anything this seems to me to be merely an issue of
semantics, which might mean much in technical terms but I write from the
perspective of a layman, so obviously to the average person on the
street the precise definition of the argument from design doesn't
matter, and it still seems to me to be variants of the argument from
design, albeit with considerably more nuance.

> And I have the advantage to do this for a living - and also had
> insider training.

Neither of which I have.

> One of the chaps who taught me about Aquinas later
> became a big cheese in Rome :o)

Peter was just being an asshole when dismissing me as being "an
ignoramus who knows nothing about Aquinas," which was actually starting
to get to me until you and zencycle reminded me that he's simply a troll
so I shouldn't let him get to me.




--
"The great thing about science is that it's true whether you believe in
it or not." - Niel Degrasse Tyson

[Oxyaena]

On 9/18/2018 10:50 AM, Burkhard wrote:
[snip rest I'll address later]

>
> Personally, I think Aquinas and the traditional response could have been
> more self-assured on this: God may or may not adhere to the laws of
> logic, but we, as humans, most certainly must.

Which goes in line with what I wrote below, that in order for something
to be discusses it must be logically consistent, and therefore any
discussions on God must still be logically consistent in order to engage
in meaningful dialogue about him.

> The laws of logic are not
> "out there", part of the empirical world, they are an artefact of
> language use, and with that human thought. That means we are restricted
> in what we can meaningful say.

[snip for focus]

> But any answer you give  will simply show
> that you misunderstand the word "four" or "triangle". Or as Wittgenstein
> put it: "When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the
> question be put into words." That was the position Dizzy Phillips tool, > and to me it seems still the best way to address the issue.

I would have to disagree, for me something that can't be put into words
isn't something worth discussing, for in order to discuss something it
has to be put into words, hence why I see the above as a meaningless
truism, it's about as useful (in a utilitarian sense) as knowing that
ants have eyes.

>
> In that sense it is also wrong to say we, let alone gods, are "bound" by
> the laws of logic.
> This is simply the misleading result of a semantic
> shift. The term "law" was originally predicated of human laws, where
> "being bound by" makes perfectly sense. It was then by analogy extended
> to laws of nature -

Language evolves over time, hence the shift in the meaning of the term
"kaw" and the expressions that come with the shift in meaning of the
term "law" to encompass natural laws as well, or laws of logic, or
Internet laws (Godwin's law for example) etc.

Therefore while we may not be "bound" by the laws of logic anymore than
my cat (see below) is, in order to engage in meaningful dialogue some
rules of logic must be established, namely that the viewpoints being
held be logically consistent and not fallacious.

[snip]

>  The laws of logic are even less
> something that "binds" you, they simply describe the limits of what can
> be meaningfully expressed in language, they are a communication artefact.
>

I'd have to agree and disagree at the same time, for while the laws of
logic may be a "communication artifact" in order to progress with any
given field it needs to be logically consistent, hence why, as it
pertains to the law of identity, a bird is a bird and not a mammal, or a
triangle is a triangle and not a parallelogram, for a triangle being a
parallelogram is not logically consistent. So yes, they may simply
describe what can be "meaningfully expressed in language", but they are
necessary anyways.

Obviously my cat (and yes, I do have cats) isn't going to care about
whether God can only perform actions that are in line with the laws of
logic or not, but a human does, or at least some humans do.



>
>
>
[snip]

[Peter Nyikos]

On Tuesday, September 18, 2018 at 10:55:03 AM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
<snip>

> > On 9/13/2018 10:04 PM, Robert Carnegie wrote:

> >> There's an apparent paradox here, but it is only
> >> a verbal contradiction, a confusion of words.
> >> Try this: can God lift a triangle that has four corners?
> >> No, because there isn't and can't be any such thing.

Well said, and it segues nicely into what Burkhard wrote next:
<snip>

> Ah, back to Aquinas again :o) Though in this case the Summa contra
> gentiles, Book 2, Section 25 where he discusses the four sided triangle.
>
> As for the answer, he gives one in the Summa Theologica:
>
> "All confess that God is omnipotent; but it seems difficult to explain
> in what His omnipotence precisely consists: for there may be doubt as to
> the precise meaning of the word 'all' when we say that God can do all
> things. If, however, we consider the matter aright, since power is said
> in reference to possible things, this phrase, "God can do all things,"
> is rightly understood to mean that God can do all things that are possible;"
>
> So essentially, his answer would be people who argue this misunderstand
> what "omnipotent" really means. Since the scriptural basis for
> omnipotence is anyway extremely limited (the term is only used once, in
> Revelations, and maybe implied by Luke 1:37 which Aquinas uses, but
> there the context makes it clear that it just means "nobody else could
> have done this") that seems fair enough, and the vast majority of
> Christian theologians followed this line.

And well they might. There is no Biblical warrant for anything
more grandiose than this. And I don't just mean a lack of a word
for ominpotence; I mean that there is no indication that God could
do anything that goes beyond what Aquinas wrote, or even gets
close to that level.

>
> Quite a number went even further. For people at the time of Christ,
> "omnipotent" simply meant "all available power" and was in this meaning
> also predicated of the emperors, merely indicating that they had all the
> powers available in the empire, and no balance of powers as the republic
> had tried to achieve.

Interesting.

> Some philosophers and theologians propose to read
> it just like that, as a honorific, not a description. McTaggart e.g.
> called it 'a piece of theological etiquette", and similar idea is
> found in Hobbes. (McTaggart was personally an atheists, but a rather
> unusual one, and stanch defender of the Anglican church.) More recently
> Peter Geach argued this position in what is probably the best summary of
> the debate, his "Omnipotence" paper from 1973 in Philosophy. Within
> Christianity broadly understood, open theism and process theology reject
> omnipotence altogether.

Theological fads come and go. Just think of the "God is Dead" flap
created by the near-schizophrenic Altizer.

> There have been a few who argued that God is not even subject to the
> laws of logic - Here on TO, only Ray disagreed and claimed God can also
> do logically impossible things, and that alone gives you a good idea
> that the idea is probably extremely heterodox. The only more influential
> thinker I can think of who held this position was Descartes.

Where??? He did buy into the Anselmic argument, even more than
Aquinas did, but there is no reason to think "the most perfect being"
entails logically impossible "perfection."

> What is slightly more interesting then is a) the reason why even a deity
> is bound by the laws of logic and b) how one should define as precisely
> as possible what "omnipotent" then should mean. The latter alone has
> created a small cottage industry of papers, quite a number of them by
> perfectly secular philosophers, because it can also tease out our
> intuitions about the nature of laws. If for instance you are a Quinean,
> then you should think of the laws of logic as merely particularly
> general and well confirmed empirical laws, and that then makes it
> difficult to argue for the distinction between a power to violate
> physical laws and one to violate laws of logic. As so often with 20th
> century logicans and analytical philosophers, you get eve more confusing
> thought experiments than the 4 sided triangle - my favourite is "McEar"
> a person who can do only one thing, that is to scratch his ear. IIRC
> this would lead with some formal definitions of omnipotence to the
> conclusion that he is omnipotent too, but please don't ask me about the
> details :o)

I once wrote an imaginary sequel to Plato's "Euthydemus" in which
Euthydemus tells Callicles that Dionysodorus is omnipotent because
he wills everything that ever happened or will happen. Epictetus
wrote things "supporting" this with his brand of stoicism.

> Personally, I think Aquinas and the traditional response could have been
> more self-assured on this: God may or may not adhere to the laws of
> logic, but we, as humans, most certainly must. The laws of logic are not
> "out there", part of the empirical world, they are an artefact of
> language use, and with that human thought.

Sorry, as a mathematician I am a limited sort of Platonist,
and I say that not only do the laws of arithmetic transcend
humans and their languages, so does the concept of an infinite
set.

Amazingly, formal logic is unable to unambiguously express our intuitive
concept of "infinite". But the concept of an infinite set is "out there"
and is just as real in its own way as the laws of arithmetic.

> That means we are restricted
> in what we can meaningful say. And the paradoxes might look
> superficially like meaningful sentences, but because they violate laws
> of logic, really on inspection aren't. (In an unlikely alliance, this
> was argued by C S Lewis, and strongly endorsed by Anthony Flew). As a
> test in the triangle case, you could ask: what would you observe if god
> had made a four sided triangle? - if you post a test, you should be able
> to say when the test was met. But any answer you give will simply show
> that you misunderstand the word "four" or "triangle". Or as Wittgenstein
> put it: "When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the
> question be put into words." That was the position Dizzy Phillips tool,
> and to me it seems still the best way to address the issue.
>
> In that sense it is also wrong to say we, let alone gods, are "bound" by
> the laws of logic. This is simply the misleading result of a semantic
> shift. The term "law" was originally predicated of human laws, where
> "being bound by" makes perfectly sense. It was then by analogy extended
> to laws of nature - and quite a lot of philosophers of science would
> today say that even this was a problematic meaning shift. For them, it
> reifies laws in an unacceptable way, and the whole concept of "being
> bound by laws of nature" is merely a confusion created by the similarity
> to laws of nations. There is no "there" out there that binds us, we
> simply observe very strong patterns. The laws of logic are even less
> something that "binds" you, they simply describe the limits of what can
> be meaningfully expressed in language, they are a communication artefact.

I disagree, and if what little I wrote up there needs further
explanation, I'll be glad to provide it.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

University of South Carolina
http://people.math.sc.edu
specialty: set-theoretic topology, which sometimes uses very advanced logic

[Burkhard]

“God could have brought it about [...] that it was not true that twice
four make eight” Replies to Sixth Objections to the Meditationes, CSM 2:294

[Burkhard]

Interesting. I'm not a limited Platonist, I'm a full blown Platonist and
Meinongian hyperrealist. But I draw the exact opposite conclusion from
that.

V is out there and exists. Super Reinhardt Cardinals? Bring them on! We
have huge Cardinals, the biggest. Make Cardinals great again! I live
very comfortably in Cantor's Attic.

This means among other things that every set-theoretical proposition is
unequivocally either true or false - including the axiom of choice or
the continuum hypothesis. That we can't prove them in ZF or NBG is
neither here nor there. It also means that V itself is unique and
consistent, like all of reality. But of course a corollary of Goedel's
theorem is that no axiomatic characterization can uniquely force V as a
model.

So that means that our language to describe V is inherently insufficient
- hence the undecidability results. (and I even permit infinite languages)

Which is just as I said. The object out there (V, or God) is not
"subject to the laws of logic", they simply are. Our language to
describe them however is, and that is why it systematically must fall
short of its target.