This is evidence that my philosophical proposition, that philosophical propositions in themselves are not evidence of anything, is true.
I also have a philosophical proposition that debates are a waste of time, so don’t argue with me.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
My philosophy is a admittedly at a “layman” level, but the argument from that last panel sounds like Platonic nonsense.
Oh! I mean the Christian argument that the last panel is based upon.
Not evidence .. sure.
Not logically valuable as ways of thinking about things & making folks think & raising questions?
Not so sure.. Ethics is an area of philosphy like epistemology and so much more. Does that mean it has no value?
Philosphy has its place I reckon even if not evidence any more than art is. Or debate is . Or “waste of time” is. Subjective obvs but still.
Isn’t this a variation of the Babelfish argument from Douglas Adams? It’s too improbable for anything but deistic creationism so it destroys faith with proof and without faith God’s buggered.
My father was so much better at debating than I was that even when I had better facts, as in contra graphology or pro homosexuality being natural, he could always silence me.
@Akira:
It’s Anselmic nonsense.
@1
These are all plays on famous arguments. The last is Saint Anselm of Canterbury’s argument. God is a most perfect being; A non-existent being is less perfect than an existing one; so to be most perfect God must exist.
It’s fairly astonishing to me as the logical fallacy is so obvious and would have been obvious at the time with the tools of logic known then, or even with no knowledge of logic at all. I can only assume wanting a proof to be valid made one blind to logical fallacies and fear of the church made one inclined not to look. I’m also astonished that so many philosophers in the following centuries did variations on it, including Spinoza and Descartes who should have known better. It’s almost as thought they were thinking “the church requires me and expects me to make an axiomatic logical proof of gods existence. I’ll drag out the old Anselm chestnut to get it over with and then I can get on to my real work”.
I’m a bit underwhelmed by this comic though. It basically relies on generic pessimism (the universe has no order/ existence is less pleasant than abstraction, and everything that happened today had no meaning or cause… really? who believes that?…) and isn’t really funny. Maybe that was the point.
First panel: A god could have reasons that we don’t understand (even silly ones) for events. Or there might be no reasons for events. IIRC Jerry Coyne once jokingly posited a God that didn’t do anything, even create the universe, which emerged naturally from quantum vacuum flunctuations. Still, an apparently purposeless universe is weak to moderately-strong evidence against creation.
Second panel: while it’s not airtight, it is an interesting idea that can be refined and tested. How can you distinguish designed from undesigned objects? This is what biology has been doing for 160 years.
Third panel: as nonsensical as the ontological argument on which it’s based.
It was, to some philosophers of the time:
But this:
doesn’t hold water either. Gaunilo obviously wasn’t blind to the logical fallacy, or prevented from pointing it out by fear of the Church (and the much more prominent Thomas Aquinas also rejected it, although he proposed other “proofs”). Although the medieval Church did sometimes persecute “heretics”, this was sporadic, and medieval scholars generally had a lot more freedom to speculate than many atheists (and Protestants) think. In the early modern period, both Descartes and Spinoza did most of their philosophising in the Dutch Republic, where the Catholic Church had no power, and even the predominant Calvinist Church lacked the power to require them to conform to its doctrines. It’s amusing to note (see the link above) that Bertrand Russell was briefly convinced the argument was sound!
Those arguments actually make kind of sense.
I was going to argue, but “I also have a philosophical proposition that debates are a waste of time, so don’t argue with me” makes that an exercise in futility.
This merely evidences the mysterium iniquitatis of sinful man aspiring to the place of George Gilder.