Edward Feser has responded to my critique of the press release about his new book that I used as the basis for pouring cold water on the idea of trying to prove the existence of gods by arguments alone. Not surprisingly, he does not like what I said and says that if I had only read his book, I would see that my criticisms were either invalid or had been addressed by him. Probably as a result of Feser’s post, a couple of new commenters have come here to defend Feser (see comment #23 and later) and some of them have also taken me to task for not having read his book
I want to particularly thank Ye Olde Statistician @#25 and George @#26 for their responses to my post where they take issue with what I say. I am responding in a new post here because old posts tend to not be read after a few days, and also because my response is a bit lengthy.
It is true that I have not read the book and, to be quite frank, I have no plans to do so. If Feser and his supporters feel that that disqualifies me from commenting on the claims contained in his press release, so be it. Some time ago, I came to the conclusion that I was not going to learn anything new or useful from religious apologetics. If someone actually does come up with a killer proof that really does establish with certainty the existence of their god (as Feser claims to do in his press release), that will surely be big news (certainly bigger than a cure for cancer or even the arrival of a new iPhone) and I am sure that it will be all over the internet, make the newspapers, and will receive massive coverage on TV, the way that major scientific discoveries do. Then I will read it.
But for the moment, let’s back up a bit to refresh what this is all about. The title of Feser’s book is FIVE PROOFS OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD and the accompanying press release says that “the existence of God can be established with certainty by way of purely rational arguments.” (Boldface emphasis mine)
These are very strong claims and are what I took issue with.
I agree with commenter George that “An argument consists of a conclusion attempted to be justified with premises through an inferential process” but I am afraid that I cannot agree with him that such an argument can count as evidence because that way lies circularity. Evidence is what one provides in support of an argument. If, as George says, Feser is appealing to features of everyday life as evidence, then Feser can no longer claim that the existence of his god can be established by means of purely rational arguments (his words) but is appealing to empirical evidence. Then the question shifts to the quality and persuasiveness of that evidence, how one deals with contradictory evidence, and whether there are credible alternative theories to explain that evidence that do not invoke the existence of any god. We thus quickly move away from ‘purely rational’ arguments and become enmeshed with evaluations of data and competing theories about the data. That is what science is all about.
It is also well known that given any set of data, however large, there are an infinite number of theories that can ‘explain’ that data and we thus have to find ways of making judgments about them by weighing what evidence is relevant and how much weightage each gets. The whole idea of proving empirical statements (such as the existence of entities) by arguments alone is not something that would be accepted in science. The existence of entities is established by a preponderance of evidence in support of the existence claim, and that necessarily includes data.
George suggests that we can arrive at true statements about the world in other ways using just premises and arguments, saying that in order to do so, “The premises must be justified as true and the argument valid for the conclusion to be true”. Therein lies the problem. It has long been known (starting with the work of Kurt Godel) that it is impossible for any non-trivial system to establish the validity of both those necessary conditions, and hence the goal of arriving at a system that is both complete and consistent and thus can establish unequivocally true statements is unattainable. The claim of certainty becomes infeasible. If that is the case in the more rigorous world of mathematics, what chance is there for such a program succeeding when we are dealing with claims about the empirical world?
Carl Sagan said that ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’, a sentiment that predates him but his phrasing captures the idea succinctly. I am not sure what he and his predecessors would make of an extraordinary claim (and surely a claim of proof of the certainty of the existence of any god has to be considered truly extraordinary) that supporters claim did not require any evidence at all but could be established purely by rational arguments, perhaps supplemented by appeals to some everyday phenomena?
The area where I live regularly experiences spectacular thunderstorms.
Therefore: Thor!
I especially enjoyed comment 28 at that earlier post, which contains “And objectively speaking, I think he knocked Mano out.”
“It is true that I have not read the book and, to be quite frank, I have no plans to do so. If Feser and his supporters feel that that disqualifies me from commenting on the claims contained in his press release, so be it.”
It does, as anyone with a brain cell between the two ears knows. Thanks for saving me the time reading the rest of your “atheistic apologetics” in the post, as I will know with absolute certainty, as you so eloquently show, that I will be the dumber for it.
“It has long been known (starting with the work of Kurt Godel) that it is impossible for any non-trivial system to establish the validity of both those necessary conditions, and hence the goal of arriving at a system that is both complete and consistent and thus can establish unequivocally true statements is unattainable. ”
And by the way this is not what Goedel’s theorem says. Completeness in the Goedel’s theorem is about *arithmetical* statements. A theory T could be arithmetically incomplete (and even shown consistent, e.g. like Gentzen’s proof that shows the consistency of first order PA and can be formalized in a system that is stronger than PA in some regards and weaker in others) and be complete about some other things it can talk about — God, souls, whatever.
I guess you not only do not read what you pretend to criticize but also lile to pontificate on what you quite obviously know nothing about.
And by the way, just adding this quote from Prof. Feser about proofs: “Singham also objects that “the whole idea of ‘proof’ in the mathematical sense has no place when it comes to establishing empirical facts such as the existence of entities.” Well, I am not using the mathematical notion of proof, but I do address objections to the use of the word “proof” in the book, at pp. 305-307 – which, once again, a glance at the book would have told Singham.”
And I think I am done with my snark here.
I’d feel a lot better about religious people if I could see some testable evidence to distinguish their beliefs from delusional illness.
As it is, I take assertions of the reality of gods to be prima facie evidence of cognitive malfunction.
Mano, ok, where is it? Hand it over, I know, I know, Feser is an icky doo-doo head, but you can’t criticize books you haven’t read, even books written by doo-doo heads. Now, where is the shovel? Ok, I’m taking this…it’s for your own good.
grodrigues @#4,
Ok, so the word ‘proof’ as used by Feser is not what we normally mean by proof and when he says ‘purely rational’ it is not what we normally mean by purely rational. Maybe his use of the word ‘certain’ is also not what we normally mean by certain?
But no matter. As I said before, if Feser has proved with certainty the existence of his god by purely rational arguments, then it is undoubtedly big news, easily the biggest news in the recorded history of the world. I just checked the internet and the news hasn’t broken as yet but no doubt it is only a matter of minutes before it does.
Or at least cognitive laziness, phhht.
It is fundamentally impossible to prove the existence of a god or ANYTHING ELSE about the natural world with purely logical argument. Fundamentally impossible.
Euclidean geometry is, to my understanding, consistent and non-contradictory. But that doesn’t mean it corresponds to any reality. It will not be very helpful for navigating around the surface of a sphere (like say, our planet) but although its axioms are consistent, they do not correspond with reality (in particular the parallel line axiom).
That is the problem all alleged “proofs” of god have. Even if you could construct the most amazingly self-consistent and sound argument, you still have to do the drudge work to show that the premises are an accurate description of reality.
Take the variants of “first cause” arguments. Originally it contained the premise “things that exist have a cause”, which the Kalam argument patched to “things that begin to exist have a cause”. These are simply asserted as true without demonstration, because of nonsense “common sense”. Yet they cannot be just accepted. You might think it’s crazy for things to exist without cause, but anyone who’s read good science books already knows that modern physics beat the shit out of common sense in the last century. It really is that fucked up.
And that’s not even considering the ones that are nonsensical, like the “greatness” argument. The key there is the assertion that “existence is greater than nonexistence.” How much greater? By what metric? An elephant is larger than a fly, and we can quantify the difference with measurement of things like mass or physical dimensions. What do you use to measure “greatness”?
I don’t care what the argument is. Anyone who thinks they can prove god with pure logic is not worth paying attention to.
#7 Mano
Ouch, he’s going to need some ice for that burn.
I assume this book costs money and the childish taunts to make you read it are just a huckster’s way of trying to part you with cash. Now if the book held any really insightful truths, the author would happily send you a gratis copy, gift wrapped, via first class mail.
@Mano Singham:
“As I said before, if Feser has proved with certainty the existence of his god by purely rational arguments, then it is undoubtedly big news, easily the biggest news in the recorded history of the world. I just checked the internet and the news hasn’t broken as yet but no doubt it is only a matter of minutes before it does.”
You really have some problems with reading elementary English, don’t you? If there is a difference on what “proof” is meant by Prof. Feser, why do you take him as implying that a proof entails the kind of subjective, Cartesian certainty you give it to? Just another one of those guesses, right? Furthermore, only an idiot takes consensus in philosophical arguments as a measure of their interest or value. By your logic, no philosophical argument should be ever payed attention to, including the ones you try to sneak in under the guise of Science ™ and any philosophical discussion would be ruled by the idiot in the room that naysayed everything. Oh and by the way, I have a phd in mathematical physics (on Homotopy Quantum Field Theories if you care to know), done research, attended lectures, etc. so I surely as hell do know the difference between the two.
But to repeat myself (and rereading myself, I was not clear enough), and to follow your own stellar example of intellectual probity, I already know for a fact the complete moronic character of your “atheist apologetics”, so there is no need to waste your words with me because I will not read them. What would be the use anyway? When the combox features an ignorant yahoo that takes the majority of mankind now living and that ever lived as suffering from a “delusional illness”, what dialogue could there be? Delusional madmen do not need arguments, they need therapy.
My little rant (and I recognize it *is* that) is just to say that the intellectual contempt is mutual.
Ye Old statistician demands and example of something
Please, I’m not playing Aristotelian metaphysic word games. It is possible within that (system of) metaphysic you can reach Aquinas’ conclusion, but I reject the metaphysic wholesale, so no sale. It’s like arguing with Catholics about the communion wafer, It’s incidents are of some bread made from a grain, but it’s substance is Jesus flesh. No it’s not, so when he says insubstantial, he’s not talking about it having energy or matter, he’s talking about a metaphysic that was de jour over a millenium ago (the fusion of Aristotle and Platonism) but is in direct oppositon of a modern understand of the world.
@George
Notwithstanding Mano’s point about circularity, this is just the usual fallacy of composition that the Cosmological argument relies on. We observere a house made of bricks, therefore the house is a brick, or we observe things coming into and out of existence, therefore the universe came into (and presumably) will go out of existence.
Anyway, Nihil sub sole novum est. In another decade, if Feser hasn’t fallen off his perch, he’ll do the same again.
I’d be interested if he’s read Jordan Sobel’s ‘Logic and Theism’, to use a you-tube-ism, it anihilates Feser and his ilk. But I bet Ye Old Bloviator and George haven’t read it.
http://www.reasonablefaith.org/sobels-acid-bath-for-theism-review-article-logic-and-theism
WLC review, he…ah, well…he read the book…and then…he reviewed it.
Crazy guy that WLC, Mano, you should call WLC and let him know he could save a TON of time and just skip reading the book.
Oh for the love of, WLC? Please, the man is the living embodiment of that Tubthumping song, ‘I get knocked down, I get up again, you’re never gonna keep me down’. He uses the same argument over and over, no matter how often it’s been shown to be falacious. He and Feser have something in common.
Mano, you’ve managed to get some fleas!
@grodrigues:
Yeah, you do.
Certainty is promised in Feser’s book’s press release. Was the press release false?
Do you disagree that words have meaning? If so, your arguments, and Feser’s, are useless; nothing you write means anything. If not, what do you pretend that “certainty” means in the press release?
Reading comprehension really is not your forté.
There’s not really much point is asking you if Feser is arguing anything new in this book that he has not argued before, because I sincerely doubt that you have the ability to understand anything at all.
Boasting is not the same as demonstration.
I’m a little impressed that you used so many words to ultimately say that you’ve got nothing to say.
Mano was very careful to politely explain exactly why he was not impressed by Feser, and you offer nothing but an emotional, disrespectful, and fundamentally incoherent rant.
I think Mano touched a nerve.
@Rufusdog:
Are you aware that your link goes to a review of a book by Jordan Sobel, not Edward Feser?
Those names are not the same!
Why should I be impressed by WLC’s review, when WLC’s arguments do not impress me?
Do you have the reading comprehension to state clearly whether or not Feser is arguing anything new in this book that he has not argued before?
“If someone actually does come up with a killer proof that really does establish with certainty the existence of their god (as Feser claims to do in his press release), that will surely be big news (certainly bigger than a cure for cancer or even the arrival of a new iPhone) and I am sure that it will be all over the internet, make the newspapers, and will receive massive coverage on TV, the way that major scientific discoveries do. Then I will read it.”
Why, it’s almost as if Dr. Singham were utterly unfamiliar with much of the scholarship of the last 2500 years, and so must rely unironically upon hearing things “all over the internet, [in] the newspapers, and [in] massive coverage on TV” in order to establish the existence of a given proof. (“[A]ll over the internet, [in] the newspapers, and [in] massive coverage on TV” are of course all three known for their scholarship, their rigor, and their diligent and forthright examination of questions of perennial interest--not to mention bikini pics.)
I look forward to Dr. Singham’s generous concession that if someone actually does come up with a killer proof of Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, that will surely be big news (certainly bigger than the arrival of a new iPhone) and that he is sure it would be all over the internet, make the newspapers, and receive massive coverage on TV, the way that major scientific discoveries do. Then he will read it.
Of course, one could not fairly expect him to read a book about something that happened so long ago as the past.
@ grodrigues
To my best understanding, Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem goes beyond arithmetical statements.
From Gödel’s incompleteness theorems
My dear grodrigues, your knowledge of Godel’s Theorems seems to be incomplete.
I hope soon to hear from meta-grodigues
Does this “proof” of a single CreatorGod also include “proof” that It is the AbrahamicMonogod?
Does the evidence to support the “proof” include TheBible™?
Take the variants of “first cause” arguments. Originally it contained the premise “things that exist have a cause”
Actually, it did not. (Aquinas specifically denied it.) This is the sort of sloppiness that Feser complains about. If one intends to rebut an argument, at least rebut the actual argument and not the version in your head. This is independent of the question whether a proof is convincing or not, or even whether it is true or not. It is a matter of getting one’s facts right.
Ye Old statistician demands and example of something uninformed or insubstantial. Please, I’m not playing Aristotelian metaphysic word games.
IOW, you don’t know of any such example. That’s too bad, because an illustrative example would have gone well toward your dismissal of matter and form. As far as I can tell, “everything is some thing.” That is, every thing is a particular form of thing. The union of matter and form is called in Greek a synolon and statements about it are “synolistic” or (more usually) “holisitc.”
Poisson once wrote that science is not a collection of facts anymore than a house is a pile of stones. It is the arrangement of those facts, just as it is the arrangement of the stones, that make a science or a house. IOW, matter must be given form. Von Hayek said much the same thing regarding economics in his Nobel laureate speech: “the character of the structures showing it depends not only on the properties of the individual elements of which they are composed, and the relative frequency with which they occur, but also on the manner in which the individual elements are connected with each other.” The elements are the matter; the manner-in-which they are connected is the form.
Werner Heisenberg, who it is rumored knew a thing or two about science, contended that mass-energy was as close as science might come to Aristotle’s prime matter and also that subatomic particles should be regarded a Aristotelian potencies rather than actual things. So it’s not just word games, and some seriously transgressive scientists have taken it seriously.
the usual fallacy of composition
But composition is a material fallacy, not a formal fallacy. (There’s that matter/form thingie again.) That is, whether it is a fallacy at all depends on the subject matter, not on the form of the argument.
Nor does a fallacy in an argument entail that the proposition be false. For example, empirical science is based on a formal fallacy, i.e., one that is always false. Theory T implies observation O. O has been observed. Therefore, T is supported. This is the fallacy of asserting the consequent. (Hume, Popper, and others called it the “problem of induction” and contended that no amount of data could ever prove a theory.) But that does not make the theory false. Basically, it is why a scientist will try to prove his theory by seeking out multiple arguments in favor of it. (Which is why multiple arguments for the same conclusion are not in any way unusual, let alone a defeater for the theory.)
Was the press release false?
Almost always. They are written by marketing people at the publishing house. Authors quite often do not even see them ahead of release.
Do you disagree that words have meaning?
Certainly not; but the question is pertinent as to which meaning they have. For example, in topology, a maze is “simple” and a figure-8 is “complex” because a “simple” curve is one that does not cross itself. This might confuse a colloquial modern, who would tend to regard a maze as complex and the figure-8 as simple. The word “proof” means to “test” or “probe,” as in “proof of whiskey,” the “proof of the pudding is in the eating,” “artillery proving grounds,” “the proofing of dough,” and so on. The modern colloquial use (outside artillery, baking, distilling and other venues) was once captured by “demonstration.” Theories that had been demonstrated would conclude by stating “Quod est demonstrandum” or QED. Aquinas’ five proofs did not conclude in that fashion (which is rare outside mathematics) since he regarded them as “determinations,” meaning that the conclusions were probable, not certain.
When discussing a proposition, it is well to ask what the terms meant to the people who argued the proposition, not what they mean to a modern graduate of the public schools. Sometimes there is a difference and sometimes that difference matters. This is even more so the case when the ideas were originally written in a different language, because meanings may shift between Greek and Latin, between Latin and French, between French and English, and so on. So it’s important to ask whether a term meant the same thing to Hume as it did to Kant, let alone to ourselves.
Gödel’s theorem
One consequence of which is that there will always be propositions within a system that cannot be proven within the system. And thus while there may actually be a Theory of Everything, we could never know for certain that we had it.
@Mark Dowd: “It is fundamentally impossible to prove the existence of a god or ANYTHING ELSE about the natural world with purely logical argument.”
“[A]bout the natural world”--“purely logical argument”--…aaand with those two category mistakes, what might have been a genuine reply to Feser (perhaps good, perhaps bad, but anyway a *reply*) fails in its very first sentence even to get off the ground.
When someone spouts this sort of rubbish:
grodrigues said:
“Oh and by the way, I have a phd in mathematical physics (on Homotopy Quantum Field Theories if you care to know), done research, attended lectures, etc. so I surely as hell do know the difference between the two.”
You know you have won the debate.
Mano 1. grodrigues 0
Owlmirror writes,
“Certainty is promised in Feser’s book’s press release.”
This is in response to grodriques point:
“If there is a difference on what “proof” is meant by Prof. Feser, why do you take him as implying that a proof entails the kind of subjective, Cartesian certainty you give it to?”
It is far from clear that all forms of certainty are the kind of grodiques. It is hard to see why you have made some sort of stinging retort, therefore.
Ye Olde Statistician @21, you are amusing.
The actual argument (translated): “In the world we can see that things are caused. But it is not possible for something to be the cause of itself, because this would entail that it exists prior to itself, which is a contradiction. If that by which it is caused is itself caused, then it too must have a cause. But this cannot be an infinitely long chain, so therefore there must be a cause which is not itself caused by anything further. This everyone understands to be God.”
Or: everything is caused, except God.
(He failed to realise that he could just leave out the extra step of God being uncaused and just have the universe being uncaused — but being a religious person he had that blind spot)
Fallacies are either formal or informal; formal fallacies are those where the inferential step from premises to conclusion is flawed, and informal fallacies are those where the conclusion is not inferable from the premise.
You are conceding it is a fallacy, just as much as an appeal to consequence is fallacious regarding truth-claims. That in the proper context they are appropriate is irrelevant here, since it is supposed to be establishing such a truth-claim (i.e. the veridical existence of a deity).
Such evasiveness!
(Q: “Is this dog friendly?”
A: “Most dogs are friendly”)
laubadetriste @22, ahem.
First, it can only be a singular category error since there is only a singular claim, and second, the very point of that claim is that you cannot infer things about the natural world without recourse to empiricism.
IOW, that reply by Mark is specifically noting the category error Feser makes, not committing one itself!
(heh)
What the heck, I cannot resist:
“I look forward to Dr. Singham’s generous concession that if someone actually does come up with a killer proof of Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, that will surely be big news (certainly bigger than the arrival of a new iPhone) and that he is sure it would be all over the internet, make the newspapers, and receive massive coverage on TV, the way that major scientific discoveries do. Then he will read it.”
Do you even know to what the term ‘theorem’ refers?
Because it was big news, at the time (1931).
(Will the Pythagorean Theorem be big news when someone comes up with a killer proof? 🙂 )
@grasshopper:
“To my best understanding, Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem goes beyond arithmetical statements.”
Your “best understanding” is simply wrong. The trick in “going beyond” arithmetic is to encode those statements via Goedel’s encoding trick (which is basically how the proof of the Second theorem goes: encode Con(PA) via arithmetization and then ensure that the theory T is strong enough to run the proof of the first theorem) which is the the great technical breakthrough of the theorems. You could read a book, say Torkel Franzen’s “Goedel’s Theorem — An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse” where this is *explicitly* stated and explained in layman terms. I could even give the right page, but it seems wikipedia skimming is the most you can hope to accomplish, so why bother?
So in short yes, Mano Singham’s argument fails, and fails because he does not even understand Goedel’s theorem.
“My dear grodrigues, your knowledge of Godel’s Theorems seems to be incomplete.”
I know you are trying to be funny, but you are just pathetic.
@Owlmirror:
“Do you disagree that words have meaning? If so, your arguments, and Feser’s, are useless; nothing you write means anything. If not, what do you pretend that “certainty” means in the press release?”
Ah yes, the great Stumbling Block that is the use of the word “proof”, a use Prof. Feser himself explains in the book. That Mano Singham has not read.
Mano Singham asked me and I quote:
“As I said before, if Feser has proved with certainty the existence of his god by purely rational arguments, then it is undoubtedly big news, easily the biggest news in the recorded history of the world. I just checked the internet and the news hasn’t broken as yet but no doubt it is only a matter of minutes before it does.”
He also wrote in the OP:
“David Hume back in 1779 dismissed the idea that one could prove the existence of a god using rational arguments alonr in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (published posthumously and quoted at D, 9.5/189; cp, EU,12.28–34/ 164–5, retrieved at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume-religion/#WasHumAth) saying:”
This is undoubtedly big news; it directly contradicts the entire classical tradition from Plato to Leibniz that did hold, and defended, that the existence of God could be rationally demonstrated (by the way, this is where the certainty comes from). Any Thomist (e.g. Prof. Feser) could point out the fatal mistake(s) in the quoted passage of Hume — go read his books if you care to know. But more importantly, I nowhere have heard of any consensus of philosophers on the matter, since 1779 or at any time whatsoever, or that Hume had the final word on it, or even that the press from then until now uniformly hailed Hume’s accomplishment, which seems to be Mano Singham’s criteria for interest. So here is the deal: I will explain what “certainty” means if you explain what Mano Singham means when he uses the very definitive expression “dismissed the idea”.
“I think Mano touched a nerve.”
Oh he most definitely did. Loudmouth ignorants pontificating on what they demonstrably know nothing about irritate me.
But this is rapidly degenerating into a pointless snark fest, so with apologies for any inconvenience I may have caused, and for the useless clutter I have added to the combox, it is time to bow out.
grodrigues:
<snicker>
“Bravely bold Sir Robin
Rode forth from Camelot.
He was not afraid to die,
O brave Sir Robin.
He was not at all afraid
To be killed in nasty ways.
Brave, brave, brave, brave Sir Robin. “
[juxtaposition]
1. So here is the deal: I will explain what “certainty” means if you explain what Mano Singham means when he uses the very definitive expression “dismissed the idea”.
2. it is time to bow out.
(!)
I dismiss thousands of creation stories and their metaphysics everyday as being outragiously superfluous in their ontologies, such as the Aristotelian one. It just happens, for reasons best known to yourself, you’ve latched onto this mess ontological superfluity, but can’t admit it’s no more rational than the others.
No, it isn’t, it’s probablistic reasoning. That’s why it’s not always false. Scientists don’t claim that evidence proves a theory deductively. Hume was arguing against those who held it to be deductive like Rationalists. There was a lot of it going on at the time. Bayes theorem was one attempt to put probabilistic reasoning a formal setting, for example.
Just to avoid the obvious retorts about the problem of induction:
That is, scientific reasoning is contingent, not deductive. This shows the claim empirical science is based on a fallacy is just a case of the fallacy fallacy. 😉
But I suspect, someone will take issue with this part
I don’t need to justify induction to head of the claim that’s it’s not a formal fallacy, because it’s not deductive reasoning, the rest is just red herrings.
Salsa: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/
@John Morales
You are quoting a summary of the second way on a Wikipedia page, not any English translation of the Summa Theologiae. See e.g. here for what Aquinas actually said. Note the absence of any premise that everything that exists has a cause!
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1002.htm#article3
@Ye Olde Statistician:
Did you mean “Almost certainly”, there? As John Morales notes, you seem to be talking about the general case when the question asked was rather specific.
I also note that the wording of the press release is taken from the description of the book on the Ignatius Press website. An author might not have control over a single press release, but surely he could tell the publisher: “No, you are overstating what I am doing; please qualify the wording of the book’s description as follows”.
Yes?
I note that the phrase about certainty uses the term “established” rather than “proved”.
This is absolutely typical of religious apologetics: a claim that a clinching argument for a point in question exists somewhere else, without even a summary of what that argument is.
@KG:
“This is absolutely typical of religious apologetics: a claim that a clinching argument for a point in question exists somewhere else, without even a summary of what that argument is.”
It is still far more intellectually honest than the atheist apologists that resolutely *refuse* to read books and instead refute them by dint of guessing — which by the way is the reason I did not even bothered to give the exact reference since Mano Singham already stated very explicitly he would not read Prof. Feser’s book, so what would be the point? But so as not to leave the impression that I am an utter ignorant like you, Hume’s objection is dealt in several places in Prof. Feser’s work (just to restrict myself to the Thomist in question), and in more than one place in the book Mano Singham will never read. For example, start in the first chapter, subsection “Hume and Kant on causation” in section “Some objections rebutted”. My kindle edition says “page 34”.
I have to say, what a nice little confederacy of intellectual frauds and poseurs we have gathered up here. Such a source of entertainment (albeit a rather un-Christian and somewhat perverse I have to admit) is rarely found that I am already sorry of having bowed out.
@Ye Olde Statistician:
That does look like you’re stating that the claim in the book description about certainty is false--false if the marketing people wrote it; false if Feser is actually the one making the claim.
Now, when you write about probable conclusions, you remind me that Richard Carrier has claimed that one can “prove” historical claims in a probabilistic manner, using Bayesian reasoning. Would you agree that this is correct?
Would you agree that he has proven — in the probabilistic sense — that Christ did not actually exist as a person?
@grodrigues:
I don’t think you can explain what “certainty” means in the book description, since you didn’t write it, and Ye Olde Statistician seems to think that the term used falsely.
You write the phrase “bowed out”, here, in a comment. I do not think that phrase means what you think it means.
You don’t seem to handle concepts well at all.
@Peter Simple:
In probability theory, “certain” means that the probability is 1. Ye Olde Statistician argues that Aquinas is arguing probabilistically, which is to say, that the probability is not 1, and that the claim to certainty is false.
What do you think that “certainty” means?
And to all of Feser’s fans who have come to visit, I once again ask:
Does Feser make any arguments in his new book that he has not made anywhere else?
Thanks for a clear answer.
@Owlmirror:
“I don’t think you can explain what “certainty” means in the book description, since you didn’t write it, and Ye Olde Statistician seems to think that the term used falsely.”
Since you do not answer my question, neither will I answer yours. I care even less about what you think of me then you care about what I think of you.
“Does Feser make any arguments in his new book that he has not made anywhere else?”
Aristotle’s argument is defended at length (e.g. in the guise of the First Way), as well as St. Thomas argument in De Ente et Essentia, in some earlier books, various blog posts and articles. He discussed Plotinus argument cursorily in his blog. The defense of St. Augustine and Leibniz’s arguments are, as far as I am aware, new in his work, and are given a Thomistic spin (as would be natural in a Thomist).
grodriguez:
It is still far more intellectually honest than the atheist apologists that resolutely *refuse* to read books and instead refute them by dint of guessing.
Why?
A simple feat of logic that proves god’s existence ought to be easy enough to write down here, such that any idiot like me would be immediately convinced.
That’s what a proof of god’s existence would do. Otherwise, it’s not a proof of god’s existence, it’s just an unconvincing argument.
I used to find it distasteful when Richard Carrier would similarly argue, “Go buy and read my book! Then you will understand!” Because all the “go read a book” tactic says is “My views are obscure!”
For example: I trust I managed to convey my point above, without having to refer you to a secondary source.
Owlmirror,
“Now, when you write about probable conclusions, you remind me that Richard Carrier has claimed that one can “prove” historical claims in a probabilistic manner, using Bayesian reasoning. Would you agree that this is correct?
Would you agree that he has proven — in the probabilistic sense — that Christ did not actually exist as a person?
I hate to get us off topic, but Richard Carrier is an intellectual charlatan. For a much better paper using Bayesian reasoning (if you are into that sort of thing) here is one ‘proving’ Christ died and was resurrected — just like we read in the Bible:
http://www.lydiamcgrew.com/Resurrectionarticlesinglefile.pdf
@Marcus Ranum:
“Why?”
Because if someone says that the answer can be found somewhere, he ought to be able to answer the simple question “Can you be more precise and give a concrete reference?”. If he cannot, then you can rightly charge him with dishonesty. Quite obviously, there is nothing to say to someone that even refuses to listen to the opponent’s case, except maybe to fire insulting epithets. Jesus Christ spared no words against the pharisees, and while he warned us not to lay our pearls before pigs, he told us nothing against *throwing* them. So may He give me a steady hand and I will get in a good shot or two right in between the eyes.
“A simple feat of logic that proves god’s existence ought to be easy enough to write down here, such that any idiot like me would be immediately convinced.”
Why?
I have very little patience for people that refuse to capitalize “God” according to the proper rules of grammar (as “God” is functioning like a proper name), perhaps out of some puerile notion of rebellion, so I will stop my answer here.
Jeffrey S. @44:
Agreed. And McGrew is either a charlatan or a fool. From the essay;
Lesson for the day: You can ‘prove’ anything with enough typing, a ‘Bayesian framework’, and a gullible audience (of whatever stripe).
grodrigues@#45:
“A simple feat of logic that proves god’s existence ought to be easy enough to write down here, such that any idiot like me would be immediately convinced.”
Why?
Did you catch the “simple” in my sentence? I’m presupposing simplicity as part of the proof. That seems to be a property of the “proofs” that are offered -- you can boil them down pretty easily into a few propositions. In fact, you partly did that already @#42: “Aristotle’s argument is defended at length (e.g. in the guise of the First Way)” -- OK, so granting that many of us are familiar with Aristotle, you can simply describe the significant arguments that support it. It’s sort of problematic when someone tries to argue that, oh, no, these arguments are so complicated that you need to wade through a book to understand them; well, then, they’re probably pretty bad arguments. My experience with poor philosophy is that sometimes arguments are obscured through incompetence, but more often there’s an attempt to insert a “divide-by-zero therefore infinity” somewhere in a mountain of bafflegab. You clearly understood the point I made well enough, and I was fairly brief. One would hope a proof of god’s existence would be similarly brief if only out of respect for the diety, who cannot be simultaneously perfect and utterly tedious.
I have very little patience for people that refuse to capitalize “God” according to the proper rules of grammar (as “God” is functioning like a proper name), perhaps out of some puerile notion of rebellion, so I will stop my answer here.
Actually, I was pecking out my reply on my iPhone and sometimes capitalization annoys me. But generally I’m comfortable pissing all over the proper rules of grammar. If you’re going to tell me that that’s your mute-button, you’re not even a mediocre strategist: you just handed me a convenient way to get you to shut up.
@grodrigues:
I asked no question in what you responded to. I note that you are proving — in the probabilistic sense — that you are less than entirely certain that you can give a clear and cogent explanation of Feser’s — or Ignatius Press’ — “certainty”.
Hm. Well, it certainly looks like he’s just rehashing older arguments here.
“according to the proper rules of grammar”
And of course godrigues is the ultimate arbiter who decides what the proper rules of grammar are -- especially regarding proper.
One question: does Feser in his book maintain that “an arm that moves a branch of a tree” is metaphysics and not physics, like he did on his blog several years ago?
Plus one remark: it’s funny how Feser’s band complains about MS not taking him seriously -- because Feser himself has such a habit as well.
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.nl/2012/03/unliterate-hallq.html
Has Eddie already learned to behave better? If no the criticism MS received here might be justified or not, it remains hypocritical.
@Jeffrey S:
Is there anything in particular that leads you to this conclusion? I mean, there are certainly things he’s written that are of little or no worth, but I can’t see dismissing everything he’s written.
What leads you to think that the paper is better?
@grodrigues:
You haven’t made a case.
Hm. Would you pay any attention at all to a “case” made for Scientology, Mormonism, Islam, or Hinduism? I bet not.
Blustering wildly makes you look weak.
I’ve seen a Christian use “god”, which surprised me a little bit. But ultimately, I ignored it and focused on what he was writing. He did sometimes make spelling and other typing errors, which I usually also ignored unless they made his statements too confused to understand, in which case I asked for clarification, rather than accusing him of anything.
But I guess some people who call themselves Christians have no charity.
Is God a person?
@mnb0:
I once saw someone walking with a t-shirt that said, in large letters,
“I CAN DISH IT OUT, BUT I CAN’T TAKE IT.”
I doubt Feser is able to be intellectually honest about his hypocrisy, but I could be proven wrong.
@Marcus Ranum:
“It’s sort of problematic when someone tries to argue that, oh, no, these arguments are so complicated that you need to wade through a book to understand them; well, then, they’re probably pretty bad arguments.”
Why is it problematic? You just assume it with no argument. Why should it be “immediately convincing”? St. Thomas, in the course of explaining why he rejects the ontological argument, explains why the atheist is in his epistemic rights to claim there is no God. That is why he bothers himself with offering a-posteriori arguments in the first place.
The proof of Carleson’s theorem in Fremlin’s 5-volume opus on Measure Theory runs up to over 40 pages. The original proof of Feit-Thompson’s theorem is over 200 pages. The examples can multiplied. So by your logic, the proofs of Carleson’s theorem or Feit-Thompson are all “problematic” (the latter has been computer verified relatively recently; as, and this is a pure harmless innocent curiosity, so has been the modal ontological argument) and they are “probably pretty bad arguments”. You should go to every Math department in the world and tell them the bad news.
Furthermore, as a self-designated idiot (and who am I to disagree?), why do you think you would be capable of understanding even a simple proof, were it to exist? What is the criteria of “simplicity” at work here? That even an illiterate man should understand it? A three-year old? A delusional madmen like someone here termed all Christians?
“If you’re going to tell me that that’s your mute-button, you’re not even a mediocre strategist: you just handed me a convenient way to get you to shut up.”
We’re playing different games. And you hardly need such a contrived scheme to shut me up anyway, all it was needed was a request, albeit an implicit one.
@Owlmirror:
“I asked no question in what you responded to.”
You weren’t? So you did not ask me in September 23, 2017 at 8:08 pm in a comment explicitly addressed at me, and I quote,
“If not, what do you pretend that “certainty” means in the press release?”
grodrigues@#53:
Why is it problematic? You just assume it with no argument.
It’s problematic, because nobody’s going to read it if it’s a bunch of tedious bafflegab.
It’s not my argument, I’m not trying to promote it or repair it. When I say “it should be possible to explain it simply” I am not saying “should” in some great metaphysical sense, I mean “should” as in “it’s not going to work, otherwise” because everyone who has a low boredom threshold is going to ignore it.
Why should it be “immediately convincing”?
Because arguments are intended to convince people. The definition of an effective argument is that it convinces people. That’s why they tend to be concise, well-crafted, free of bafflegab: because tedious, circuitous, book-length arguments are boring and they aren’t going to convince anyone if the interlocutor’s response is to put their head in their keyboard for a well-earned nap halfway through (that, by the way, is why I am not either convinced or unconvinced by Richard Carrier: he bored me so badly I never finished his book so I didn’t conclude he was right or wrong, but concluded he was obscure and a bad writer)
St. Thomas, in the course of explaining why he rejects the ontological argument, explains why the atheist is in his epistemic rights to claim there is no God. That is why he bothers himself with offering a-posteriori arguments in the first place.
Oh, look! You are capable of providing a brief, fairly concise, summary of an other person’s arguments! Good for you. Now, why not give me a brief, concise, summary of how wossname extends whatever to prove god, without my having to read some tedious book-length wad of apologetics?
The proof of Carleson’s theorem in Fremlin’s 5-volume opus on Measure Theory runs up to over 40 pages. The original proof of Feit-Thompson’s theorem is over 200 pages.
That sounds to me like the very definition of an “unconvincing argument.” I haven’t read it, or even heard of it, because as far as I am concerned something that takes 40 pages to convince me is going to wind up with me having a keyboard-nap and never finishing it. I’m not saying it’s a bad argument, I’m saying it’s an ineffective argument. Now, it may be that all that text is necessary to an expert at a certain level. I’m fine with that.
If it takes hundreds of pages to prove god’s existence that’s god’s problem, not mine.
Furthermore, as a self-designated idiot (and who am I to disagree?), why do you think you would be capable of understanding even a simple proof, were it to exist?
Key word: “simple”
I am capable of understanding simple proofs. Please read my comments more accurately, you keep tearing off on these tangents where you’re arguing against things I didn’t say.
What is the criteria of “simplicity” at work here?
If it’s trying to convince me, it needs to be comprehensible to me. If it’s trying to convince Mano, it needs to be comprehensible to him. If it’s trying to convince John Morales, likewise. I’m not interested in defining what a “simple” argument is because it’s not my problem; I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything.
There’s this idea that the burden of proof is on the one proposing the argument. Let me offer an addition to that: if the “proof” is incomprehensible or tediously long so that it has the effect of chloroform on the reader, it’s not an effective proof, because then the argument devolves to “did you manage to choke that all down?”
I would imagine that a convincing argument for the existence of god must be, you know, by definition, “convincing” -- i.e.: capable of convincing people. Being able to understand it is a necessary precondition for its being convincing. If you believe it’s convincing (as you seem to) if you want to convince me, it’s not an effective strategy to say “read this book” because that’s not going to work on me therefore it’s unconvincing. Simple. It doesn’t mean that the book doesn’t contain an absolutely amazingly clear argument that would convince me if I read it, it’s that you’re not convincing me that it’s an amazing argument enough to get off my butt and go read some book.
I am curious, however, about one thing: does the argument include ‘proof’ that it’s the christian god, not enkidu or loki or some other god? I also get exceedingly bored by apologetics that try to argue “there is a god therefore: it’s christian god” because that doesn’t necessarily follow and I hate being disappointed like that.
We’re playing different games. And you hardly need such a contrived scheme to shut me up anyway, all it was needed was a request, albeit an implicit one.
Would someone please help our little wounded hothouse flower to the fainting-couch? I would, except I strained my giveafuck arguing with a global warming denialist on facebook and I’m just not up for the task.
@grodrigues:
See, there’s a grammatical error that I could get pedantic about, but I won’t.
And, no, in what you responded to, in comment #42 of September 24, 2017 at 11:04 am, copying my words from comment #39 of September 24, 2017 at 10:23 am, I did not ask a question.
In comment #29 of September 24, 2017 at 4:41 am, you did not answer the simple question, and in fact said you were not going to unless I (or someone else?) spoke for Prof Singham, and explained his words. So I gave up on expecting a response to that question, and given your comment #29, and Ye Olde Statistician’s, and some of your other comments, decided that you were unable to actually give a clear and cogent answer. And I wrote that statement out, and that is what you responded to.
Just a note to Brian English: You’re a presumption jerk, since I have read atheists like Sobel and, e.g., Mackie. Circularity occurs when the conclusion is in the premise. And the fallacy of composition is not obviously committed because Ed Feser’s arguments don’t go from making a basic observation locally to then generalizing it to the entire universe. The arguments are constructed radically different; hence, you’re ironically a fool talking about something you know nothing about and books you haven’t the slightest clue about. And I’m talking about actual *construction of* the arguments, not their final validity or truth value. (I’m not arguing the latter here.) It’s about—for example—looking at something locally, explaining only that, then arguing that it needs a cause of some specified kind, and then finally infers certain properties of that cause, etc.
Mano Singham: Feser is not a “rationalist” in the strict epistemological sense. Really, you’re just reading into words what you want to find rather than what they actually are intended to mean by Feser himself. It’s just absurd how intelligent people will become so intellectually dishonest when it comes to their ideological creed. And Feser is not trying to provide a theory of everything or a system of premises that are complete and consistent. It’s about independently judging the individual premises. To be sure, that can be an issue of quality and persuasiveness; fine, judge them that way.
@George:
Wait a minute.
Singham repeatedly cites Feser’s press release (which repeats the book’s description on the publisher’s site) about “purely rational arguments”, and you think Singham is calling Feser a rationalist?
So what do you think Feser — or the Ignatius Press marketing department, I guess — means by “purely rational arguments”?
@Marcus Ranum:
“It’s problematic, because nobody’s going to read it if it’s a bunch of tedious bafflegab.”
This is quite obviously false, since many people have already read Prof. Feser’s book, not to mention the countless number of people that have gone through the Summa, etc. and etc.
“If it’s trying to convince me, it needs to be comprehensible to me. If it’s trying to convince Mano, it needs to be comprehensible to him. If it’s trying to convince John Morales, likewise. I’m not interested in defining what a “simple” argument is because it’s not my problem;”
So by “simple” what you really mean is what “Marcus Ranum can understand and find convincing”. Then how the hell should I answer your question, as I am not inside your head? The best I can offer is a wild guess. Given that you are an utter moron with an IQ that could not outwit a dead gerbil, there is no such argument simple enough for you to understand. Sorry.
“I am curious, however, about one thing: does the argument include ‘proof’ that it’s the christian god, not enkidu or loki or some other god?”
Yes, the arguments make it clear that enkidu or loki cannot be the One True God. On the other hand if you are asking for specifically Christian doctrines (resurrection of Jesus Christ, Trinity, etc.), that is, the doctrines where Christianity differs from other monotheistic religions, no it has no such arguments. And if it had, you quite clearly do not have the attention span needed to grasp them anyway — they do run to more than a couple of paragraphs, you know.
But at least your effectiveness at shutting this “wounded hothouse flower” is indeed remarkable, as you are a complete moron, and worse, a bore and a waste of time.
Owlmirror: Last time I checked, in a colloquial sense, “rational” usually means something like reasonable, sensible, using logic, and not being based not on feelings or subjective whims. I know it’s shocking, but people and different schools of thought can use the same word a bit differently in a technical sense. Will you stop for a moment to be fair to a point of view you disagree with and maybe try to understand where it is coming from? My goodness, e.g., nobody thinks Thomistic philosophy is strictly in the rationalist or empiricist camp as they are generally understood and defined. There’s a sense in which it is in both. But even saying that may be misleading.
@George:
But it’s not the word “rational” alone being discussed, but the phrase “purely rational argument”.
I am trying to figure out the sense. There is a distinct lack of clarity, here.
Does “purely rational argument” mean “rationalism”, in the philosophical, epistemological sense? If it does, then Feser (or Ignatius Press) is calling Feser a rationalist, not Singham. If it does not, you have no basis to assert that Singham was calling Feser a rationalist in the strict epistemological sense, since all Singham did was cite the phrase “purely rational argument” from the press release.
I’m trying to figure out what your point of view even is.
@Marcus Ranum:
But Enkidu was never a God, not even in the story of Gilgamesh — he was a feral human who was friends with animals; an early Mowgli or Tarzan (say, I wonder if Kipling or Burroughs got their ideas from the Epic?). Maybe you mean Enki, or Enlil.
Owlmirror@#62:
Yeah, I meant enki. Darn it, I reached into a grabbag of mythological beings and pulled out the wrong one!
I should have said covefe.
Once again, Feser fans:
Is God a person?
Is God enough like a person that the purported Biblical manifestations are intended as real; that Adam and Eve and Cain actually heard a voice that interrogated them and cursed them; that Abraham heard a voice explicitly telling him to tie his son to a rock, cut his throat, and set his body on fire? And so on and so forth.
Or is that all just supposed to be allegory and metaphor? Abraham never existed, or never actually heard a voice; he just felt a strong feeling that he was supposed to tie his son to a rock, cut his throat, and set his body on fire. Like that?
@grodrigues:
There’s that “Christian” charity again.
The projection is blinding.
grodrigues@#59:
So by “simple” what you really mean is what “Marcus Ranum can understand and find convincing”
Yes, how many different ways do I have to say that?
Then go a step further: make it simple and convincing to me, and anyone else of moderate intellect and education, then you don’t need to worry about how any particular one of us reacts to it, as you’ve set the baseline somewhere practical.
Then how the hell should I answer your question, as I am not inside your head? The best I can offer is a wild guess.
Now you finally come around to the point where we started; that’s good. You have to make a guess about what anyone reading a logical argument is going to think; that’s why clarity and simplicity and conciseness are important. If you’re saying that your argument is so special it needs 200 pages and a doctorate in Advanced Bafflegab, or an entire book then I’m offering the perspective that perhaps a simple, clear, comprehensible argument would be better. And, if you have such an argument, you ought to be able to offer it quickly and simply, clearly and concisely -- no book needed.
The whole point of arguing for anything is that you must get inside the head of the person you are trying to convince, so that you can refine a mental model, “will this convince him? or maybe, what about this? no, wait, maybe that…” That’s the hard work of reasoning; anyone who wants to pretend to offer a convincing argument has to do exactly that. I suppose the alternative is to just use your own private vocabulary and then complain about “context” and being misunderstood, like Sam Harris does.
Given that you are an utter moron with an IQ that could not outwit a dead gerbil, there is no such argument simple enough for you to understand. Sorry.
Can you put back on the guy who called me “puerile” earlier? We both want to laugh at you.
Yes, the arguments make it clear that enkidu or loki cannot be the One True God. On the other hand if you are asking for specifically Christian doctrines (resurrection of Jesus Christ, Trinity, etc.), that is, the doctrines where Christianity differs from other monotheistic religions, no it has no such arguments. And if it had, you quite clearly do not have the attention span needed to grasp them anyway — they do run to more than a couple of paragraphs, you know.
Wow, that does sound impressive. But, yeah, I’ve got to say if it’s more than a few paragraphs I’m not likely to waste my time. Why should I? Because if those arguments are so amazing and tight and solid, I’m sure they’ll convince so many other atheists, who will all become good christians, and one of them will be able to boil it down into a few simple comprehensible paragraphs and then I’ll be convinced and everyone will be happy.
It’s probably escaped your notice (which is why I hopped in to make the little point that I hopped in to make) there are some pretty smart people on this thread. You probably don’t realize that because they’re asking you all kinds of dumb-sounding questions, but those dumb-sounding questions are actually the sounds that smart people make when they’re trying to understand things. Those dumb-sounding questions are your opportunity to shine, intellectually. That they continue to ask you those questions may indicate that you’re not being concise, comprehensible, or convincing -- or maybe you’re not being all three of those things. See how that works?
But at least your effectiveness at shutting this “wounded hothouse flower” is indeed remarkable, as you are a complete moron, and worse, a bore and a waste of time.
Everyone already knows I’m a moron, a bore, and a waste of time. You should have seen that right away and just posted a beautifully clear, exciting, succinct proof of the existence of the christian god rather than wasting any time on me, master strategist that you are.
1) The world has certain aspects which I consider to be fundamental.
2) I cannot imagine that those aspects of the world might not be fundamental, or that my understanding of those aspects is limited enough that it might be false.
3) Something needs to exist for those aspects of the world to exist.
4) That something is a person which everyone calls “God”. Because that’s wonderfully convenient for everyone who already believes that this person exists.
/Thomism
@Owlmirror:
“There’s that “Christian” charity again.”
I find it really endearing atheists invoking virtues they revile to make a cheap rhetorical point. If there is one thing that one can very rarely accuse them of is of hypocrisy. But if you know something of the history of Christian apologetics, from Jesus onwards, my words are fairly tame (as I only spoke the truth as to the intellectual character) compared to some of the more belligerant and acrimonious apologists.
After your transparently dishonest rendering of our “dialogue”, here’s a little bit of that “Christian” charity just for you. The answer to your question to all “Feser fans” is: go read a book, you lazy asshole.
@John Morales #26 & #27: I see I must explain myself to you more fully.
“‘It is fundamentally impossible to prove the existence of a god or ANYTHING ELSE about the natural world with purely logical argument.’ [quoted from Mark Dowd #9]
…
‘First, it can only be a singular category error since there is only a singular claim, and second, the very point of that claim is that you cannot infer things about the natural world without recourse to empiricism.”
The two category mistakes I pointed out that Mark Dowd made are:
1) Thinking that “the existence of a god” is “about the natural world”; and
2) Thinking that Dr. Feser used “purely logical argument”.
(Asserting that what Mark Dowd did was to claim that one “cannot infer things about the natural world without recourse to empiricism” is merely to repeat his category mistakes, while begging the question against Dr. Feser [since he wrote several whole books, many articles, and more than a decade worth of blog posts to the contrary, the arguments of which which neither Mark Dowd nor you have yet disputed], and also to confuse the issue by conflating the contrary of “purely logical argument” with “empiricism”.)
“IOW, that reply by Mark is specifically noting the category error Feser makes, not committing one itself!”
Feser shows by argument in his book (and in several books before that, and in some articles, and in many blog posts) why that is not so. Furthermore, his is hardly a new point, having been made centuries ago, and ad nauseum since. Therefore, merely to assert without argument that he is wrong is, again, merely to beg the question against him.
“Do you even know to what the term ‘theorem’ refers?”
Yes.
“‘Why, it’s almost as if Dr. Singham were utterly unfamiliar with much of the scholarship of the last 2500 years, and so must rely unironically upon hearing things “all over the internet, [in] the newspapers, and [in] massive coverage on TV” in order to establish the existence of a given proof. (“[A]ll over the internet, [in] the newspapers, and [in] massive coverage on TV” are of course all three known for their scholarship, their rigor, and their diligent and forthright examination of questions of perennial interest–not to mention bikini pics.) / I look forward to Dr. Singham’s generous concession that if someone actually does come up with a killer proof of Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, that will surely be big news (certainly bigger than the arrival of a new iPhone) and that he is sure it would be all over the internet, make the newspapers, and receive massive coverage on TV, the way that major scientific discoveries do. Then he will read it. / Of course, one could not fairly expect him to read a book about something that happened so long ago as the past.’ [quoted from laubadetriste #18]
Because it was big news, at the time (1931). / (Will the Pythagorean Theorem be big news when someone comes up with a killer proof? 🙂 )”
A close reader of English might have noticed several clues that what I wrote was ironical. Such clues include:
1) That items of scholarship, rigor, and diligent and forthright examination of questions of perennial interest do not, in fact, generally include bikini pics;
2) That the internet, newspapers, and massive coverage on tv are, in fact, not generally known for scholarship, rigor, and diligent and forthright examination of questions of perennial interest;
3) That my paragraph about Kurt Gödel’s proofs closely followed the form of Dr. Singham’s paragraph about proofs of the existence of God, even down to the choice of words, implying a parallel between the two;
4) That all books about something that happened are about the past;
5) That it is in fact fair to expect Dr. Singham to read books about the past, when he comments about the past;
6) That Kurt Gödel’s “killer proof” was not a “major scientific discovery” in the sense required by Dr. Singham to be true of putative future proofs of the existence of God;
7) That *proofs* are not generally called “killer”; and so on.
You rightly note that both the incompleteness theorems and the Pythagorean theorem were written in the past. I invite you to ask yourself:
1) Which time (the past, or not-the-past) were the proofs in question of the existence of God written in?; and
2) In what sense do the incompleteness theorems and the Pythagorean Theorem fit the requirements you think needful for proofs of the existence of God (of being “about the world”, say, or following from “empiricism”)?
If you do, you will realize that by your sarcasm in comment #27, you repeated the same point that I made in #18, only clumsily and with an emoticon. I am glad you think you understand that point. Now you ought to be able to see why it is silly of Dr. Singham to expect to hear about proofs of God *in the future*, without reading *books*, “[A]ll over the internet, [in] the newspapers, and [in] massive coverage on TV”, “the way that major scientific discoveries do”.
The level of sloppy thinking and total disregard for the principle of charity demonstrated here by so-called “rational” thinkers is beyond belief.
Mano Singam writes:
“It is true that I have not read the book and, to be quite frank, I have no plans to do so. If Feser and his supporters feel that that disqualifies me from commenting on the claims contained in his press release, so be it.”
Why should any person of any philosophical persuasion continue reading after this point?
Mr. Singham,
I’d like to provide a review of your book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom (2009).
But I don’t really care to read it.
Instead I’m going to simply opine on the wording of the title and any marketing material.
Mr Singam uses the verb “war” in his title, but theories cannot actually be at “war” since war is confined to organized hostility between social groupings of various scales and not abstract theoretical frameworks.
Q.E.D.
Don’t read his book. But make sure to have very strong opinions about it.
Mr. Singam,
Your piece here is bursting at the seems with epistemic incoherence and shallow, almost gleefully crude thinking about issues dealing with rationality, evidence and evidential standards, argumentation, metaphysical presuppositions, the nature and demonstration of a priori necessary truths.
Your naive empiricist logical positivism is showing, sir, which, by the way, is itself a metaphysical framework that must be reasoned to and justified independently of any empirical science.
This is just more confirmation for me that one can have considerable mathematical aptitude and talent for empirical science, yet operate at a sophomoric level when it comes to general critical thinking and meta-cognitive reflection on philosophical presuppositions.
@Owlmirror #64: “Once again, Feser fans: / Is God a person?”
No, He is not.
I suspect this won’t bother you, but I feel it incumbent upon me to explain that your question shows a colossal ignorance of what people have been saying for about a thousand years (literally), and that is why you haven’t had serious takers to answer it. It is as if somebody were to ask you (say):
“Once again, Darwin fans:
Are humans descended from chimpanzees?”
Now, if you were asked such a question, you would realize that, to have a genuine discussion with the questioner, you would really have to go back to square one. That would be a lot of work, and like everyone else you have things to do, so unless you have some investment in the questioner, you would probably wash your hands of him, ignore the question, and devote your time to more rewarding forms of charity, elsewhere.
Oh Swoon, be still my beating heart! Not only that I poor social skills and questionable bathing habits*!
Speaking of presumptive. My little piece of rhetoric was returning serve to the Feser Fanbois (TM) who keep screaming ‘If you haven’t read the book, you can’t say anything’. Anyone can play that rhetorical game. I haven’t read any books on Ganesha, and have no intention of doing so, myths don’t interest me. So why would Feser’s book be different, it doesn’t matter if he can make a sound argument in that system of metaphysics, like the Hindu metaphysic I reject it, so it’s not going to sway me. Why aren’t you swayed by other myths and metaphysics? You can’t argue that it’s not how the world is, as that argument equally applies to Aristotelian metaphysics. After all, metaphysics isn’t something physical that can be measured.
Anyway, I knew there’d be some hero who’d read the book, and think that is of import, I almost didn’t post that bit, but thought fuck it, I’m not editing for you guys. Well done.
*Rumors that my mother was a hamster, and father smelt of Elderberries are just that.
laudetriste
Look out, he’s going rogue!
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06612a.htm
So the complaint is that Mano did not consider there to be a need to read Feser’s work before arriving at a conclusion on it, as the small amount he had already read was enough. grodrigues’ response is to declare that he does not need to read Mano’s post fully before arriving at a conclusion on it, as the small amount he had already read was enough.
Priceless.
@Holms:
“Priceless.”
Sigh.
To quote myself from September 23, 2017 at 6:15 pm:
“But to repeat myself (and rereading myself, I was not clear enough), and to follow your own stellar example of intellectual probity, I already know for a fact the complete moronic character of your “atheist apologetics”, so there is no need to waste your words with me because I will not read them. What would be the use anyway? When the combox features an ignorant yahoo that takes the majority of mankind now living and that ever lived as suffering from a “delusional illness”, what dialogue could there be? Delusional madmen do not need arguments, they need therapy.”
Is the argument not clear or do I have to explain it to you in gruesome detail as if you were moron?
@Owlmirror:
I did not expect so soon to have an example on this very blog of what people generally are trying to avoid, but you can see from Brian English #75 what a time-suck generally that question becomes.
@Brian English #75: “Look out, he’s going rogue! / ‘Divine personality / When we say that God is a personal being we mean that He is intelligent and free and distinct from the created universe. Personality as such expresses perfection, and if human personality as such connotes imperfection, it must be remembered that, as in the case of similar predicates, this connotation is excluded when we attribute personality to God.'”
I am not a Catholic. But even if I were, that sort of proof-texting misses the point just as much now as when Jean Meslier, Thomas Paine, Spinoza, Hobbes, Mark Twain, Voltaire, Pascal, Edward Gibbon, Robert Ingersoll, and others objected to it, centuries ago.
Also, I suggest you re-read your own citation, which says what it means after the part that says, “we mean”. This is elaborated upon elsewhere in the Catholic Encyclopedia, and also at length by Dr. Feser, although not so much in his recent book, which makes *philosophical* arguments (as opposed to other kinds).
@laubadetriste:
And yet you use a personal pronoun . . .
As Brian English notes, your response contradicts Catholic doctrine. Perhaps you are not a Catholic?
If there is a problem with definitions, it helps to explain which definition you mean.
And it isn’t that hard to simply write: “No, humans and chimpanzees are descended from a common ancestor”. Greater clarification can be made by making an analogy to a family tree: “Are you descended from your cousins?” And so on.
What simple response can you make to my question? Well, besides sneering as you have.
I note you ignored the additional clarification I asked for regarding the biblical appearances of God. Too hard, maybe?
@laubadetriste:
Sorry, crossed posts there. OK, so you are not a Catholic. And you also reject the divine Trinity of persons of God?
And where do you stand with regards to the appearances of God in the bible?
@grodrigues:
But I don’t revile charity. I also don’t revile common civility, which you seem to — were you raised in a barn by wolves?
I was accurate, precise, and honest. Don’t blame me for your failings.
I agree that from reading the books of the bible, God is a lazy asshole.
@Zob:
And yet, you felt compelled to keep reading, and to post thrice about how upset you were by what you read. Are you then not a person of philosophical persuasion?
And Jesus said, you sahll know them by their
lovesnide dickishness.Edward Feser claims that his arguments demonstrate that God exists with certainty.
One can interpret this in two ways. The first interpretation isn’t saying anything substantial, and the second interpretation is extremely implausible.
The first interpretation says something like, “My arguments are deductive arguments for God’s existence. If the premises are true, then the conclusion necessarily follows.” Okay, that’s just the nature of a deductive argument (i.e. deductive validity).
The second interpretation says something like, “My arguments are deductive argument for God, and the premises are known to be true with certainty.”. But, I don’t see how Feser can claim that all of the premises in his arguments are known with certainty. He hasn’t shown this to be the case. Even if all the premises are supposedly “self-evident”, for example, that doesn’t mean one is certain and has a confidence level of 100%. Furthermore, one can think, for instance, that something is a logical contradiction, but that doesn’t mean they are certain that something is a contradiction. This is important because, while it is true that if something is a contradiction then it is necessarily false, that DOES NOT mean that the subject is 100% certain that the something in question is indeed a contradiction. Hence, while a deductive argument for God would guarantee that God exists, that doesn’t mean that one’s confidence in the conclusion has to be certain. It would only be certain if the premises are known with certainty.
I’m not saying that a successful deductive argument has to have premises that are known with certainty. But, I am claiming that Feser’s arguments must have this feature if he is going to meaningfully claim that his arguments show that God exists with certainty. Perhaps, he could retreat to saying that his deductive arguments only show that the conclusion necessarily follows from the premises. But that is trivial, and nobody disagrees with that feature (i.e. deductive validity) of a deductive argument.
The upshot is that there is a distinction between objective and subjective probability. One can say that God necessarily exists (If God exists, then God necessarily exists), which means that it is 100% guaranteed that God exists; however, this is objective probability. There is also the subjective/epistemic probability of one’s own confidence in the proposition. Possibly, Feser’s confidence level, with respect to all of his premises in his arguments, yields certainty. Even then, most people don’t have that same certainty.
@laubadetriste:
(at the risk of another crosspost)
Brian English and I are not the same person.
Wait, do you agree with what the encyclopedia says, or not?
When we say that God is a personal being we mean that He is intelligent and free and distinct from the created universe. Personality as such expresses perfection, and if human personality as such connotes imperfection, it must be remembered that, as in the case of similar predicates, this connotation is excluded when we attribute personality to God.
As far as I know, “intelligence” is a characteristic associated with persons. Would you argue that this is not the case? Or would you argue that God is not intelligent?
@Owlmirror ,
Yes, I felt compelled to keep reading, the way one is compelled to rubber neck when seeing a dumpster fire or car crash.
Your last question is nonsensical and illiterate.
@Zob:
I guess you are indeed not a person of philosophical persuasion -- by your own argument.
Don’t blame me if you can’t parse English or reason about propositions that you yourself make.
Owlmirror,
What’s it like living under a bridge? Instead of being a third rate troll, finish eating your red herrings, and go read a book. I recommend Feser’s.
laubadetriste says
why the fuck are you NOT a Catholic?
It’s a serious question.
When you can explain why you are NOT a Catholic, any one of the rest of us can explain why we are not theists of any sect.
When you can explain why you don’t find the behaviors of the holy mother church convincing enough for you to swallow what is odious and stupid about their doctrine, we can explain why we don’t find the behaviors of Feser and followers convincing enough to swallow what is odious and stupid about his writing.
I’ll bet on the great likelihood of being able to use your answer word-for-word, and changing only the signifying names and pronouns.
@Zob:
Not so bad. There are plenty of tadpoles, darters, koi, and the occasional turtle or duck.
What’s it like playing the goat?
We cannot all aspire to Ed Feser’s heights.
Are you seriously trying to imply that the question of whether or not God is a person with intelligence is irrelevant?
@Owlmirror #79: “And yet you use a personal pronoun . . .”
You got me. Now I must give up my philosophical convictions.
(For the sake of John Morales, let me note that that last sentence was facetious. Though I suppose it *would* be interesting to see you, Owlmirror, construct an argument along such lines as that, from someone’s use of a personal pronoun to refer to God, it follows that he must think God is a person.
Don’t take too much time on such a thing, if any at all. I suspect you realize what a sideshow that would be.)
“And it isn’t that hard to simply write: ‘No, humans and chimpanzees are descended from a common ancestor”. Greater clarification can be made by making an analogy to a family tree: ‘Are you descended from your cousins?’ And so on.”
Simply to write such a thing, you are correct, isn’t that hard. For writing such a thing to be sufficient as an explanation to someone who would ask such a question is, however, rare. (If you have given such an answer frequently and found it sufficient for the purpose, then either you have been fortunate in your allotment of debating opponents, or else you just haven’t debated so many creationists as I have. For that answer to so quickly clear up confusion [in just one or two sentences, natch!] requires a modest familiarity with Darwinian thought which, among those who would ask such a question, is generally not present.
And likewise with writing two sentences about the sui generis, to someone in a like position regarding God.)
“I note you ignored the additional clarification I asked for regarding the biblical appearances of God. Too hard, maybe?”
Not really, no. But certainly beside the point (which, let me note as a reminder, was regarding Dr. Singham’s response to Dr. Feser). It is true that we have already gone somewhat far afield from that. But that is no more a reason to go farther, than from the fact that a diabetic has eaten an Oreo, it follows that he ought to eat a whole bag.
“And you also reject the divine Trinity of persons of God? / And where do you stand with regards to the appearances of God in the bible?”
I quoted those sentences so that you’d know I read them. And now, for the reasons given in my previous paragraph, I will overlook them as further red herrings.
“Brian English and I are not the same person.”
Understood. My apologies if it was not so clear as it should be that that paragraph was the second paragraph of my response to him, and not to you.
“Wait, do you agree with what the encyclopedia says, or not?”
Who cares whether I agree with it? That neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg, as Jefferson said in a different but related context. What matters are:
1) Such items as what the Catholic Encyclopedia says and means, and how that may fit into what a Catholic must believe, and how that in turn may relate to what can be proved with philosophical argument (because these would form part of a proper response to Brian English’s purported gotcha citation); and
2) What is true.
“As far as I know, ‘intelligence’ is a characteristic associated with persons. Would you argue that this is not the case? Or would you argue that God is not intelligent?”
No, I would not argue that intelligence is not a characteristic associated with persons. (I don’t think that’s very interesting in this context, but if you want to take it somewhere, sure, whatever.) And no, I would not argue that God is not intelligent.
(As a further reminder, let me note that Dr. Feser’s blog is public, and has reviewed these matters for more than a decade. It always puzzles me that some folks who refuse to read something so long as a book, and also refuse to read something so short as an article, yet have time to quote-mine such sources as the Catholic Encyclopedia in order to--well, in order to what, I don’t know.)
@Owlmirror,
“Not so bad. There are plenty of tadpoles, darters, koi, and the occasional turtle or duck.”
Any books in that lively ecoysystem? For reading, that is. Not for not reading.
“What’s it like playing the goat?”
Quite fun. I thought I’d join in after seeing “freethinkers” here act the goat when it comes to diligent rational inquiry. I’m rather intrigued by this “not reading a book gives one licence to opine on it” anti-matter version of rational analysis.
“We cannot all aspire to Ed Feser’s heights.”
You got me on this one. A guy who opines on books that he’s actually read is a little too esoteric and highfalutin for me.
“Are you seriously trying to imply that the question of whether or not God is a person with intelligence is irrelevant?”
Since I’m not engaging you on that particular thread, that question is irrelevant. Your red herrings are scaly diversions from the substance of my criticisms of Sangham’s approach.
@hotshoe_says #89: “laubadetriste says / I am not a Catholic. / why the fuck are you NOT a Catholic? / It’s a serious question. / When you can explain why you are NOT a Catholic, any one of the rest of us can explain why we are not theists of any sect. / When you can explain why you don’t find the behaviors of the holy mother church convincing enough for you to swallow what is odious and stupid about their doctrine, we can explain why we don’t find the behaviors of Feser and followers convincing enough to swallow what is odious and stupid about his writing. / I’ll bet on the great likelihood of being able to use your answer word-for-word, and changing only the signifying names and pronouns.”
No, that is not a serious question. It is not a serious question because it is wildly beside the point. And your question is wildly beside the point because:
1) Dr. Feser did not claim in the book in question, nor did Dr. Singham dispute thereof, that he has proved, or shown, or established, that one should be a Catholic, or that Catholicism is true, or anything of the sort;
2) The “behaviors” of this, that, or some other institution you have not even pretended to argue have any relation to #1;
3) Serious questions on any subject do not proceed by making calumnies about it (“odious and stupid”) without giving any examples, and without any argument whatsoever to establish that such examples would have some relation to #1;
4) The actual arguments relevant to #1 (e.g., the ones in Dr. Feser’s book) proceed without using names, those being unnecessary (and without many pronouns, either, those being used just to write clear English).
(One astonishment in these matters is how regularly a theist will claim to prove x, after which some doorknob will insist that he hasn’t proved y, without even pretending to argue how y should be relevant to x.
Theist: “God exists because such-and-such.”
Random internet commentator: “When you explain why you don’t like chocolate, then I’ll explain why I don’t like strawberry!”
After enough of which the theist concludes that random internet commentators can’t read, and random internet commentators conclude that theists for some reason won’t talk about flavors, which seems a suspicious behavior.
[For the benefit of John Morales, that last sentence was facetious. I realize that it is not *flavors* that people are asking about.])
I am tired of the pretensions to knowledge by the god-botherers. They love titles, fake authorities, the buzzwords of math and science without any understanding, appearance instead of substance. Proof has no meaning apart from mathics.
Speaking of a “proof of the existence of God” suggests only of the speaker’s ignorance of the term “proof”. Similarly with “certainty”.
The consequences of Godel’s incompleteness theorems do not just apply to systems encompassing arithmetic; they apply to all systems complex enough to encompass arithmetic.
Life is simply too short to read the book in question and others of its ilk. We have no obligation to listen to, read, or watch anything that these people put out. Our time is worth much more than that and these people would love nothing more than to fritter our time and lives away.
@Complexity
Evasion and a succession of ad hominems and non-sequiturs still doesn’t win you a waiver from the cornerstone of rational exchange -- address the best version of your opponent’s argument. Yes, that involves apprising oneself of the actual content of an opponent’s arguments. And that, no doubt to the dismay of all the “freethinkers” on here, involves reading their work.
I just see a lot of cognitive wankers on here who can’t seem to distinguish between deductive demonstration and inductive reasoning, metaphysics and empirical physical science, scientism and science, and the naive empiricism of the crude logical positivism that they so dogmatically subscribe to, with little to no self-awareness.
I’ve just read this entire thread, again, And I noticed a very important thing is missing: proof that there is a god (and extra credit proof that it’s the christian god)… I see a great deal of bloviation and some name-calling and smart-posing, but the christians appear dead set on not actually making the one point that would allow them to conclusively hold the field.
@Marcus Ranum,
This thread is in response to a supposedly “rational” scientist who wants to dismiss the work of Dr. Feser without acquainting himself with his work to the extent that would be required for an informed and justifiable assessment. This thread is not a summary of Dr. Feser’s work or a compendium of arguments for God. Read Feser’s book if you want that.
To all you supposed freethinkers -- stop employing the preening and rhetoric of rational analysis and freethought and actually PRACTICE the substance of it.
Step 1. Read Feser’s book -- the one where he defends in detail arguments for the existence of God, responds in detail to objections, and shows why God would necessarily have traits that align with the classical theistic conception of God.
Step 2. Try to understand these arguments with the principle of charity in mind.
Step 3. Outline the arguments, identifying the premises, inferences and conclusions.
Step 4. Assess the arguments on the basis of clarity of premises, truth of premises and/or logical structure of the premise-conclusion complex.
Step 5. Be sensitive to the philosophical presuppositions (epistemic, metaphysical) of the arguments as well as those that you bring to the table. Often disagreements are rooted at this level.
Step 6. Share your conclusions with others in a spirit of rational collaboration
Ta-da! Now you’re a real rational freethinker, not just a fucking poseur.
You might come out of it even more confident of your atheism, but at least you can justifiably call yourself a thinker and not a partisan dogmatist hack.
When respected philosophers start taking notice of Feser, then I’ll think about it, life is short, and if the experts don’t give him the time of day, why should I?
@Brian English,
Ah, I see. You need celebrity endorsements to set your reading agenda. Very freethinker of you. That’s fine. But don’t opine on something you refuse to acquaint yourself with.
Honestly, this is just more evasion. It’s almost like…you’re scared of what you’ll find in his book.
Zob@#97:
This thread is in response to a supposedly “rational” scientist who wants to dismiss the work of Dr. Feser without acquainting himself with his work to the extent that would be required for an informed and justifiable assessment.
Yes, that was exactly what I was suggesting.
Step 1. Read Feser’s book
No thank you. Just explain it to us. A convincing proof of god’s existence and christian nature ought to be succinct and straightforward (otherwise, nobody can be expected to understand it) I see no reason why I should read some book, when you’re busy spilling easily enough words that you ought to have been able to explain it already.
Step 2. Try to understand these arguments with the principle of charity in mind.
I’m familiar with the principle of charity; it doesn’t apply as far as I’m concerned. For one thing, any convincing and compelling argument for god’s existence and christian nature should hardly need to be looked upon charitably. No?
Step 3. Outline the arguments, identifying the premises, inferences and conclusions.
Why don’t you do that?
I’m not going to buy some book. If it’s such a good argument and it was convincing to you, it must have been clear and comprehensible even to an idiot. So it ought to be pretty easy to explain to a non-idiot.
Step 6. Share your conclusions with others in a spirit of rational collaboration
I’m asking you to do that; based on what you explain, then maybe I’ll decide the book is worth reading or not.
Ta-da! Now you’re a real rational freethinker, not just a fucking poseur
You appear to be making the mistake of assuming that “freethinker” is a label that we apply to ourselves, here. It’s actually just the domain name of a blogging site. There are people ranging from what I’d consider ideologues of one sort or another, to radical skeptics of one sort or another. There are even a few quasi-nihilists and maybe even a sociopath or two. So, you’re making an error if you’re appealing to your mistaken assumption of our common desire to be “freethinkers.” Hell, I don’t even know what a “freethinker” is, but then I sometimes reject whole parts of language which makes it hard for me to take such labels seriously.
You might come out of it even more confident of your atheism
Many of us (especially the more extreme skeptics) are extremely unconfident of anything. You appear to be making a typical believer’s error, which is natural since you may value belief in things -- namely that belief is a good in itself (belief implying ‘confidence’) Perhaps you’d understand better if you considered that skeptics may or may not believe any proposition to a particular degree, and that their skepticism or non-belief might be exactly a result of non-confidence. You may want to look up the history of the pyrrhonian skeptics, for example -- I’m not sure if there are any full-blown pyrrhonians here, but there may be -- and, if there are, they’re probably withholding judgement about what you’re saying: they’d not be flat-out refuting it (since that’s also a dogmatic position) but rather they would appear to be studiously unconvinced by your arguments. By the way, asking a moderate-to-extreme skeptic to interpret anything with a principle of charity is -- gosh, I don’t even have the right word -- so let’s say “it’s funny.”
at least you can justifiably call yourself a thinker
Why do you imagine any of us are concerned with how we label ourselves? Again, I realize that self-labelling is important to some believers (being a “catholic” or a “southern papist” or whatever seems to matter a lot to believers) but, speaking for myself, I don’t call myself anything much more complicated than “myself” (which it appears to me, that I am) and, depending on how you want to define “thinking” I think ( <- get it? ) that I think, but I could be mistaken except that being mistaken would require me to think, would it not?
partisan dogmatist hack.
Partisan? Are you bringing politics into it? You may want to avoid that; I know for a fact that several of the people you are communicating with in this thread are from a variety of places on the globe and probably don’t align with any political parties that would justify an accusation of partisanship.
Unless, by “partisan” you mean “favoring truth” or something like that?
dogmatist hack
Mr. Pot, if you insist on calling Professor Kettle “black” I’m going to fall over laughing.
Zob@#95:
Yes, that involves apprising oneself of the actual content of an opponent’s arguments. And that, no doubt to the dismay of all the “freethinkers” on here, involves reading their work.
No, it doesn’t. It involves apprising oneself of the actual content of an opponent’s arguments. That’s why I suggest you apprise us of them.
Sure, I could read some book, but since you’re here spilling words a’plenty why don’t you summarize those arguments for us? You’ve already done the hard work of reading, and you appear to love to read your own typewriting, so why not educate us?
laubadetriste says
Oh, honey, I knew you would prevaricate if you tried to answer my honest question.
The reason why it is an honest question
is because you were the one to identify yourself as not-a-Catholic to begin with. If that were not relevant to discussing Feser, why the fuck did you even mention it?
It’s either “wildly beside the point” in which case shame on you for making your argument about yourself (as if your not-a-Catholic status makes your fanboying for Feser more convincing somehow? ) or it is NOT “wildly beside the point” in which case shame on you for criticizing me.
If you find Feser’s arguments so goddamn convincing and worthy of respect, why aren’t you emulating him in worshipping within the holy mother church?
If his arguments in favor of (some christian version) monotheistic god are so wonderful, then where do you draw the line? How is it that you imagine Feser to be a wise man whom everyone should read/listen to regarding proofs of god, but not wise enough to set an example for all of us regarding which church to join? Where does he go wrong, in your mind? He’s right about philosophy in general, but wrong about Christianity being closer to god’s truth than Islam? He’s got the correct theology, but his ritualistic Catholic behavior is to be ignored at best, or perhaps pitied for going too far?
Feser obviously thinks he has chosen not merely the true philosophy but the correct sect of christianity. Why don’t you agree with him?
Not my fault you and he are both idiots who can’t agree upon anything more significant than “there is a god”.
Respected is not a synonym of celebrity.
I was a bit curious about the book’s content (about which there is negligible information here), and took a look at his Five Proofs preview.
So, the same old silliness rehashed.
If such a deity wanted me to believe in its existence, then I would — that’s an ineluctable entailment of the omnipotence and omniscience. Since I don’t, the implication is that if it exists, it doesn’t want me to believe in it. So, really, I am doing God’s will!
But, free will! Sorry, just couldn’t help myself.
Incomprehensibility -- that tried and true escape hatch for any apologist. If the claim makes no sense, no matter! Nonsense and illogic are built right into the foundations of the premise of divinity; not making sense is part of the game.
@grodrigues
Yes. My comment to you was uninformed. My understanding of Godel’s theorem, such as it is, is rather shallow, and I accept your pertinent criticisms of me, but in no way was it based upon wikipedia skimming, as you snidely assumed. Remember books?
Your comment to me has enlightened me, and has introduced a new field of knowledge i.e. “Homotopy”. Thank you for that.
@grasshopper:
“My understanding of Godel’s theorem, such as it is, is rather shallow, and I accept your pertinent criticisms of me, but in no way was it based upon wikipedia skimming, as you snidely assumed. Remember books?”
“Snidely”? Expressions such as “My dear grodrigues, your knowledge of Godel’s Theorems seems to be incomplete.” are what then?
This is very common with a certain type of persons (and de rigueur around here). They already know, by dint of their psychic powers, that all the arguments for God’s existence are so stupid and bankrupt, that even reading them is a waste of time. They pour scorn on Christianity and bully Christians with their mockery and derision. With absolutely no problem, and pulling no punches. Fine, this is war and these are the rules. But when their ignorant buffoonery is exposed and they are punched back, the hypocrisy of Christians is remarked upon; a random jackass of a troll invokes the imaginary rules of the mythical book of the code of civil debate; another idiot, unable to argue his way out of a paper bag, remarks about “snide dickishness”. Now all this is quite predictable, but also a quite transparent dishonest ploy to stack the discussion in their favor and I for one have no intentions of ceding even one inch in this confederacy of dunces. You complain about “snideness”? Here’s what you can do with your complaints: wrap them in cement and shove them where the sun does not shine.
grodrigues:
Nobody needs to make a philosophical argument to provide proof that Donald Trump exists. Or that the Sun exists. Or that trees exist. Or that traffic lights exist. This, because they’re all evident.
(I guess God is a special case!)
Also, it’s been a long, long time since I’ve encountered a novel argument for its existence.
(Are Feser’s arguments novel in any way? If so, how?)
Poor persecuted Christians!
I see you don’t exactly eschew mockery and derision.
I still haven’t seen even an adumbration of even one of the multiple purported proofs of the Christian deity’s existence proposed by Feser. Presumably you have read his book, so… care to essay this task?
Incidentally, I recall reading about Mother Teresa’s letters after she died; she admittedly also found God less than evident.
From Wikipedia [citations elided]:
Ah well, she did find fame and fortune by her LARPing, so it was not that bad. 😉
@John Morales:
“Poor persecuted Christians!”
The next sentence on the quoted part says “Fine, this is war and these are the rules.” So your exclamation is strictly redundant and idiotic.
“I see you don’t exactly eschew mockery and derision.”
I see you are such dimwitted fool that the point I made passed by you.
“Presumably you have read his book, so… care to essay this task?”
Do you have a problem with reading books? Well, that was a rhetorical question. More to the point: if a book was written to explicitly discuss the arguments along with their objections, by an expert on the subject, why do you imagine I, or anyone else for that matter, would or could do a better job summarizing it in the space of a combox comment? And what is the evidence that you would even understand it or have the open mind to give it a fair hearing? All the empirical evidence available shows that the audience here is entirely constituted by close-minded bigoted morons, so why should I waste my time on them, even if I were up to the task?
Mano Singham is a theoretical physicist. Why don’t you ask him to summarize in the span of a combox comment the long line of argumentation that goes from the observations at the LHC to the conclusion of the existence of the Higgs boson, including all the background physics and mathematics needed to understand it and see what his response is. Manus Ranum set a few paragraphs as his threshold for accepting an argument as “convincing”, or at the very least, not fall dead on the keyboard out of intellectual exhaustion, the poor man. Maybe your threshold is a little higher?
grodrigues:
Is it available for free? If so, I certainly will give it a once-over.
(Would you pay money to read a book “proving” the Earth is flat on the basis that flat-Earthers claim the arguments therein are conclusive?)
You don’t have to do a better job; you merely have to give the gist of but one of its proofs.
For example: The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin is based on the observation of variation between species, and explains it via the concepts of natural selection (the unguided version of human selection of domesticated species) and deep time.
(See? I just adumbrated a book!)
But fine, you (and every other Feser fan) choose not to even do that much. Which is suggestive.
You do know to what the term ‘adumbration’ refers, no?
PS regarding the Higgs boson: the Standard Model of physics — a very successful theory — hypothesised a field that affected the symmetry of electroweak interaction, leading to a search for its associated particle force carrier. Trouble was the energy levels required to produce them, but the LHC finally achieved that and after observation the consensus of the physics community was that the particle had been detected and that the field existed.
(I might be wrong in my understanding, but I am not an evasive coward)
@John Morales:
“For example: The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin is based on the observation of variation between species, and explains it via the concepts of natural selection (the unguided version of human selection of domesticated species) and deep time.”
Ah, I understand now. You are a clueless idiot who does not even know what an argument is.
@John Morales:
And about the parenthetical remark and the “evasive coward” bit, is that what you take to be the putative evidence that you have the intellectual ability to grasp the arguments and the open mind to give them a fair hearing?
grodrigues, I have no idea whether or not I have the intellectual ability to grasp the arguments, but I certainly haven’t been exposed to those arguments. Perhaps I do, perhaps I don’t.
(I guess we’ll never know, will we? Short of me shelling out $ to Feser for the privilege of being exposed to those arguments — neither you nor any other objector to Mano’s post has bothered to provide even the gist of them)
BTW, nobody needs either an open mind nor special intellectual ability to grasp the existence of Donald Trump, of trees, of dogs, or of traffic lights.
(The Christian god is special!)
@John Morales:
“grodrigues, I have no idea whether or not I have the intellectual ability to grasp the arguments, but I certainly haven’t been exposed to those arguments.”
Since you do not even know what an argument is, the answer to that question is clear. But that was not the only question I made.
At any rate, you can whine as much as you want, but the fact is you do not get to set the rules of the discussion unilaterally. You do not get to set the tune and have me dance to it. And most of all, you will not have me willingly participate in the lie that you are even in the least interested in the truth of the matter. What you want from me is to reinforce your preconceived notions and an opportunity to take some cheap potshots, to which my answer is: go RTFM.
The book is not interesting enough to shell out money for it? Fine. That is a perfectly valid choice, as time is finite and we all have to make choices. I would just wish that the whole lot of you would be a tad more humble and stay silent about that which you know nothing about. On the other, the vocal stupidity offers so many opportunities for hilarity, as witnessed throughout the thread, that whatever.
“BTW, nobody needs either an open mind nor special intellectual ability to grasp the existence of Donald Trump, of trees, of dogs, or of traffic lights.”
You really do not have the faintest clue of how utterly asinine this comment is, do you? You do not need arguments, you need prayers.
No one needs prayers except the men who financially profit from convincing people that prayers are what’s needed.
But please do feel free to go away and pray for John and the rest of us who “need” prayers.
grodrigues:
🙂
If I don’t need arguments, and if Feser’s book provides arguments, then I don’t need Feser’s book, do I?
Gah, quote fail again! Bona nox amici (et inimici) mei.
@hotshoe_:
“No one needs prayers except the men who financially profit from convincing people that prayers are what’s needed.”
Thanks for sharing with me your trite, vulgar, uninformed, stupid opinion on prayer, but I already suspected that the whole lot here would think something like that.
If the very mention of “prayer” offends thy fragile sensibility, replace it with “therapy”; it matters little.
@John Morales:
“If I don’t need arguments, and if Feser’s book provides arguments, then I don’t need Feser’s book, do I?”
Right. Since the conclusion to be taken from your asinine commentary is that you are a complete moron, of course no books, Prof. Feser’s or anyone else’s, will do you any good.
You *are* good for a laugh, I’ll give you that.
For someone who doesn’t see why he should waste his time on the audience of close-minded bigoted morons here, you sure are wasting a lot of time on the audience of close-minded bigoted morons here… Are you actually hoping to achieve anything, or do you just enjoy haranguing people?
Darlin’ don’t ever change! You are the best possible advertisement for Christianity.
Dunc@#124:
Are you actually hoping to achieve anything, or do you just enjoy haranguing people?
Given the rather frequent references to how dumb we are, they probably are giving their sense of superiority some frottage. Which is funny because, from over here, it’s an embarrassing performance.
@Dunc:
“Are you actually hoping to achieve anything, or do you just enjoy haranguing people?”
The latter. But I would not say “haranguing people” is quite correct; it is more like mocking and deriding close-minded bigoted morons.
Do not worry, though. This is indeed a piddling trifle of an entertainment (and woe is me, quite un-Christian). I will soon get bored and go away, and then you can all comment to each other on how stupid, dickish, whatever, that grodrigues character was. Or what is more probable, simply forget that I ever existed at all, which is all good as well.
John @113:
First part’s sort of OK, but the Higgs ain’t the force carrier; those are the photon (em) and the W and Z vector bosons (weak). Nutshell oversimplification: the Higgs field gives masses to the W’s and the Z.
OK, y’all can get back to your pointless feces-flinging.
I was thinking, there’s probably another good way of framing this:
1) Christians show up on a blog
2) C: “Let us tell you about this amazing proof of god!”
3) A: “What is it?”
4) C: “It’s in this book! You need to read the book! You need to read the book with a spirit of rational collaboration and generosity!”
5) A: “Can you summarize it?”
6) C: “No! You need to read the ENTIRE BIBLE, you narrow-minded atheist poseur!”
7) A: (reads it) “OK, well, that was batshit.”
8) C: “You’re stupid and blinkered!” (goes away for a while)
9) GOTO 1, except change the book
It’s been a couple thousand years of this, and the quality of the reasoning in the book hasn’t moved substantially. In fact, most of the books the christians come in all excited about are pretty much rehashes of the first 50 or so.
I’m just pointing this out in case there’s any misunderstanding about who’s stupid here.
grodrigues says
No worries, doll, you’re a perfect representative for the patriarchs of your book and the leaders of your faith. Carry on!
@Marcus Ranum:
“I’m just pointing this out in case there’s any misunderstanding about who’s stupid here.”
First, you designated yourself as an idiot and a moron. I agree completely, as the evidence is all over the thread.
Second your parody cannot apply to you, that is, you cannot be an instance of A in that parody, because by your own recognition you cannot read more than a couple of paragraphs, let alone an entire book, let alone a large book like the bible, so you could never reach the seventh line and have any rational grounds to affirm that it is “Batshit crazy”. By your own words, you are incapable of following even a moderately long argument, so you have to rely on your buddies to inform you on what to believe. In other words, you are nothing but a sheep.
Third, making parodies does not exempt you from the standards of rational discourse and logical argumentation. For just one example, in the fourth line, you speak about a “book” and in the sixth about the “bible”. In other words, you are committing the fallacy of equivocation — or more precisely, putting that fallacy in the mouth of C.
Another reason why your parody is completely inane and applies only to the imaginary opponents that populate your paltry imagination, is because Prof. Feser’s book (I should even add, books), the one you have not read, the one Prof. Singham will never read, explicitly eschews any appeals to divine revelation and to the Bible in particular. Furthermore, given the explicit stated position of Prof. Singham’s, the seventh line would never be reached because he has flatly refused to read said book. Due to his amazing powers of guessing he already knows what it contains. This by the way is also a logical fallacy (which one exactly, depends on the exact formulation of Prof. Singham’s statement).
Yes, there is no doubt about who is the stupid here.
Any more bawling from you?
Marcus Ranum, you’re too generous by almost an order of magnitude. Rehashes of the first half-dozen, more like.
Lucifer himself could not do better work than the disciples of Feser.
@hotshoe_:
“Darlin’ don’t ever change! You are the best possible advertisement for Christianity.”
Honey, there is no essential connection between my behavior and the truth or falsity of Christianity, or even between my behavior and moral value of Christianity’s teachings, in exactly the same sense that Stalin’s behavior says nothing about atheists in general and their behavior. The most you can squeeze out is that I am a hypocrite and a jackass.
Now, if one goes back in the thread and reads the fifth comment, I stress the *fifth* comment, one can read and I quote:
“I’d feel a lot better about religious people if I could see some testable evidence to distinguish their beliefs from delusional illness.
As it is, I take assertions of the reality of gods to be prima facie evidence of cognitive malfunction.”
So the departing presumption is that religious people, not me in particular but *all* religious people, suffer from a “delusional illness”. No one batted an eyelid at this extremely insulting, bigoted comment, because quite obviously, it is par for the course around here. And you think I am worried about you, and the other bunch of intellectual frauds and hucksters, having their feathers ruffled about my punching back? Rob Grigjanis complained in #128 about “pointless feces-flinging”. I do not know if his comment was sincere or not, but sorry, too late. As for me, my only regret is that English is not my first language, my knowledge of it is extremely meager (as witnessed by my many mistakes), and my rhetorical talents are next to non-existent, because I would punch back even harder.
Hmm. I read this comment thread last night when I noticed there were dozens of new comments. Clearly good for a laugh then. Reading it again today, and I see that even thought the comment number has doubled, nothing new has been said.
Not that I can add all that much. I stopped reading philosophy years ago and I’ve probably forgotten more than I remember. The question of god’s existence no longer troubles me. The actions of the worshiper’s of this mythology are far more important. Which is why one of the commenters up-thread asked if the supposed proof in Feser’s book was to prove the biblical god or the vaporous god of modern theological philosophy.
That’s a good question, as far as it goes. But the problem with a proof which goes from a set of premises to a conclusion that a deity exists rests in the premises, not the conclusion. If the book has a conclusion that many people want to agree with, then the premises are only going to be of interest to the de-bunkers. I suspect most of the people who actually do purchase Feser’s book are not going to read it. It will take up space on their shelves, and they can point to it and say, “This book proves, rationally, the existence of god.” They will not differentiate between the biblical god which they have been taught is a giant bearded face in the sky throwing fire and manna around and the ethereal creature which does not interact with the material world in any way.
However, to get to my point, the reluctance of Feser’s supporters in this thread reminds me of an argument I had over a decade ago with a fan-boy of The Bell Curve. He made, of course, vary racist remarks and indicated they were supported by the data found in The Bell Curve. When I challenged him on an point, he said, “you’ll have to read the book.” Effectively dismissing my arguments without answering them, just as the apologists on this thread are doing. I finally told him that all the arguments found in The Bell Curve were destroyed in the second edition of The Miss-Measure of Man. I asked him if he had read that book. When he indicated that he hadn’t, I told him that he had better read it.
It is a fallacy to assume that you must read a book in order to know what is in it. Books are not islands of thought. Books constantly refer to other books. Some books are more independent than others, some fiction only tangentially refers to other books, and most of that can be in style not content. However, there is a special class of books which almost exclusively refer to other books. Those are philosophy books and books in the related (albeit not identical) field of religious apologetics. You cannot write a book of apologetics without referring to previous works in the subject.
Whether the author is destroying previous apologetics, or bolstering the arguments for other previous apologetics, the author must refer to them. In this case it appears Feser has taken some rather antiquated arguments (at least one of which was badly wounded by William of Occam), and updated them with modern logic and sensibilities. It’s like putting a new slip-cover on a couch. The couch is still there, but it looks nicer. If you never liked the feel of the couch in the first place, putting a new slip-cover on does not make you like the couch any better.
Which may be why the very obtuse defenders of Feser in this thread are unable to answer the many requests for a summary of the arguments used by Feser. The arguments are the same, their premises have been debunked repeatedly in the past; but they have a prettier presentation, suitable for modern tastes.
Should Feser have developed a proof for the existence of god (any god) which does not rely on any previous apologetics, that would be a miracle and would have been front-page news. Since this appears to be warmed over tripe, Mano appear to have correctly read the omens to avoid wasting time reading this book.
grodrigues @134:
My own policy (not always followed, but it’s an ideal) towards that sort of thing, whether directed at me or someone else, is to ignore it. Life’s too short, etc.
flex @135:
That’s certainly the case for all ‘proofs’ I’ve seen.
I would have worn my sloshes if I knew I had to wade through a deluge of diarrhea.
I see nothing but a bunch of whiny excuses to avoid diligent inquiry. If you’re too timid to get in the ring, don’t pretend to be a prize fighter.
It’s really quite simple. If you’re interested in the atheism-theism debate, you should take note of Dr. Feser’s work because his exposition and defense of the classical arguments for the existence of God is philosophically informed, robust and accessible. He painstakingly responds to all the standard classical and contemporary objections, and then some. Reading his work has helped me see that my understanding of natural theology was based on caricatures, straw men and sloppy misconceptions, and that scientism is not a scientific position but a philosophical one that needs philosophical defense if it’s to avoid circular justification.
So if you’re a sincere and genuine freethinker, these corrective insights are valuable in themselves, even if you don’t end up agreeing with all or much of his exhaustively explicated and defended positions/framework. (I, for one, don’t think his account of Aristotelian Thomism leads to the sort of natural-law conclusions that he defends.)
A real rational thinker wants to examine and assess the best versions of concepts, ideas and positions, not puerile stereotypes.
Seek out the best stated case, not kindergarten crayon doodles.
But you’d have to be genuinely interested in truth to do that. If you can’t even bother to glance at the free portions of the book on Amazon or Google Books, yet feel confident enough to issue derisive pronouncements on the very content you’ve defiantly refused to familiarize yourself with -- then it’s really not truth you’re interested in, but the preservation of your ideological group-think bubble.
So basically, go read the book, then respond. Otherwise, stop embarrassing yourself.
@flex:
Since at least you have adopted a more even tone, I will relax a little (and quite frankly, I am just tired) and will just note one point:
“They will not differentiate between the biblical god which they have been taught is a giant bearded face in the sky throwing fire and manna around and the ethereal creature which does not interact with the material world in any way.”
No serious philosopher in the Christian tradition (which is what I know best) ever defended God as “a giant bearded face in the sky throwing fire and manna around” or as “the ethereal creature which does not interact with the material world in any way”. None. This has nothing to do with the God of Augustine, Athanasius, Anselm or Aquinas, just to stick to some of the more prominent A’s. It is nothing but a pure fabrication. And spare me the routine about what the common man thinks: if you want to debunk a theory, you go to their strongest and ablest of defenders, just in the same way as if you want to know about Evolution Theory, Quantum Field Theory or whatever, you consult the experts, not the common man on the street, which is bound to have all sorts of erroneous ideas about them.
And here is the gist: all the evidence available in this thread points to the fact that there is no one here, absolutely no one, that could *correctly* reconstruct the classical arguments for God’s existence, let alone point any flaws in it. So your complaints are, to be quite blunt, nothing but hot air.
grodrigues @138: Aquinas’ most “compelling” argument was death for heretics. Did he convince you on that point as well?
grodrigues says at comment 138
I think that’s something I can agree with.
“grodrigues @138: Aquinas’ most “compelling” argument was death for heretics. Did he convince you on that point as well?”
That’s some cringe-worthy ignorance right there. Imagine if you approached scientific inquiry with this level of abject and willful indifference to fact and truth.
grodrigues @138:
Oh dear, I must have been fooling myself all these years. Aquinas’ first proof starts with this, pulled from his arse; “whatever is in motion is put in motion by another”. Then follows blather about potentiality and actuality, with the punchline also pulled from his arse: “this cannot go on to infinity”. Maybe “pulled from his arse” isn’t a philosophical term of art.
@Robert Grigjanis:
“Aquinas’ most “compelling” argument was death for heretics. Did he convince you on that point as well?”
I do not know any such argument, let alone an argument for God’s existence — which is the subject of the thread — based on any premise involving the life or death of heretics. I am sure, as you quite obviously are an expert Aquinas scholar, you will give me the reference to Aquinas’ original works and then communicate to me what is your understanding of his words.
Or don’t. I think we both know how this will end up, and it ain’t gonna be pretty for you, as you said you dislike feces-flinging (probably bearing the proverbial shit-eating grin).
If on the other hand, the direction of your question is whether I think Aquinas is infallible, the answer is of course not. St. Thomas is a model philosopher for Catholics only, and you can ask any knowledgeable Catholic and he will promptly give you an example where St. Thomas is wrong and spectacularly so.
@Robert Grigjanis:
As to your most recent comment: there was no need to make the point for me, but thanks anyway.
grodrigues says
Exactly.
Couldn’t the elders have dispatched a fanboi who is NOT a hypocrite and a jackass to speak to us?
I want better christian representatives.
It is, supposedly, a moral religion with explicit teachings of how to live a moral life while waiting for death and the redeemer. If the Jesus books were true, you have been instructed to “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works”.
I don’t see any “good works” from you. I see hatred, excessive pride in (verbally) beating on your enemies, obfuscation, and oh yeah, hypocrisy and general jack-assery that we both agree describes your work here.
I have yet to see any evidence from any of the so-called christians in this thread that you learned a thing from the man you supposedly worship. And I don’t mean from Feser. Obviously you learned a lot from that stinky wad.
Yeah yeah yeah you’re all sinners, and you’re all going to be forgiven your sins — no matter what — as long as you say the correct ritual formula before you die. But in the meantime, aren’t you supposed to have a care how you demonstrate the faith to those who are not in the fold? Are you supposed to act like wolves?
Lord please send us some better christians next time. It’s past time we get to see their good ones, not their worst ones.
@hotshoe_:
“I want better christian representatives.”
And I would like better atheists instead of the current cultural crapsters, but such is the world. At any rate, I am afraid the better Christians don’t waste their time in atheist blogs sparring with intellectual frauds and hucksters, but rather doings works of mercy, corporal and spiritual, praying, etc. I would imagine the best place to find them would be in Church, but somehow I suspect you are not very tempted to go there.
Yeah, because doing works of spiritual mercy and praying is so much more useful for humankind!
If that’s the best you can think to offer, they might as well ALL keep wasting their “time in atheist blogs sparring …”
At least it would keep christians away from corporally murdering women, terrorizing children with visions of hell, torturing gay men to death.
Keep them busy haranguing atheists and — unless a believer is diddling a child on his lap as he types — the christian is wasting their own time while doing no harm. Net win for humanity.
In the interests of full disclosure, I am a regular church-goer — not The Church, tho, so maybe it doesn’t count — and you are absolutely right: the better christians are not to be found among your kind.
But it would be good for your own soul to aspire to be among the better.
@hotshoe_:
“But it would be good for your own soul to aspire to be among the better.”
So you are a “regular church-goer”, you offer sound Christian advice and even talk about the “soul”. Well, If you are not careful, you will be Bible-thumping these darned atheists in no time!
haha no, not gonna happen.
But thanks anyway for caring enough to warn me off from egregious christian conduct.
grodrigues @138 writes,
While true, these are, in fact boundary conditions. Any argument for the existence of a deity is going to argue for a deity somewhere between those limits.
Which means that one of the first things any particular author of an apologetic does is define the attributes they assign to the deity. Over the decades, christian apologetics have moved from trying to defend an largely-interventionist deity to a less-interventionist one. I’m certain you know what I mean, but in case I’m unclear, god used to cause the fall of every sparrow, but now god simply watches it happen.
Which brings us back to one of Mano’s points. One which seems to have been lost in the comments, that the key to a convincing proof of a deity is not through rational argument, but through evidence of intervention into the rest of the world by a deity.
And that is the point. Any author of apologetics which argues for an interventionist deity, at any level of intervention, must provide evidence of how the rest of the world is changed by the intervention of a deity. If god only watches a sparrow’s fall, and does nothing to cause it, in any way, there will be no evidence for the intervention of that deity. A deity of this nature cannot be dis-proven. Fair enough.
However, should god intervene in any fashion, the intervention can be described. If god causes a sparrow to fall, then the author of the apologetic needs to describe how god does so. Which, unfortunately for the author of these apologetics, that ‘how’ can be tested. If there are other possible explanations for the death of the sparrow, it weakens the strength of the argument for the existence of a deity. Again, it doesn’t dis-prove the possibility of the existence of a deity.
Needless to say, apologetics in the last couple of centuries have generally taken two paths. Arguing for an interventionist, but undetectable deity, or an arguing for an interventionist deity who’s interventions cannot be detected with modern instruments. There is one other path the apologetics authors have taken, and that’s to try an approach by using the rules of formal logic. Regrettably, as anyone who has studied formal logic knows, a logical proof without any links to a testable hypothesis (testable in the real world), can be developed to prove anything. Both the existence or the non-existence of a deity. Generally, the arguments head back to the postulates, not the logical links. But without something which can be tested, a proof made in formal logic is not very convincing to someone who starts from a position of non-belief.
For what it’s worth, the other two strategies are not particularly useful to convince non-believers either. A deity who intervenes but cannot be detected? Hey, I’m an atheist with an open mind, I’ll accept that possibility. And yet…, you are multiplying causes without need. Why should I accept that there is an additional, undetectable, intervention by a deity? That seems to be a rather extraordinary claim, without any evidence (extraordinary or not) for it. So I’ll reject that possibility.
Then, god intervenes but god’s intervention is not detectable by modern instrumentation? Okay, let’s look at that one. Possible. Maybe. But the history of theology has given this one rather swift kick in the nuts. You do know that during the middle ages thunderstorms were thought by theologians to be caused by evil spirits? And that ringing church-bells was recommended by the theologians to drive them away? (Causing a series of deaths by electrocution of the bell-ringers who were holding a wet rope attached to a high-up metal object.)
At one time, according to the best theologians of the time, lots of spirits existed. In christian thought these were demons/devils, and they interacted with the world in order to bring about pain, suffering, or simply corruption of the soul and denial of entry into heaven. They were able to control winds, storms, thoughts, feelings, lust, and anger. As knowledge of how the world grew, the number of things these spirits could control (or a deity could control) dropped. When we knew that winds were caused by air being warmed by the sun, we didn’t need to have a god sending it.
The theologians didn’t give up, they continued to claim that those things which were unknowable at the time were caused by god (or spirits). But as humanity’s knowledge grew, the spaces which were controlled by god shrunk. One of the more ingenious places I’ve seen god be placed recently was in Roger Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind. Which isn’t to say that I agree with Penrose, but he deliberately picked a scale in the area which, at the time, was largely unmapped. At the quantum scale the models made very good predictions, and at the macro scale we have models which made very good predictions, so he placed a deity between those two scales in an area where there is still mystery.
An ingenious solution, but ultimately unconvincing to a skeptic, because you already know how this story ends. There has been, throughout history, a slow shrinking of the areas where an interventionist deity is claimed to actually intervene in. There is no reason to suppose that this shrinking will stop, which means that there is no place for an interventionist deity.
Now, if you desire to convince atheists who understand all these aspect of the proof of a deity, you need to find a way to stop that shrinking of the god of the gaps. Not through stopping the accumulation of knowledge, but through increases in knowledge to the point where it is known that something intervenes but it cannot be known what it is. Even then you wouldn’t convince all atheists that there isn’t some other explanation.
To recap:
A deity which is:
Non-interventionist: Not convincing
Interventionist but undetectable: Not convincing
Non-evidential (only proved through the use of formal logic): Not convincing
From a cursory glance at the book, and the comments in this thread, it seems to me like Fesel’s book is of the third kind. Do you have any evidence that it is not?
Is Fesel’s argument something which is not contained in one or more of the above three categories?
I shouldn’t need to read the book to learn the answer to that question.
If you, or other commenters, feel that Fesel’s argument does not fit into one or more of the above three categories, then feel free to let us know how it differs. A short summary will do. Something shorter than this comment, because I’m extraordinarily prolix.
@flex:
“One which seems to have been lost in the comments, that the key to a convincing proof of a deity is not through rational argument, but through evidence of intervention into the rest of the world by a deity.”
No, it is not.
Look, you have the wrong interlocutor here. You are not *engaging* the classical tradition, which is what Prof. Feser represents, but something else entirely. You want to talk maybe to the ID crowd. But I have no interest in defending that brand of arguments, which even if successful, a big if, do not prove God but at best only god, a paltry demiurge.
The rest of your comment has so many errors, and shows such a misunderstanding of the classical tradition, which at the cost of sounding boring and repetitive, is what is at stake, since we are talking about Prof. Feser’s book (Hint: as I said above, your whole comment applies only to an historically modern portion of Christianity. It has nothing to do with Augustine, Athanasius, Anselm or Aquinas and how they conceive of God, much less the likes of Plato or Aristotle) that I do not even know where to begin. No matter, because of what I said above, it is all pretty much irrelevant, so this conversation can end in a tone of peace and quiet.
“Now, if you desire to convince atheists who understand all these aspect of the proof of a deity, you need to find a way to stop that shrinking of the god of the gaps. Not through stopping the accumulation of knowledge, but through increases in knowledge to the point where it is known that something intervenes but it cannot be known what it is. Even then you wouldn’t convince all atheists that there isn’t some other explanation.”
Ah ok, so you want a gap so spectacular that even Atheists would not be able to deny it. Well not all Atheists according to you. So why exactly would some be convinced and would not? Some of them might even mumble that God of gaps reasoning is fallacious. Well, there are plenty of gaps already, and despite the promises of several years of intensive study we are nowhere near a solution, or even of what a solution will look like (the emergence of life, the emergence of conscience, etc.), so why are not these gaps convincing enough? Maybe you want some personal grand intervention of God? And why exactly would such a grand intervention be evidence of the existence of God? Is God of the gaps reasoning fallacious or not?
But as I said above, I am not in the least interested in these types of arguments and neither is Prof. Feser, so find yourself a better interlocutor.
grodrigues says
More hypocrisy.
YOU want some “personal intervention” of your god, or else why would you constantly be harping on the value of prayer. Prayer is by definition a request for help (personal intervention) addressed to god. You claim prayer has value -- or at least, you tell people they need prayers. (Maybe you only say that to trick people, I dunno.)
It cannot possibly be that you think the value of prayer is in the individual person straightening out their own desires and calming their own mind in accordance with reality — because then you could not be using the term “prayer” correctly. You would instead give advice like “think about it” or “talk it over with a friend”. So there is clearly some sense in which you believe god could intervene in response to mental/verbal prayer from a believing petitioner … even if the intervention were merely god sending brain-calming waves (or something analogous) to that person so they accept that the will of god is being done.
In fact, you already admitted that “therapy” is more sensible than “prayers”. Because therapy has a record of having actual effect in our mutual real world, and prayer never has. That is mostly flex’s and Mano’s point: in a world in which prayer is seen to actually work, all those academic arguments would be unneeded and overly prideful. In our actual world where divine intervention can never be seen, those arguments are woefully inadequate for anyone’s purpose — except for a handful of fanbois trying to score points by beating up atheists. Granting the existence of your supposedly-proven god, you still have all your work ahead of you to render it the least bit relevant to any normal human life.
You apparently think there is a point to defending Feser’s (and your) “logical” concept of an immaterial impersonal omni-god — because here you are, trying to do it. But there is NO point, because that never was the god you believe in. No one, not even you Feser fanboi, remains a member of The Church to worship that abstract entity. No one gets dressed to attend service and make their confession and tithe their hard-earned money to sing praises to Non-Intervention Omni Spirit. That was never the god which you tell people they need prayers about.
But you cannot actually defend the likelihood of an interventionist deity. You believe in it, but you can’t explain where it is hiding nowadays, after it managed somehow to jump-start life, (but how? immaterial, remember, so what ghosty fingers could it use to stir inorganic matter? ) and create souls and/or human consciousness, and work all those antique miracles, yada yada. Why aren’t prayers answered anymore? Do YOU pray at all? Why would you bother?
No one besides you and a few other “special” people will ever care about some long-winded proof of god’s mere existence since you cannot tie it into anything in reality. You all be happy together on the special bus. Meanwhile we will be engaged here in the real world, the only world that we’re likely to get. We will ask for intervention from the only beings we know can possibly provide it: our fellow humans; and we will in turn provide aid to the best of our human abilities without wasting time in prayer.
If you were one of the good christians, that’s what you would be doing, too.
@flex
I don’t know who you’re arguing against, but it’s certainly not the classical tradition of natural theology that stems from Plato, Aristotle and the Neo-Platonists, and expanded upon by the Scholastic philosophers. That’s the tradition that Feser works within, and that’s the tradition that he ably and rigorously explains and defends. (Even if you end up disagreeing with him, he’ll actually help you understand it as it is, and not some caricature.)
This tradition revolves around metaphysical arguments, not to the exclusion of empirical inquiry but as a broad framework within which to understand empirical data. In its attempt to demonstrate basic and broad truths about the fundamental nature of reality through empirical premises and deductive logic, it’s a tradition that’s both rationalist and empiricist.
Now, if your epistemology precludes metaphysical demonstrations, then yes, you might not be motivated to study it. However, you need to justify your prior epistemological commitment as to why only empirical inquiry yields knowledge. Feser shows how this sort of crude empiricism fails and how metaphysics generates real knowledge.
So, in the Scholastic tradition, the empirical method of formulating testable hypotheses and using probabilistic reasoning to understand causal processes and intervene in them for predictive and technological purposes is one facet of rational inquiry. Metaphysical demonstration, akin to geometric proofs, is another. It’s arguments of the latter kind that Feser deals with.
I am currently reading a textbook on neurology, a mathematics book on category theory, and a variety of books on history. I may live another ten or fifteen years. The number of books that I will be able to read grows smaller every day. Why in hell should I spend part of my life reading the book in question? It is on a subject that doesn’t interest me from a point of view that I find noxious and infertile.
I was religious (non-xian) for a few decades. I grew up and moved past it. I spent many years thinking about god and the nature of reality. I eventually realized that I no longer believed in god and stopped spending time on reading about religion from the point of view of a believer or seeker. I still enjoy reading about the history of religion, for I find people and our myths fascinating. One book that I reread every few years is on the history of ancient Greek religions.
I have no interest in learning what a believer thinks about gods or most anything else (yes, religious belief is that damaging to thought and ethics). It doesn’t matter to me in the least whether any god exists. We have invented very few gods that wouldn’t utterly offend me if they were realized. If your god turned out to be real, I would be its implacable enemy.
You want me to read something. Its subject does not interest me.
You want me to engage you in a meaningful discussion on your religion and your purported “proof of God”. Nothing you have written suggest that you are worthy of my time. I don’t think that I have anything to learn from you. There is no point in giving you an opportunity to proselytize and harangue me. I am quite content to live my life unaware of your continued existence.
You want me to lend you credibility by engaging with you as if we are equals. We are not.
I wish Dr. Seuss had written a book, resonant with Green Eggs and Ham, that contained “I will not read your silly book…”
@hotshoe_:
“More hypocrisy.”
Honey, you clearly need to calm down. Maybe take some xanax. And actually *read* people’s arguments. My comment was made in the context of flex’s argument of what would make up an effective argument for God’s existence, and it is to be understood in that context; it has nothing to do with prayer, or the Christian conception prayer, or of its uses and values. Look, you quite obviously cannot handle rational argumentation, so why not go away and do something more productive? Like banging your empty skull against the wall?
“If you were one of the good christians, that’s what you would be doing, too.”
Oh God, not again. Would you be so kind and spare me your histrionics about “better christians”? A few rounds of those were quite enough, thank you. Call it pride, but neither do I receive, nor do I give a rat’s ass about, sermons about being a “good christian” from hysterical, ignorant atheists.
grodrigues says @151,
Fair enough. But what has not been established in this thread is why I should care about the classical tradition. Or why Mano should care about the classical tradition.
If the entire reason for Feser’s book is to attempt to re-write metaphysical arguments for the modern age, then I don’t need it.
However, from Zob’s comment @153,
Which really sounds like it’s in category three of my earlier classification. So, what part of the difference between classical epistemology and modern epistemology am I missing?
@Complexity:
“Why in hell should I spend part of my life reading the book in question? It is on a subject that doesn’t interest me from a point of view that I find noxious and infertile.”
This is getting more surreal with each passing comment. Do not want to read the damned book? Don’t. You are not interested in such books and I am not interested in your opinions on religion, God or such books, that is why I stopped reading your comment after only a couple of paragraphs. See? No problem at all.
So in the end, we get to a metaphysics that says cooked wheat is Jesus flesh because a priest cast a +1 transubstantiation spell. The same old rehashed Substance and bulldust. Remember, Jesus is God (trinity) and is man (incarnation), so God is interventionist, and you’ll say no, or whatever. But it’s all bulldust. The devout (and not so devout) pray to Saints to intervene on behalf with God, who performs miracles, but that’s not interventionist somehow. Even though the Pope creates saints because of miracles from God, God’s not intervening. Sigh. And yes, if you’re not Catholic, you can say that doesn’t apply, but that’s the tradition of Aquinas.
grodrigues says
I bet you say that to all the cute boys. Does it ever work? Does it ever get you laid?
Brian English,
Exactly.
but I think you’re not trying hard enough, because you haven’t gotten called “hysterical” yet. I don’t see that you’ve gotten “ignorant” yet either.
You have to work harder to piss off the god-botherers. 🙂
@flex:
“But what has not been established in this thread is why I should care about the classical tradition. Or why Mano should care about the classical tradition.”
Given that the classical tradition is not only the historically mainstream part of Christianity, the tradition of the Catholic church, of the Orthodox churches, of a significant portion of the Protestant churches, etc. accounting for about two thirds of Christianity (I may have the exact numbers wrong here; apologies for that); that it is the tradition of Plato, Aristotle, the neo-Platonists, many philosophical deists; that it is also the mainstream tradition of the other two main monotheistic religions of Islam and Judaism, I would have thought that it was the more juicy target for atheist debunkers.
Apparently, I have been wrong all this time and what they want is to debunk Pastor Bob down at the local shack. Do not let me stop you.
“If the entire reason for Feser’s book is to attempt to re-write metaphysical arguments for the modern age, then I don’t need it.”
Of course, you don’t. You might run the risk of learning something about what you do not believe in. What you want is a big gap, or something like a road-to-Damascus experience. Well, I cannot give you that, sorry. Nice talking to you though; no trading of insults was a nice change of pace.
Complexity says:
Yep, if their god were real, it would be the duty of every human being to resist it to death — and beyond if possible.
No decent human being could ever forgive their god of genocide rape and child torture.
Fortunately for us, there is no sign that their god is real. Only the hatred which believing in their god has stirred up in them is real.
grodrigues says
Haha, you gotta love a christian who says something like that!
“So in the end, we get to a metaphysics that says cooked wheat is Jesus flesh because a priest cast a +1 transubstantiation spell.”
Ah the moron that named-dropped Sobel makes his appearance. Given the quality of his comments, it is quite clear that he never actually read him, not in any of the deeper senses of reading and understanding.
By the way, if anyone asks me what is the best case for atheism currently in print, Sobel’s “Logic and Theism” is probably it. He is a formidable philosopher, and while of course I ultimately disagree with (some of) his arguments, he is always interesting, valuable and definitely worth reading.
You’re so sweet. It’s interesting that in replying to a comment about substance and transubstantiation, and how God is interventionist, according to church doctrine, the response is personal abuse. Interesting.
I take it that you hold the church wrong, that in Mass, when a priest performs the sacrement of Communion, the substance of the the wafer doesn’t transubstantiate, and become the body of Christ then? And the wine the blood?
@Brian English:
“I take it that you hold the church wrong, that in Mass, when a priest performs the sacrement of Communion, the substance of the the wafer doesn’t transubstantiate, and become the body of Christ then? And the wine the blood?”
You are pulling my leg, right?
That’s Catholic doctrine. That’s why it’s called Transubstantiation (metaphysical Substance changing). That’s the tradition of Aquinas.
Dr. Mano Singham wrote: “If, as George says, Feser is appealing to features of everyday life as evidence, then Feser can no longer claim that the existence of his god can be established by means of purely rational arguments (his words) but is appealing to empirical evidence.”
We have to distinguish between “purely rational” and “a priori” arguments. For any Christian, the rational demonstration of God’s existence and attributes is not a priori but a posteriori, after the existence and features of the universe. In the words of the Apostle Paul: “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made,” (Rom 1:20).
@Brian English:
“That’s Catholic doctrine. That’s why it’s called Transubstantiation (metaphysical Substance changing). That’s the tradition of Aquinas.”
Let’s see. You offer a mocking parody of the transubstantiation, an issue that has absolutely nothing to do with the OP, which is Prof. Feser’s book on arguments for God’s existence, merely as a gotcha question. Then you call it a “comment”. I mean, it takes real chutzpah. And then you turn around and pretend to make a serious question, as if you actually cared for any answer I could give. Do you think I am going to waste a single word with a Frankfurtean bullshitter like you? Who the hell do you take me for?
We all take you for the self-admtted jackass whose head is so far up Feser’s rear that you haven’t seen daylight in a year.
And a liar, of course, also self-demonstrated.
Because as you say to Brian English:
you follow immediately with eight more words to Brian English.
Oh, wait, you didn’t waste a “single” word. Is that your get-out-free card? That your indignant question is literally true and you’re not lying because it was not a single word, it was eight?
Game over.
You might as well pick up your marbles and go home for real this time, instead of continuing to lie about not responding any further.
Dr. Mano Singham wrote:
“George suggests that we can arrive at true statements about the world in other ways using just premises and arguments, saying that in order to do so, “The premises must be justified as true and the argument valid for the conclusion to be true”. Therein lies the problem. It has long been known (starting with the work of Kurt Godel) that it is impossible for any non-trivial system to establish the validity of both those necessary conditions, and hence the goal of arriving at a system that is both complete and consistent and thus can establish unequivocally true statements is unattainable.”
Acute observation indeed, as all classical arguments for the existence of God have as premise the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) [1], which states that “there is a sufficient reason or adequate necessary objective explanation for the being of whatever is and for all attributes of any being” [2], or alternatively that “for every fact F, there must be an explanation why F is the case” [3].
Thus, the classical argument from contingency, from the obvious fact that the universe is contingent and PSR, gets to God (the God of classical theism, not any other entity) as the necessary metaphysical explanation of the universe. On the other hand, the Kalam argument, from the (increasingly more evident) fact that the universe started to exist at a certain time and PSR, gets to God as the necessary physical explanation of the universe.
Now, if the God of classical theism exists, PSR is true and so the system “is both complete and consistent”!
References
[1] http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2014/11/voluntarism-and-psr.html
“Now if PSR is false, then the principle of causality is threatened as well, since if things are ultimately unintelligible, there is no reason to think that a potency might not be actualized even though there is nothing actual to actualize it and thus that something contingent, like the universe, might just be without any cause at all. But then it would not be possible to argue from the world to God as cause of the world.”
[2] Bernard Wuellner, Dictionary of Scholastic Philosophy, p. 15.
[3] Melamed, Yitzhak and Lin, Martin, “Principle of Sufficient Reason”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2015/entries/sufficient-reason/
Brian English says
They hate it when we mess with their crackers, don’t they? 🙂
I’ve been speculating today that Feser specifically sent some of his minions to attack Mano because of the connection with PZ — the connection via freethoughtblogs, that is. While a wad like Feser has too many casual critics for him to attack all of them, he’s the kind of angry Catholic who would still be carrying a grudge from PZ’s cracker-nailing a decade ago, and I can easily see Feser targeting anyone who gives him an opening in the vicinity of his enemy PZ.
I’m certainly not going to Feser’s disgusting blog to see how he phrased it; whether it was some specific statement like “go tell that Freethought idiot what you think of him” or something more general — in which case it’s just our luck that goddy grodriguez, Zob, and whasshisname each independently decided to attack Mano’s relatively modest blog.
Ya wanna know what’s really going to piss them off? Pope Francis has been accused of heresy in a 25-page document signed by 60 priests and scholars.
Hahahahhahahahahahah ahhahhahhahh.
Way to go, boys! Way to go!
“I’ve been speculating today that Feser specifically sent some of his minions to attack Mano because of the connection with PZ — the connection via freethoughtblogs, that is. While a wad like Feser has too many casual critics for him to attack all of them, he’s the kind of angry Catholic who would still be carrying a grudge from PZ’s cracker-nailing a decade ago, and I can easily see Feser targeting anyone who gives him an opening in the vicinity of his enemy PZ.”
Oh dear, now the kook is having a delusional episode. Someone call 911, please. Restraining jackets will be needed.
You’re claiming that the Substance in TransSubstantiation has nothing to do with Aquinas metaphysics, and so Feser’s metaphysics? OK, whatever. There’s a limit to how much of your tediousness I can tolerate. It’s a pity you never offered a clear precise of how this time Feser offered something novel, but not a surprise.
Who is having a delusional episode. g-boy? Evidence is, it’s you, for claiming that my speculation in a blog post could ever possibly warrant a 911-and-restraining-jacket response.
Even for a self-admitted hypocrite, jackass, and liar like you, that’s really over the top.
That’s just plain bizarre for you to think that, much less expose your bizarre thought to the public as you do.
Carry on, tho, please do, every moment you waste on writing evidence-less bizarre things about me is one less moment you could be interacting with a human who has the bad luck to live in your vicinity.
@flex
As you can see, the majority of comments here are juvenile so thanks for engagement.
What precipitated this thread was the fact that Mano wrote about Feser’s book while proudly admitting that he never read it, has no intention to read it, and doesn’t think he needs to read it to have and express an informed opinion about it. Anyone, atheist or theist, should take issue with such an anti-intellectual approach. So this wasn’t about “Christians” hijacking a conversation, marketing a book or randomly advocating for classical natural theology but calling out a rational, intelligent person for anti-rational, unintelligent behavior. So Mano should care about the classical tradition insofar as he wrote a post dismissing a book about the classical tradition, a book that he didn’t bother to read.
@flex wrote: “Which really sounds like it’s in category three of my earlier classification. So, what part of the difference between classical epistemology and modern epistemology am I missing?”
It’s not quite your third category b/c it’s a combination of deductive logic and empirical premises. The classical tradition builds metaphysical arguments on basic empirical realities such as causation, change, motion, and the intelligible basis of reality. All of these things are presupposed by science, so they can’t be fully addressed by science insofar as that would be circular since they’re essential to scientific inquiry itself. So understanding them and their corollaries falls into the domain of metaphysics. Science can’t wish metaphysical issues away.
@flex wrote: “Fair enough. But what has not been established in this thread is why I should care about the classical tradition. ”
I would say you should care about the classical tradition b/c
-- it deals with basic and inescapable metaphysical issues that are of profound importance to all aspects of our worldview, and deals with them in a compelling way
-- you should care about the history of ideas, especially such a deep, rich and consequential tradition
-- it’s a tradition that aims at clarity, precision and rigor
-- it’s a tradition that offers the best possible arguments for God, so if it’s conclusively refuted, it would be the closest thing to a definitive refutation of classical theism
I don’t agree with a lot of Feser’s conclusions -- particularly around natural law -- but I’m thankful for his clear exposition and defense of an important, often misunderstood and unjustifiably maligned thought tradition.
So, I’m not a Christian or even a religious believer, generally. But I’m someone who enjoys philosophy and I do think Feser is worth reading. Obviously no one HAS to read any book if they don’t want to, but I’ve profited enormously from reading him. I’m REALLY not a fan of his conservative politics, but I’ve learned much about arguments that I had long misunderstood.
@hotshoe_:
“Even for a self-admitted hypocrite, jackass, and liar like you”
Are you better now, honey? Did the frothing at the mouth stopped?
By the way, I never admitted to being a hypocrite and a jackass. The expression I used was “The most you can squeeze out is that I am a hypocrite and a jackass” which is a clarification about the possible conclusions that can be drawn from my behavior, not an admission of anything. And what I certainly did not admit, implicitly or explicitly, was to being a liar. Ever. So you uttered a falsehood. If intentionally and maliciously, then you lied. But you know what? I really couldn’t care less. Go in peace and take care.
Since I did prove you were a liar within one single sentence of yours — see above — my conscience is completely clear. I uttered no falsehood, and you claiming I did makes you a ….
fill in the blank, care-less g-boy.
Zob:
Actually, he wrote about the press release’s claims about the book. There’s a link to that post in the OP.
—
Rob @128, thanks for the feedback.
Zob wrote @177,
I see, so the classical tradition assumes that change, motion, and causation cannot be fully explained by science because they are presumed by science to exist? But that does not really explain why they cannot be used, studied, and explained by scientific inquiry and must be explained in a metaphysical sense. That is similar to saying that we cannot study the formulation of arithmetic because we have to use numbers to do so. On the contrary, we can use numbers to study arithmetic, we have. We have also used other tools. From this work we have developed quite a few higher level laws to explain how arithmetic works. All this without resorting to an invocation of deity which handed down the laws of arithmetic to his chosen people.
To get back to Feser though, his claim is that by studying metaphysics he can generate a proof of the existence of god. The problem is not that he is using metaphysics, but that he is using metaphysics on a topic for which no concrete evidence exists. Which means that contrary to your claim that Feser is using a tool which is
he is abandoning the empirical premises and focusing on the deductive logic. Thus my point stands, his arguments appear to be firmly in the third category of my earlier categorization, even if he stresses the usefulness of the evidence to support his argument.
Every place Feser can stand to provide empirical evidence for the existence of god (through his metaphysical argument) can either be explained without needing the existence of god, or is insufficiently understood at the present day. I presume that Feser argues that all other explanations are faulty, but that’s only half the task. Feser has also to explain why the only explanation acceptable for the evidence he uses requires the existence of god. There is no known irrefutable evidence for the existence of a deity, which means that all metaphysical arguments which rely on evidence to show the existence of a deity can also be constructed in a fashion which does not require the existence of a deity. Or a different deity. A similar metaphysical argument using inconclusive empirical evidence could be used to prove the existence of the entire Hindu pantheon. Yes, the arguments would need to be adapted. But when you rest such arguments on inconclusive empirical evidence, you can build a lot of different castles in the sky.
The upshot of using empirical evidence which can be interpreted in many ways in a metaphysical argument is that the metaphysical argument is no longer relying on empirical evidence. Religious arguments doing this are generally called apologetics (AKA speculative theology), which is an art-form in itself. BTW, I’m not picking on your deity. I’ve encountered bad metaphysical arguments which make no mention of a deity. I was once handed a paper at an SF convention where the author assured me that it proved that all objects in the universe were aware. His mistake, which took some work to find, was that he confounded the mathematical and social meanings of the word “identity”, probably cause by a combination of poor maths skills and the amount of weed he smoked. But his 90-page, poorly-xeroxed, paper is still in my files as an example to me of how faulty premises can lead to absurd conclusions.
I do not presume to know, or even speculate, where I would take issue with Feser’s arguments. 30 years ago, when I was evaluating these questions myself I may have been interested. I’m no longer interested in such questions, I’ve made my peace with them. After studying philosophy I spent another decade reading about the nature of consciousness and the structure of the brain, and concluded that there is no good evidence for mind-brain duality. Which kind of puts the kibosh on the whole soul thing, and puts a lot of holes into the belief of an afterlife. If there is one, I’ll certainly be surprised.
I’m going to stop responding to this thread. I might read responses, I don’t think I could be human if I didn’t have that much curiosity. But I’ll steel myself to reply no more. My work today suffered as I thought about the ideas floating around in this comment section. Although I do appreciate the enjoyment I get out of engaging with minds who think differently than my own. I also appreciate being reminded of some of the ideas I was studying so long ago, even if I ultimately rejected them as unsound. Not that I expect you to eventually come to the same conclusions I did. We all weigh the world differently and I’ve been wrong enough times in my life that being wrong (or right) doesn’t matter too much to me anymore. Instead I’ve come to believe that enabling joy and reducing pain is more important than being right or wrong. And as an atheist, I’ve only got one chance to help these things happen, my lifetime.
Thanks for the discussion.
flex:
I personally think it’s abductive logic — the weakest form of inference, but one which is always available (unlike the other two).
@flex
Best of luck in your journey.
@John Morales
Abductive reasoning is inference to the best explanation, which is probabilistic, so it wouldn’t be the sort of inference involved in a classically conceptualized metaphysical argument since the inferences are presented as having the force of deductive necessity, similar to mathematical demonstration.
The whole issue really turns on the question of whether a metaphysical demonstration is possible, and if so, whether it can lead to non-trivial knowledge.
Zob, nope. Not probabilistic, but speculative.
(NonStampCollector sums it up rather amusingly: The thing that made the things for which there is no known maker.)
@john morales
There are three forms of inference -- inductive, deductive and abductive. Abductive is a broad category of inference-to-the-best-explanation type inferences. This isn’t controversial.
Metaphysical arguments purport to demonstrate very basic facts about reality through deductive inference.
Your video link is a non-sequitur.
Zob:
Really?
The unmoved mover; the uncaused cause; the non-contingent instantiation (to take a few); you really imagine they are not abductive?
(heh)
Ahem.
Some metaphysical arguments purport to demonstrate very basic facts about reality through deductive inference.
(Love it!)
Bottom line: the putative omniscient omnipotent deity either wants me to believe in its veridical existence, or it doesn’t care either way, or it does not.
Fact: I don’t believe in its existence, other than in the minds of believers.
(What is the best explanation here?)
BTW, I have no problem accepting the weak anthropic principle.
(Which is metaphysics)
@John Morales
You sent me a shitty cartoon that straw mans the shit out of the actual Aristotelian-Thomistic arguments from motion, causation and contingency.
“So, if everything has to have a cause, who caused God?” (OOoooooh shiiiiiiit….so ssmaaaaaaart)
I’m going to take it on faith (heh) that you actually want to understand A-T arguments, and not some bullshit disfigured caricature of them.
1. A-T arguments don’t rely on the principle “everything has a cause.” Only that “some things have a cause.”
2. A-T arguments purport to show, through separate arguments based on (a) contingency, (b) causation, and (c) motion, that there must, of necessity, be a (i) necessarily existing existent, (ii) an uncaused cause and (iii) an unmoved mover
3. A-T arguments don’t stipulate (i to iii) out of nowhere, they show, through deductive argumentation, how (a to c) necessarily entails (i to iii)
4. A-T arguments aren’t committed to either a created universe or an infinite one; the unmoved mover and first cause aren’t temporal, in the sense of being the first in a chain, but are the basis for movement and motion, change and causation at all times
5. A-T arguments use the concept of motion and causation in a broad sense that goes beyond the usual notion of motion as simply moving from once place to another, or as causation as just efficient causation (i.e. the cue caused the billiard ball to move); motion is understood in a broadly metaphysical sense as change from potentiality to actuality, and causation includes formal, efficient, material and final causation.
6. A-T arguments purport to show, through a deductive chain of inference, that (i to iii) necessarily must have the qualities of immateriality, eternality, supreme goodness and other attributes normally associated with classical theism.
If you want to see the actual arguments in detail, then you can read Feser given his clear writing and philosophical felicity.
Or, you can watch shitty cartoons that respond to arguments that no Aristotelian-Thomist has ever actually argued.
@hotshoe_says #102: “Oh, honey, I knew you would prevaricate if you tried to answer my honest question. / The reason why it is an honest question / why the fuck are you NOT a Catholic? / is because you were the one to identify yourself as not-a-Catholic to begin with. If that were not relevant to discussing Feser, why the fuck did you even mention it?”
The reason why I mentioned my not being Catholic was because that was a proper response to the accusation made against me, to which I was replying. You may recall reading in the post yesterday, to which I explicitly referred (Brian English #75), that Brian English said:
“Look out, he’s going rogue!”
…after which he quote-mined the Catholic Encyclopedia. Of course the accusation that I had “gone rogue” would make sense only if Brian English thought I was going rogue from something that Brian English thought followed from an obligation imposed upon me by the Catholic Encyclopedia; and that would be possible only if I were Catholic, which he assumed for no good reason that I am. And so the reply from me that I am not Catholic was exactly to the point.
On the other hand, the reason why I am not a Catholic has nothing to do either with the original subject (which was about Dr. Singham’s response to Dr. Feser), nor the question from Owlmirror which Brian English interrupted with his accusation (“Once again, Feser fans: / Is God a person?”)--which is why I pointed out to you that your own question was wildly beside the point, since it addressed nothing either originally in dispute, nor anything further disputed by me (to whom you addressed your question). I further explained to you four reasons why that was so, to none of which you have even pretended to reply.
Of course, you are being merely sloppy when you claim falsely that any dispute on this page has been so rudderlessly broad as “discussing Feser”, which imaginary discussion, you would note if you were careful, could include anything at all about him, from his hair color to his favorite pastries. I suspect it is such sloppiness which led you to confuse the subject of my response to Brian English with the earlier subject of the dispute on this page, and both of those with your hobbyhorse regarding names and pronouns (hotshoe_ says #89).
You did not claim, and I did not dispute, that your question was an *honest* one. You claimed (hotshoe_ says #89), and I disputed (laubadetriste #93), that your question was a *serious* one. Would you like to withdraw your choice of words and choose another?
While you’re at it, are there any other words you would like to withdraw and change?
“If his arguments in favor of (some christian version) monotheistic god are so wonderful, then where do you draw the line? How is it that you imagine Feser to be a wise man whom everyone should read/listen to regarding proofs of god, but not wise enough to set an example for all of us regarding which church to join? Where does he go wrong, in your mind? He’s right about philosophy in general, but wrong about Christianity being closer to god’s truth than Islam? He’s got the correct theology, but his ritualistic Catholic behavior is to be ignored at best, or perhaps pitied for going too far?”
Of course, in that paragraph you merely repeat some of the flaws which I previously identified as marking an unserious question, viz., numbers 1 and 2 (laubadetriste #93); while also further confusing yourself regarding whether some arguments are “wonderful”, regarding whether Dr. Feser is “wise”, regarding whether Dr. Feser sets “an example”, regarding the choice of churches, regarding whether Dr. Feser is “right about philosophy in general” (whatever that is supposed to mean), and so on. It should go without saying, but evidently does not in this case, that the way to bring your question to the point is not to ask a bunch of other questions which are also wildly beside the point. I previously noted your making no argument whatsoever (not even a bad argument) for anything that might render your question to the point; a serious response would at least gesture in the general direction of an argument.
@johan morales
“Ahem.
Some metaphysical arguments purport to demonstrate very basic facts about reality through deductive inference.
(Love it!)”
Yes, purport. Before evaluating the soundness of an argument (logical validity + truth of premises) you have to clearly understand what it’s purporting to do and how. Metaphysical arguments purport to do exactly what I said. Whether they achieve it is another question. To do that, you’ll actually have to carefully review them, not mock them and rely on bullshit straw man distortions.
Zob:
So, Feser is the first person to write these supposedly compelling arguments?
Either I shell out $, or I miss out, right? You write as if there were something novel about his arguments, which are not to be found other than by spending money.
(Ah well, those without the disposable cash just have to miss out on the purported proofs he provides)
So you claim that no Aristotelian-Thomist has ever actually argued that there must be a maker for the things for which there is no known maker. OK.
(It amuses me you focus on the form, not on the content)
—
You know what the biggest problem with this mindset is? I will tell you: teleology.
(Can you even imagine that there is no purpose, no end-goal to existence?)
PS
Such naivety! Those are two separate things.
Any argument can be expressed in symbolic logic. One can evaluate the validity of the logic under a particular set of rules of inference by assuming that the premises are true and seeing whether the conclusion follows from those rules.
@Marcus Ranum 100: “A convincing proof of god’s existence and christian nature ought to be succinct and straightforward (otherwise, nobody can be expected to understand it)… […] If it’s such a good argument and it was convincing to you, it must have been clear and comprehensible even to an idiot. So it ought to be pretty easy to explain to a non-idiot.”
I speculate one reason why some folks demand a SparkNotes version of Dr. Feser’s book be reproduced here on this page is that they are careless what proofs are. One can see repeated, for example by Marcus Ranum in the lines I just quoted, several seeming examples of such.
For example, proofs are not expected to be “convincing”--they are expected to be valid and, furthermore, sound. Being “convinced” is a psychological fact of no particular significance to a proof, and the relations that hold between steps of a proof are not psychological ones. (And contrariwise, of course, people are “convinced” all the time by things that aren’t proofs, as well as prevented from being “convinced” by things that also aren’t proofs.)
Marcus equivocates there between “proof” and “argument”, using sometimes one, sometimes the other. Besides not being identical, of course each has broader and narrower meanings which do not always overlap. Sometimes he uses a narrow meaning of one as a sort of club to attack a broader meaning of the other. (The attentive reader will note how his resembles the use of what Daniel Dennett called a “deepity”.) As a matter of historical fact, many “convincing” arguments (“convincing” in the sense that they convinced tens or hundreds of millions of people) have been neither “succinct” nor “straightforward”, in the senses now demanded on this page of Dr. Feser’s arguments. One could multiply examples, from Paine’s *Common Sense*, to Darwin’s *Origin of Species* (“One Long Argument”), to Euclid’s *Elements*, to Marx’s *Capital*. That is the wiggle room Marcus gives himself by demanding to be “convinced” by a “proof”/”argument”. This wiggle room is of course enlarged further by willy-nilly claiming that a proof must be “good”, “clear”, and “comprehensible”, which, besides being quite different from each other and from the previous requirements, are also not expected of proofs as proofs, notably because of how vague all those terms are, and again, how irrelevantly psychological.
The idea that any “clear” and “comprehensible” proof ought to be “pretty easy to explain to a non-idiot” is of course false, as can be shown by teaching a proof to a class of intelligent students. Teaching, say, Euclid 1.47 (the Pythagorean Theorem, which was mentioned earlier on this page) from Euclid’s *Elements*, the most successful and longest-used textbook in history, will sometimes proceed just fine from Heath, will sometimes make little headway without the color diagrams by Byrne, and will sometimes take one deep into the wilds of the fifth postulate and Lewis Carroll (who wrote a book on that). Geometry famously has been a scene of great dispute for millennia, from the pons asinorum to Bolyai and beyond; yet most people demanding a capsule version of Dr. Feser’s book would consider geometry “clearer” and more “comprehensible” than philosophy. To which the obvious question presents itself: Why should one’s standards for how “convincing” a philosophical argument should be, be more stringent than one’s standards for how “convincing” a geometrical argument should be (as opposed to being valid, say, or sound)?
That question is somewhat rhetorical, of course, as to ask it is to answer it: the demand to be “convinced” is as blinkered as it is lazy. It is the demand (so to speak) of a student to be dragged kicking and screaming into getting straight As, without having to do any homework, on the grounds that he is a student, and that therefore he has the right to be made to get straight As.
laubadetriste:
So, nobody has yet summarised Dr. Feser’s book, and seeking such a summary constitutes carelessness.
(It’s the full original copy or it’s nothing)
—
I’m pretty sure it’s not just me who thinks that all the verbiage in this thread by his apologists would have been better served by adumbrating even one of his arguments.
(Are the arguments really that dense that they cannot be summarised?)
—
laubadetriste:
There is no such demand; what we are seeking is the gist of but one of the five arguments.
(Too difficult for his followers, too expensive for him)
—
Seriously, if the matter were of such significance as is claimed, would it not be appropriate to put the claims into the public domain? Yes, Feser would miss out on $, but he would actually make his arguments (“proofs”) available to the community at large.
BTW, it’s interesting that he claims to justify an enumeration his God ‘s attributes, one of them being incomprehensibility.
(And by ‘interesting’, I mean ‘incoherent’. Perhaps he justifies this claim, unlikely as that is, but I will never know short of shelling out $ — obviously, his supporters aren’t in the mood to even attempt to summarise any of his arguments. Nope, no money from me to him)
I understand grodrigues’ point (#3) that not having read something seems like it should totally disqualifie you from commenting on it. But I happen to agree with grodrigues (#3) that you don’t have to read something to know with absolute certaintly that it’s total ungulate effluent.
[fun thread; it’s not that often these days that goddists venture to this site]
@David B.:
“I understand grodrigues’ point (#3) that not having read something seems like it should totally disqualifie you from commenting on it. But I happen to agree with grodrigues (#3) that you don’t have to read something to know with absolute certaintly that it’s total ungulate effluent.”
To quote myself from my reply #77 to Holms who made the exact same point you did:
“To quote myself from September 23, 2017 at 6:15 pm:
“But to repeat myself (and rereading myself, I was not clear enough), and to follow your own stellar example of intellectual probity, I already know for a fact the complete moronic character of your “atheist apologetics”, so there is no need to waste your words with me because I will not read them. What would be the use anyway? When the combox features an ignorant yahoo that takes the majority of mankind now living and that ever lived as suffering from a “delusional illness”, what dialogue could there be? Delusional madmen do not need arguments, they need therapy.”
Is the argument not clear or do I have to explain it to you in gruesome detail as if you were moron?”
@hotshoe_:
“Since I did prove you were a liar within one single sentence of yours”
What I disputed was not whether you allegedly proved I am a liar but whether I was a “self-admitted hypocrite, jackass, and liar”, in other words, whether I ever admitted to being a hypocrite, jackass and a liar, which of course I never did as I showed. So your alleged proof, even if correct, does nothing to refute my point that you uttered a falsehood.
“my conscience is completely clear”
Of course it is; how could it even be otherwise? Go in peace my child.
Reading the book’s Amazon reviews tells me that the only people convinced of Feser’s brilliance are the goddists themselves, and they come pre convinced. No true atheist will ever be convinced by such windy claptrap and I suspect that Feser never was one. That’s just a story for the gullible same as every other conversion story loved by the believers.
I’ve been really disappointed with the responses here. Yes, if defenders of Feser’s book wanted to, they could make a pretty brief summary of his arguments.
But what would be the point of this? There would be wrangling and objections over this and that premise in the argument, and replies to the objections…and you might as well read the book if you’re interested in all that.
@john morales
Your reading skills are obviously lacking, and your replies are so stupid and willfully ignorant that you’re simply not a worthy interlocutor. If this is the level of thinking and rational discourse that the atheist community produces….God help us.
My parting comment on this whole grotesque thread -- acquaint and familiarize yourself with the best representatives of your opponents and make a good faith effort to understand the best version of their argument, and then make up your mind -- otherwise, you’re just bloviating with your fly open.
I was reasoned out of my atheism by Feser’s account of the First Way about six years ago. It was a lukewarm atheism by then so I was much more receptive to the argument itself, and I was also amazed that what I rejected previously was really only a caricature.
dover_beach says
I hope at least that you have remained a decent human being in spite of becoming a Feser fanboi, altho he does seem to exude some sort of malware which infects the brains of his followers and turns them into trolls.
You seem okay so far.
John Morales says
Well that depends on what their purpose here might be.
— If their purpose were convincing people to buy Feser’s book — then their tactics have completely backfired.
— If their purpose were convincing people that Feser’s arguments are correct (or should be taken seriously as educational/interesting/good/valuable/sound arguments) — then likewise their tactics have failed.
— Since their actual purpose is to beat on atheists and show off their own supposed superiority — then they got what they came for and they have each declared victory in their own ways. From past experience with Feser’s minions I have little doubt they are congratulating themselves back home for how they handled the “moronic” atheists. Hooray, they win!
So, no, this thread would not be better served — from their PoV — if any of the Feser fanbois had made a good-faith attempt to represent one of his arguments.
At least we’ve had fun watching them show their true nature.
@hotshoe
I commented here to make the blindingly obvious point that one can’t have a sufficiently informed view of a book that they haven’t read. I know, you’re still trying to process that one.
Why would anyone summarize the arguments at your beck and command when many of you have proven that you can’t engage in good faith conversation and have no interest in even trying.
3 chapters of his book are available for free on Google Books -- the Aristotelian proof, the Neo-Platonic proof, and the Rationalist proof. Each chapter ends with an explicit step-by-step summary.
To make it even easier for you, here you go -- Google books link.
But you won’t read it. Because you’d rather posture than pursue truth.
What fools those Feser fanbois are.
What difference does it make if I ‘pursue truth”?
God either exists or it doesn’t.
If it exists, it is non-interventionist, or it is not.
If it is interventionist — all you have to do is show us specifically where/when/how.
Then I wouldn’t have to “pursue” truth; it would be visible to me and every other human being. No one would need faith, no one would “believe”; they would simply know, the same way we don’t “believe” in gravity and we all know it exists.
Of course, we all know — all including you — know that you cannot provide any valid evidence that god has ever intervened in our real world. If you could, you would have fronted it already.
If it is non-interventionist, that god has fuck all relevance to human lives. Why would anyone but an academic prig care about some god that has zero effect on our world? You could pay me enough money to care, I guess, but … you’re not offering money or any other reason why I should care about that worthless abstraction of a god.
And if it doesn’t exist, then we’re left exactly where we began with you fools who desperately wanting to believe and the rest of rational humanity saying, quite correctly, that it doesn’t matter in any case.
G’wan home, you’re useless.
@hotshoe
Too scared to read a few free pages online. Coward.
hahahahhah
you are even more stupid than I thought at first.
A) I read it and tell you I have done so. Now what? You pat me on the back (internet-wise) and say you’re glad I did?
B) I read it and tell you I have not done so. Now what? You continue in your stupid-troll tactic of calling me a coward?
C) I don’t read it and tell you I have done so. Now what? You believe me? You don’t believe me? What would your beliefs be based on?
D) I don’t read it and tell you I have not done so. Now what? Status quo ante. You continue in your stupid-troll tactic of calling me a coward?
Since I love to hear trolls like you call me “too scared” and “coward” I will pick either B or D.
How under god’s blue heaven do you think you are going to tell the difference? Is god going to tattle on me to you?
You are a fucking idiot.
Zob @210: I did read, well past the point it got boring. With this sort of nonsense, there is always a part you come to where the only response is “WTF? Where did that come from?”. In this case,
In other words, to keep the value of Fido’s existence ‘bit’ at 1, there must be something operating on it continuously, or it would flip to zero! Gibberish, freshly pulled from you know where.
Do we have an answer yet to whether God/ Religion is faith based -- No evidence/proof exists (in the conventionally accepted definition of evidence/proof) OR God/Religion is evidence/proof based -- faith is not really needed here.
Im also curious as to which God(s) is being proved here (I would rather spend my money on Batman comics than Feser’s work ) so unfortunately I cannot spend it on his book ) -- I find the abstract God almost pointless in its use in every day life. if someone could actually prove the religious God then it atleast would have some use in every day life
Sorry, I should have specified that I went straight to the Thomistic Proof.
Rob Grigjanis says
psst Rob, wanna have a little side bet that Zob comes back with one of those fake-nice things they say about how good it is to converse with someone who isn’t a “coward” and who doesn’t use bad words?
Except you did say “boring” about their hero’s writing, so that’s gotta sting a little. Maybe sting too much for Zob to keep his cool.
Well, you tried to play fair. Not your fault Feser is such a wanker. Other wankers sure do love him, tho.
deepak shetty says
quoted for truth.
Thanks!
Why is that a wtf moment? In the paragraph of which that sentence is a part, Feser is simply saying that another of the implications of existence being distinct from essence is not only that something other than Fido is required to bring Fido into being, namely his parents, but that this also holds true even once Fido comes in existence. This could only be a wtf moment if you hadn’t been following the argument thus far.
@Rob Grigjanis
Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics makes a basic distinction between essence and existence and this distinction is important to much of its reasoning. It’s actually a very common sensical distinction. It’s simply saying the essence of something (what it is) is distinct from its existence (whether it is). So we know the essence of a unicorn (horse-like creature with a horn) but we know it doesn’t exist. So we can distinguish between the essence of a thing and its existence as separate (the conclusion that the Thomistic conclusion is building to is that there NECESSARILY must be at least one thing where its essence and existence necessarily coincide).
The short illustrative blurb you quote is giving an example of a thing with an essence (Fido) that requires another already existing thing to give it existence since a non-existent essence can’t bring itself into existence.
Moreover, he’s making a distinction between (i) a temporal cause that can be pointed to in a causal chain to explain how something came into existence (Fido, in the quoted case) and (ii) what’s actually sustaining that very thing (Fido) in existence in the “here and now.”
Feser explains and clarifies this idea at great length in the book. So your remark that Feser “pulls it out of nowhere” is false. But it sounds like you found it “boring” and didn’t bother to read the whole chapter. But sincere kudos for checking it out.
@dover_beach:
I said in #138 (that is, at the moment of this writing, almost 90 comments ago) and I quote:
“And here is the gist: all the evidence available in this thread points to the fact that there is no one here, absolutely no one, that could *correctly* reconstruct the classical arguments for God’s existence, let alone point any flaws in it.”
This was true then, it is true now. And sadly, it will remain true in the future, at least in general and for this particular brand of atheists. There are many factors for why this is so (intellectual, cultural, psychological, etc.), but it is what it is.
dover_beach @219:
No, he simply says (paraphrasing) “everything I’ve said so far applies at all times”. Fine, but it does not follow that continuous maintenance of existence is required. It’s like saying a billiard ball needs a continuous force applied to it for it to keep moving after you hit it.
Zob @220:
What he’s not doing is providing any justification for (ii). One might say “air, heat, food, water, etc”, but that’s obviously not what Feser means, since taking this sustaining thing away would cause Fido to “blink out” of existence.
@Zob:
Since the atheists here have nothing useful or even mildly entertaining to contribute, allow me to go off-topic and make a small remark:
“Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics makes a basic distinction between essence and existence and this distinction is important to much of its reasoning. It’s actually a very common sensical distinction.”
This is true, but it should be remarked, in the interests of fairness, that it *is* a controversial thesis, even among Scholastics. For example, while Blessed Scotus or Suarez agree that there is a distinction, they do not agree that the distinction is, to keep things simple and avoid technical jargon, a distinction of the sort that allows one to make the type of argument that St. Thomas wants to make. That is, the problem is not so much whether there is a distinction, but whether the distinction is real as opposed to merely logical or virtual. Now, Thomists have a whole barrage of arguments so sustain the thesis (and in the interests of full disclosure, I side with them), but Scotists and Suarezians have theirs, and the debate very fast gets into very deep metaphysical waters.
Of the whole five arguments in Prof. Feser’s book, I would say that this is not only the hardest to grasp and the most abstract, but also because of that, the hardest and most difficult to defend.
It’s odd how one can simultaneously claim to be open to the evidence (even demanding evidence) while simultaneously settling on the comfortable ignorance of not cracking open the book.
I know, I know: It’s all nonsense anyway, so you have a reason not to want to read it.
But during moments of solitude, perhaps tucked in your bed at night as you think about the ways of the world, your gaze tracking the light and shadow on the ceiling, perhaps in such moments, don’t you wonder if maybe you really are just closed to the evidence, no different from a creationist who dismisses the evidence because it requires him to step outside his comfort zone?
Shouldn’t it bother the atheist (the rational, freethinking, skeptical, agnostic, atheist) that for all the dismissing of the book’s contents, no real refutation of the book is on hand?
These are cracks in the psychology of many atheists. And what’s peeking through is a little uncomfortable for atheism.
@Robert Grigjanis:
First, and for whatever is worth, my personal apologies to you since the opening salvo of my #224 is unduly harsh and unfair.
“No, he simply says (paraphrasing) “everything I’ve said so far applies at all times”. Fine, but it does not follow that continuous maintenance of existence is required.”
This is simply false, and dover-beach is quite correct. You are reading “existence” as “coming into being”, but what Aquinas is after in why things exist at all, in the here and now, not for the causes of their coming into being. It is no good saying that such does not need explanation (for say, the reasons adduced by Prof. Feser). Now, you ask why things couldn’t simply have existencial inertia? (*) Precisely because of the real distinction between essence and existence. If the distinction is real in the contingent beings of our experience, and no contingent thing can be the cause of its own existence, then contingents things need a cause of their own existence. But this whole argument does *not* rely on any temporal modality, there are no temporal terms or operators in it, because what is at stake is not the coming into being but existence full stop.
(*) Prof. Feser wrote a whole article attacking the thesis of existential inertia.
grodrigues @226: First, no worries. Water off a duck’s back.
No, I thought Feser was quite clear on that. I pictured it as a bit, apart from essence (which I read, more or less, as a possibly partial list of properties, excluding the existence bit), which is either 0 or 1. “coming into being” is the bit changing from 0 to 1, I suppose.
Yeah, that’s basically the bit I quoted in #214. And it still looks like verbal sleight of hand. Pardon the temporal terms, but: Fido can’t cause his existence, his existence persists in some time interval, therefore some external cause is required to maintain his existence over that interval. The requirement of a continuous cause seems to be assumed.
Anyway, I don’t think it’s the article you’re referring to (this one?), but I’ll have a look at Feser’s The medieval principle of motion and the modern principle of inertia (here) in the next day or two. Looks readable.
@grodigues
Thanks for that note and clarification. Definitely important to see that Scholasticism has vigorous internal debate. I definitely agree that it’s the most abstract of the arguments and can easily befuddle.
@Rob Grigjanis
I can definitely see the issue that you’re seeing. But honestly I think reading the whole chapter on that section will help.
In any event, here’s my attempt, re: (ii), Feser calls it “hierarchical causation” (if i’m wrong, some one please correct me), and what he means by that is that there actually are continuous sustaining causes for Fido to exist any one time. And these sustaining causes are themselves sustained by “lower” causes that sustain them, but that can’t go on for infinity, and so there must be, at all times, a sustaining cause that itself is not in need of a cause to have it shift from potentiality to actuality, and therefore this sustaining cause must be pure actuality -- which is what sustains all other causes, at all times, that are a mix of potentiality and actuality.
Feser has used a few concrete examples to illustrate this (a hand moving a stick which in turn in near simultaneity moves a stone; a coffee cup that’s held up by a table, that’s held up by the floor, that’s held up by the earth). (ii) is atemporal insofar as you have a hierarchical sequence of simultaneous sustaining conditions, each of which needs the antecedent one to move from potentiality to actuality.
A. If (ii) can’t go on for infinity, then we have to admit a sustaining cause that is pure actuality. If we concede this, then he deduces the traits that pure actuality would have.
B. If (ii) can go on for infinity, then we can’t deduce a pure actuality and the argument doesn’t succeed.
Just to note, he says -- and he’s drawing on Aquinas -- that a temporal causal sequence can be potentially infinite, but a hierarchical causal sequence, like (ii), can’t be. But since (ii) is more fundamental than temporal causal sequences (given that temporal causal sequences always include (ii) each step of the way), then we can deduce a pure actuality which keeps all things from “blinking out of existence” -- like Fido.
I know, a little heady, but honestly selective reading of that chapter won’t be edifying.
If I had infinite time and money , I could agree with the sentiment being expressed here.
But I don’t. As analogies consider perhaps Perpetual motion machines or Intelligent design. if someone claims to have created a perpetual motion machine or now has the definitive work that “proves” Intelligent design -- would I waste my time and money on it ? Unlikely , that does not mean that we are not open minded -- just that the bar is quite high.
a. Been there done that -- fool me once shame on you , fool me twice , shame on me. I’ve seen what passes for proof of God.
b. Provide a concise summary of what is new / different about the book and maybe, maybe (though not likely) I might read the book. I’ve been burned by slogging through for e.g. Paul Tillich -- wondering , forget me -the non believer , but does even a religious person hold to the views being expressed.
c. If it is really ground breaking work then I’m sure i will hear of it.
@Zob, that’s the fallacy of composition mentioned earlier in the thread. It doesn’t follow that because somethings have a cause, the existence/universe has a cause.
@Rauss, I dismiss Norse Gods, Quetzocoatl wihout reading the books and so do you, doesn’t that reveal something unformfortable for your theism?
@Brian English
You’re tossing a random stock objection that doesn’t apply to the specific argument being discussed.
Also, saying something commits the fallacy of composition doesn’t make it so. There are instances where parts have properties that wholes don’t have (rectangular bricks assembled into an arch over a doorway); where parts don’t have properties that the whole has (water is wet and made up of atoms but atoms aren’t wet); where parts and wholes necessarily have the same properties (each individual hair on a lion is yellow so its fur is yellow).
When charging the fallacy of composition you have to show which category is being applied and why.
Zob @228: I recognized, and have read about before, hierarchical causation, and it’s distinction from temporal causation.
To me, it seems to be about the creative use of language rather than a path to wisdom about the Universe and God. So, A’s potential to exist is actualized by B, whose potential to exist is actualized by C, and so on (not necessarily temporally). If the chain is not infinite, the first actualizer doesn’t need to have its existence actualized, so its existence is not potential.
At bottom, I have a profound sense that mere language combined with our rather limited intuitions about how “stuff” works cannot possibly lead us to transcendent wisdom. The utility, if not the beauty, of language pretty much hit its peak with “shit faster, there’s a bear coming!”.
“its” not “it’s”. Im t’ired.
Causation is what we call the emergent property of matter/energy interacting. Whethere it’s you pushing something, or gas moving, etc. It is not something extra, nothing metaphysical there, just a term we use to organize natural phenomena around us. This is done and dusted.
But you’re trying to polish a pre-modern metaphysic that posits that causation is something extra. You need this to show that like causation of you pushing something, there’s more than just the interaction of energy, there’s a cause and effect that’s like an extra object that exists, then you say that this cause-effect must have an end, or be infinite. But since cause and effect are terms we use to describe the interaction of matter, that is like money, something like a social category we’ve agreed upon to categorize the world and make it more intelligible to our minds, you can’t say the universe is caused like you can say a rock falling on your head caused the headache.
@John Morales #197: “‘I speculate one reason why some folks demand a SparkNotes version of Dr. Feser’s book be reproduced here on this page is that they are careless what proofs are.’ / So, nobody has yet summarised Dr. Feser’s book, and seeking such a summary constitutes carelessness. / (It’s the full original copy or it’s nothing)”
Of course, a *summary* is different from a *proof* or an *argument*, which are the terms I borrowed from Marcus Ranum to use in my prior post (laubadetriste #196). Do you claim now to want merely a summary of Dr. Feser’s book? Very well, here is a summary of his book:
In his book, Dr. Feser defends five arguments derived from classical thought, which aim to prove the existence of God, and also addresses common objections to them.
There you go. Are you satisfied with a summary, less than the “full original copy” of the book, yet more than “nothing”? I suspect not. The major reason I suspect you are not satisfied with it is that while you implied you wanted a summary, in fact you wanted more than a summary. Rather, you wanted an amalgam of summary and proof and argument and some other things, all rolled into one. I can tell because you (and others) asked things from a “summary”/”proof”/”argument”/etc. which are inconsistent with each other, and couldn’t keep your terms straight, using sometimes one, sometimes another, as it suited you, as if they all meant the same. Yes, that is careless, and also lazy, for the reasons I explained in my previous post.
“I’m pretty sure it’s not just me who thinks that all the verbiage in this thread by his apologists would have been better served by adumbrating even one of his arguments. / (Are the arguments really that dense that they cannot be summarised?) […] [$198] …what we are seeking is the gist of but one of the five arguments. / (Too difficult for his followers, too expensive for him)”
Do you claim now to want merely an “adumbration”/”gist”/”summary” of just one of the five main arguments in Dr. Feser’s book? (Of course, that is different from what you implied you wanted in just your previous post [John Morales #197], namely a summary of his book.) You are fortunate, for you can find “adumbrations” of his Aristotelian argument on pages 35-37 of the print edition, of his Neo-Platonic argument on pages 80-82, of his Augustinian argument on pages 109-110, of his Thomistic argument on pages 128-131, and of his Rationalist argument on pages 161-163. As with many books these days, his can be read in snippets for free on Google Books. Also fortunately for you, such a snippet is long enough to read an “adumbration”.
@John Morales #198: “There is no such demand…”
Of course there is. See my previous post (laubadetriste #196), where I quote Marcus Ranum making it. And as I said, others made such a demand also.
“Seriously, if the matter were of such significance as is claimed, would it not be appropriate to put the claims into the public domain? Yes, Feser would miss out on $, but he would actually make his arguments (‘proofs’) available to the community at large.”
Dr. Feser’s “claims” could not be put into the public domain, for the reason that they are claims, about which that description makes no sense. Of course a library, which would be free, would have Dr. Feser’s book available to the community at large. Alternately, Dr. Feser’s blog at edwardfeser.blogspot.com is both free and available to the community at large, and there too one can read the “gist of but one of the five arguments”, such as the Aristotelian, which “gist” has been regularly discussed there for years.
@John Morales #199: “BTW, it’s interesting that he claims to justify an enumeration his God ‘s attributes, one of them being incomprehensibility. / (And by ‘interesting’, I mean ‘incoherent’. Perhaps he justifies this claim, unlikely as that is, but I will never know short of shelling out $ — obviously, his supporters aren’t in the mood to even attempt to summarise any of his arguments. Nope, no money from me to him)”
Dr. Feser reviewed the “gist” of that “justification” too on his blog, which, again, is free. You could have found that out by using Google.
I am glad I could alleviate your tender worries about the “community at large”. And now that you know the “gist of but one of the five arguments” has been available, no doubt you will be relieved not to have revise your word choice again to claim that something utterly different was what you wanted all along regarding Dr. Feser’s book.
@Robert Grigjanis:
“And it still looks like verbal sleight of hand. Pardon the temporal terms, but: Fido can’t cause his existence, his existence persists in some time interval, therefore some external cause is required to maintain his existence over that interval. The requirement of a continuous cause seems to be assumed.”
“looks like verbal sleight of hand” is not an argument. I explained why that is the case. Go read the book for the gory details.
You could try to make your case, but since at this time it is barely a complete thought, I can only guess that you would try to argue that existence is inexorably tied with time. The problem with such an assay is that it would beg the question against Thomists that conclude that God is a-temporal. Furthermore, it would entail that a-temporal things do not exist: spacetime, laws of nature, Platonic abstracta, etc. Note that it is not the case that such would-be argument entails that such things do not actually exist, but rather that they cannot *possibly* exist.
Here is another reason, or more of an analogy, for why your objection fails. Suppose we take an extreme Parmenedean interpretation of GR (*). So the whole reality is simply a block universe. Things exist (e.g. they occupy some 4-volume in the space-time manifold) or do not exist, but there is no change, there is no time, there is no persistence through time, and certainly there is no such thing as existential inertia. St. Thomas’ argument still goes through, because as I said, what he is trying to explain is the very existence of things, whether they happen to exist in and throughout time, or not.
(*) Thomists, Aristoteleans, etc. reject such an interpretation for reasons I will not go over.
grodrigues @236:
Of course it’s not. It’s merely a reason to distrust, like watching an illusionist. Human language can no more uncover transcendent “truths” than a magician can make an elephant disappear. And I have less interest in ploughing through Feser’s arguments than I would in learning the magician’s tricks.
The existence of a massive object is a time-like world line in spacetime, with a finite invariant proper length which can be measured by a clock attached to the object. That’s pretty inexorably tied.
You assume a lot about an argument I haven’t made, but how on Earth would tying existence to time entail the non-existence of atemporal things? Never mind. Progress has, I think, halted. Just another closed-minded atheist who refuses the offered splendours of Aquinas, Feser, etc. I can live with that.
It certainly does if you want it to continue moving at the rate with which it began.
Because atemporal things do not exist in time.
@Robert Girgjanis:
“And I have less interest in ploughing through Feser’s arguments than I would in learning the magician’s tricks.”
Fair enough.
dover_beach @238: Don’t know about you, but I’m certainly slowing down.
Point was, it moves (yes, for a finite time, at a decreasing speed) because of the initial impulse, not because something is maintaining its motion as it travels.
Rob Grigjanis says
Good for you, Rob.
We can all live with that.
dover_beach @239: Spacetime does not exist in time. Sure. It’s like saying a box does not have a position inside the box. You could say it is the collection of all positions inside, plus a boundary. So there is an atemporal thing to which I ascribe existence, but it is categorically different from objects within the box, whose existence is characterized by one position, or one worldline. I can certainly tie the existence of these objects to coordinates within the box, and talk about how different objects affect each others positions/worldlines, without compromising the existence of the box itself.
@Robert Girgjanis:
“Just another closed-minded atheist who refuses the offered splendours of Aquinas, Feser, etc. I can live with that.”
To be quite clear, just like Prof. Singham, you are not “refus[ing] the offered splendors” of Aquinas & Co. in the sense of having made an informed judgment and coming to the conclusion that they are unconvincing, but rather refusing to give the case a fair hearing. Fair enough, as I said. And one can certainly live, in the most literal sense of the word, and even lead a productive life, without even having heard of the men in question. To me, it just sounds a very odd thing to say, in fact positively irrational. But then again, each one is responsible for his own intellectual life, and I am not an atheist or belong to the sect, so I can live with that.
The phrase “To me, it just sounds a very odd thing to say, in fact positively irrational” in #244 is missing a couple of words. It should read instead: “To me, it just sounds a very odd thing for an atheist to say, in fact positively irrational”.
grodrigues @245: Life’s too short. Sometimes you have to go with your gut. So, I don’t have to read Richard Carrier to doubt his conclusions about the historicity of Jesus (see my #46). So I’ll probably go through life with my tentative belief that the Jesus of the Gospels was a real bloke who had supernatural characteristics tacked on by others after his death. And no doubt Carrier would call that positively irrational, and I should read his books, etc. Again, I can live with that.
As I’ve mentioned more than once, profound conclusions about existence reached solely by the use of human language are, to me, only profound in the suspicion they raise. Like claiming to have detected proton decay using only stone tools. I wouldn’t read that book either. Well, maybe the cover blurb!
But you’re equivocating here re ‘move’. The fact that the billiard ball requires something beyond the billiard ball to sustain it continuously post-initial impact, if it is to remain at a constant speed, is entirely consistent with his claim.
dover_beach @247: Where’s the equivocation? Yes, if the ball is to move at constant speed, it requires a continuous external force apart from the initial impact. Without that force, it will move from point A to point B at a decreasing speed. In that case, it does not require a continuous force applied after the initial impulse, but it will still move from A to B. Where did “it must have constant speed for the analogy to be useful” come from?
Nunc dimittis servum tuum in pace. Thanks all for the responses. It was interesting.
@Zob
I’m curious why there is no option for multiple sustaining causes (and plural pure actualities) --
(irrespective of what those words actually mean!).
The equivocation is re ‘move’ as I said and as you demonstrate. It is the ‘movement’ of the billiard ball that came into existence, and it requires continuous external force in order to ‘remain in movement’.
Because, without it the analogy fails to capture the distinction effectively. To return to Fido, its clear that he needs nourishment in the form of food, water, air, and exercise in order to be ‘sustained in existence’ (remain in movement). Now, if a person disputing this said, “No, I can remove these things from Fido’s environment and he will still, for a time, continue be sustained in existence, though, become increasingly debilitated (decreasing speed) and eventually die (come to rest), you would have to agree they would be missing the point.
@Robert Grigjanis:
“Life’s too short. Sometimes you have to go with your gut.”
I honestly do not know if what you say in #246 is a response to what I said (not that there is much of a response that can be had), as I stopped reading at the word “gut”.
@deepak shetty:
“I’m curious why there is no option for multiple sustaining causes (and plural pure actualities) –”
You can read Prof. Feser’s arguments (there is more than one) for why this is so in the book.
I just noticed that I mispelled “Grigjanis” not once, but multiple times. Ouch. My apologies.
And that for some odd, weird reason, I keep replacing “Rob” with “Robert”. Double Ouch and double apologies.
@Rob Grigjanis
I sympathize with your apprehension about language and our investigation of reality. That’s why I think attention to precision, accuracy and clarity is so important. And that’s why I appreciate the Scholastic tradition and its cousin, the analytic philosophical tradition for its effort to circumvent the ambiguities and pitfalls of natural language through the use of symbolic logic. But I’m not so pessimistic about language and truth as you are.
You’re actually not as as pessmistic as you think you are as you’ve drawn quite a few strong conclusions regarding the relationship between language and truth, none of which you’d have much basis for if you were really that skeptical.
The logical positivists of the Vienna Circle also shared a similar level of impatience with metaphysical speculations and were wary of being tied into knots by natural language. So they pushed for a radical type of empiricism with their verification principle, insisting that only empirical testable statements were meaningful. They thought they had banished metaphysics into nonsensical irrelevance. But the whole thing collapsed when in their effort to flesh out and justify the principle of verification and radical empiricism, they necessarily had to tip-toe back into metaphysical ideas and reasoning.
And it really is inescapable. The idea of potentiality and actuality is so basic to our understanding of change and causation that regardless of the empirical mechanisms it’ll always be a basic category. As our understanding of the mechanisms expand, it doesn’t nullify the overarching categories of actuality and potential, but just makes them even more necessary.
While philosophy and metaphysical inquiry can be difficult and challenging, that fact can’t be used to invalidate or dismiss philosophy and metaphysics anymore than it can be used to invalidate or dismiss math or empirical science as they too can be difficult, challenging, abstruse and require considerable effort to understand, let alone master.
@deepak shetty
If there were two pure actualities, then there would have to be some difference between them in order for them to be distinct and separate; but difference entails lack, and lack entails an unactualized potential, which a pure actual cannot have. Hence, there can only be one thing that is unactualized pure actuality.
@Zob
Flippantly , I hear the Christian God is something like this , distinct , in 3 forms, but not really so, except when it is but maybe not when it is not.
This is a set of assertions designed to reach the conclusion, is it not? The number 3 is different from the number 2 -- What is it lacking ?
Why make assumptions about what a pure actual cannot have ? I find a lot of this motivated reasoning rather than a genuine attempt to understand. If you don’t go with the assumption that God must be the Christian God would you necessarily make the statements you are making ?
@grodrigues
If there is a link somewhere where this is described, please point me to it -- I’m not buying the book because I’m saving up for the Batman Metal event -- which will be money well spent (imo) and much more useful to me , practically.
@deepak shetty:
“If there is a link somewhere where this is described, please point me to it – I’m not buying the book because I’m saving up for the Batman Metal event – which will be money well spent (imo) and much more useful to me , practically.”
There may be links available, but I do not know them off the top of my head, and I am not going to search for them.
I have explained upthread why my general answer to the sort of questions you ask is to direct people to the book. In your specific case, there was a second reason. Your second sentence was a parenthetical remark: “irrespective of what those words actually mean!” So you want me to explain details of an argument using concepts you have absolutely no knowledge of. The reaction that immediately popped to my head was “Are you stupid or just feigning to be one to make a point?” More politely: this is a completely surreal question. It is like Rob Grigjanis saying that “And I have less interest in ploughing through Feser’s arguments than I would in learning the magician’s tricks”, how “life is short”, gut feelings and what not and then continue to wrangle with dover_beach over details about… one of Prof. Feser’s arguments. It just boggles the mind.
It’s not an assumption. Definitionally, pure actuality denotes a thing without any potentiality at all, and as Zob notes, for two things to be distinct in some way is for those two things to have something that is still not yet actualized. So, there can only be one purely actual being. Nothing is being assumed here, it is simply logic and entailment.
@deepak shetty
The motivated reasoning charge only gets mileage if the reasoning in question is actually fallacious and one wants to understand why someone, who’s otherwise intelligent, would insist on x even though it relies on fallacious reasoning. You haven’t shown anything to be fallacious.
Also, is it always just your opponents who engage in motivated reasoning? Are you immune to it? It seems like atheists think it’s always everyone else but them who are susceptible to distorted thinking. I’ve seen a hell of a lot of emotionally-driven reasoning on this thread to avoid reading free online chapters of a book.
And no, the Trinity has nothing to do with anything I’ve discussed regarding actuality, potentiality and how there can only be one unactualized actualizer. It’s simple logic.
You can find Feser’s book at Google Books. Several of the chapters are available for free.
And this general nonsense about “these are just words” and all that. Yes, they’re words. That’s how we communicate, with words. And we need to be clear and careful with our use of words so that they facilitate lucidity. So this nonsense of dismissing sustained metaphysical/philosophical reasoning b/c it involves words and concepts that you can’t bother to try to understand, even though they’re defined and clarified with admirable rigor and precision in the Scholastic tradition, is just a bunch of “motivated (un)reasoning” tosh.
And one general point -- while some of this can be a bit opaque for someone unacquainted with philosophical reasoning, it’s actually not as arcane as it might seem.
The classical theistic tradition, particularly in its Aristotelian-Thomistic form, argues for the existence of God from the starting point of very commonsensical things that science itself presupposes and only the most eccentric skeptic would deny: something exists, things change, there are causal relationships, reality is orderly and intelligible, some things exist but don’t have to exist.
What you find in the A-T tradition, and in an accessible form in most of Feser’s work, is how we can deduce remarkable facts about reality through pure reasoning beginning from these undeniable starting points.
There are some excursions into general metaphysical principles along the way, but the journey is actually quite a prosaic one.
@Zob:
“And this general nonsense about “these are just words” and all that.”
Nonsense indeed. Consider the following three statements:
1. Every paracompact, Hausdorff, normal, second-countable differentiable manifold admits a triangulation.
2. The category of perverse sheaves is the heart of the perverse t-structure on the bounded derived category of sheaves of an analytic space with constructible cohomology.
3. The triangulation of a complex of sheaves of finite height is isomorphic to its dual.
One sentence is true, one is false and the other is a meaningless word salad, but I am pretty confident that only a mathematician could tell which is which. And not only distinguish the true from the false, the meaningful from the meaningless, but also tell the *reasons* why each is each, that is, without guessing, that amazing psychic power Prof. Singham has.
This is just the arrogant presumption that because one ignores or does not understand something, it therefore is meaningless. That this sort of claim has any purchase with atheist apologists just goes to show how intellectually corrupt they are.
Me @227:
So I did that. A chunk is, I think, worth quoting;
So, you see, if the ball traveled a finite distance and spontaneously stopped*, there would be no metaphysical problem re external mover: A finite cause would have caused finite motion. But because the ball would go to infinity if it could, we will call its motion infinite**. So, we have finite cause, but infinite effect (and never mind that the motion can be described by a finite vector; velocity or momentum), which seems to be “fishy”. Totally not a stupid word game of the sort played by charlatans and apologists the world over.
Of course, all would be made clear and solid if I but probed deeper. Lol.
*i.e. not because of friction, or a brick wall in the way, or any other external force, mind.
**Feser makes it clear this is precisely what he means in the reply to some objections.
@Rob Grigjanis
I don’t see the supposed difficulty that you’re seeing. In fact, I can’t even make out what you’re seeing as a difficulty.
Feser explains how Aquinas’ metaphysical account of motion doesn’t conflict with Newton’s principle of inertia. Where does he fail in showing this?
Again, it’s always “word games” when it’s reasoning that you don’t agree with in principle or substance, but never “word games” when it’s your own reasoning.
Also, there are other arguments that don’t involve motion, causation or change, such as the Neo-Platonic argument and the Augustinian argument.
Zob @264: I thought I was quite clear; Feser manufactures a “problem” by saying the ball has infinite motion, while the thrower is finite. Finite cause, but infinite effect: ahah! we obviously need something else after the initial throw to “explain” the infinite motion.
Why does the ball have “infinite motion”? Because in infinite time, it would cover an infinite distance! Is this obvious nomenclature to you?
Of course, if I said it has finite motion because its velocity is finite, there wouldn’t be a metaphysical problem. Finite cause, finite effect. Why is this unacceptable?
Yeah, word games.
@Rob Grigjanis
If you would read the article carefully (which I’m going to assume you did), you would see that Feser distinguishes between the metaphysics and physics of motion. He shows that the metaphysical notion of motion is broader than the physical since it’s not limited to change as movement from one location to another. He then argues that the principle of inertia and the metaphysical notion of motion do not formally contradict each other, that they’re operating on different levels of analysis. Section 5 on p.8-9 of the article discusses this.
Also, in your excerpt, Feser isn’t arguing for what you think he’s arguing for; he’s NOT arguing for the necessity of con-joined objects for motion.
Section 4 (Natural Motion), from p. 7-8 explains why that’s a misunderstanding of the A-T view of motion.
And if you continue reading past the “fishy” section, you see how the difficulty he broaches requires a metaphysical explanation, not a physical one, which he then explores.
-ctd-
He’s probing the metaphysical reading/understanding of the principal of inertia.
Zob @266: Why are you telling me what I already know from reading the article, and assuming I didn’t “get” what Feser was saying?
Where on Earth did you get the idea I thought he was arguing that?
I’m focusing on one passage, in which Feser simply asserts that the ball has infinite motion (or, if you prefer, that “Inertial motion is not finite”). If the cause is finite, this seems to create a metaphysical problem. But what rule of language, philosophy, or common sense dictates that we call the motion infinite? Is it written somewhere that the “value” of the motion is the distance it would travel in infinite time, if unimpeded? If so, you’ve snuck infinity into your definition. If you can assign ∞ to anything you want, you can prove anything.
@Rob Grigjanis
Your focus on that passage to the exclusion of the rest of the article -- what comes before and after it -- leads you to a twisted and erroneous understanding of why he says what he says there.
He’s not “proving” anything there. He’s raising a potential issue with an A-T metaphysical reading of the Newtonian principle of inertia.
@Rob
Sorry, I’m just not seeing the problem you have with Feser @263 and @268 at all. Feser’s trying to come to grips with the modern principle of inertia, which is an idealization that does imply infinite motion from a finite cause unless acted upon by another force. There is nothing gratuitous at all in this deduction; it is entailed by the principle of inertia itself.
Amazing.
RG: How does Feser justify calling the motion of the ball “infinite”?
Zob: You’re missing the point!
Absolutely frickin’ amazing. Adieu.
@Rob Grigjanis
He’s saying the METAPHYSICAL reading of the principle of intertia leads to an absurd conclusion -- a finite cause having an infinite effect!! So he explores the issue he’s broached in more depth with this ostensible difficulty for the A-T account of the metaphysics of causation in mind. What’s so difficult to understand about this??!!
Nothing, Zob. Anyone reading the principle of inertia can clearly see that an implication of this idealization is that a finite cause can, in principle, impart an infinite motion to an object unless acted upon by another force.
Are all Feserites this obtuse? I know what he’s saying. I repeated it myself, quite clearly. What isn’t clear at all is why Feser calls the motion infinite. I’ve said this repeatedly, and you either don’t understand plain English, or you’re pretending I’m not asking what I’m actually asking because you can’t answer it. So, again:
If the thrower is finite, and the ball’s motion is infinite, there’s a metaphysical problem.
Right. How is calling the ball’s motion infinite obvious to you? What is intrinsically infinite about inertial motion? That it goes to infinity if unimpeded? This is a definitional choice. One that gets you on the road you want to be on.
If I say the ball’s motion is finite because its velocity is finite, there is no metaphysical problem.
[I missed a lot. Maybe I’ll try to catch up, maybe not]
Generally, the distance traveled by a ball due to inertia would approach infinity if and only the space in which it moves is infinite and the time in which it has to move is infinite, for all finite velocities. Yes? No?
Is space-time infinite? Is space-time actually God because space-time is infinite?
@Rob Grigjanis
You’ve changed what you take to be the problem with that passage at least three times. Each time you’ve been wrong, and you’re wrong again. You’re the one playing words and creating problems where there are none.
Again -- a natural entailment of the principal of inertia is that under its idealization conditions something finite could produce an infinite effect, that is, a finite cause can cause infinite motion. There is nothing controversial about this obvious deduction from an incontestable fact of classical Newtonian physics.
What Feser is talking about in that passage is how that obvious deduction poses problems for Aquinas’ account of natural motion. This is blindingly obvious to anyone who can read since two sentences prior to the passage in question Feser writes, “Natural motions, as AQUINAS understood them….”
Feser isn’t attacking the principle of inertia. He’s pointing to a tension between the obvious corollary described above and Aquinas’ understanding of natural (as in actual physical, in the sense of physics) account of finite motion.
Feser than proceeds to explore how an A-T METAPHYSICAL analysis might resolve/dissolve the issue. I’ve listed exact page numbers for this in above comments.
If this doesn’t help you, then I can’t do anything for you and I entrust you to the mercy of Hooked on Phonics.
Zob @276:
Me @263:
Me @265:
Me @268:
Me @271:
Me @274:
What has been changed?
And you still refuse to explain why the ball’s motion is obviously infinite. You’re just mindlessly parroting Feser’s nonsense.
Owlmirror @275:
Run away! Here madness lies.
Owlmirror @275:
I’m guessing Feser “addresses” this somewhere*. But even if he does, he still has to justify being able to call inertial motion infinite. If you can stick a “finite” label on a cause, and an “infinite” label on the effect, you can claim there’s a problem. And that’s the issue; it’s labeling sleight of hand.
Having a 13th century worldview probably helps.
*Maybe something about spacetime being locally Minkowskian, and this is the essence of spacetime, yadda yadda arglebargle.
Oh dear, here we go again: “…an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.”
An entailment of this principle is that an object to moved by a finite force will continue to move with the same speed ‘unless acted upon….’ Remove the conditional, and the object moves at the same speed indefinitely. Finite cause, infinite movement.
Not at all, because a ball with finite velocity can still have infinite motion “unless acted upon…”
dover_beach @280: Yes, if it could carry on unimpeded it would travel an infinite distance in infinite time. Calling that “infinite motion” or an “infinite effect” is a cheap linguistic trick. Anything for which you allow infinite time would be an “infinite effect”.
Just to see if I understand this:
In the eternal inflation cosmological hypothesis, what exists necessarily are: time; the false vacuum; and the laws of physics. So our universe exists because the laws of physics allow fluctuations in the false vacuum over time, which means that our universe (and infinitely many others) came into existence (and still do come into existence) when those fluctuations met/meet the appropriate criteria.
Now, given the above definition, does this mean that (1) time/false vacuum/laws of physics are collectively the purely actual being, or (2) there is no purely actual being (all 3 are necessary to actually interact for everything else to be potentialized, so none of them are pure) or (3) something else?
@Rob Grigjanis:
‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ the physicist remarked.
‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the theologian: ‘we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’
‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said the physicist.
‘You must be,’ said the theologian, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’
The physicist didn’t think that proved it at all; however, she went on ‘And how do you know that you’re mad?’
‘To begin with,’ said the theologian, ‘a god’s not mad. You grant that?’
‘I suppose so,’ said the physicist.
‘Well, then,’ the theologian went on, ‘you see, a god is necessary; it essence is its existence; its being pure act without potentiality. Now, I am contingent; my existence is not my essence, and my being is certainly not pure act. Therefore I’m mad.’
Me @281:
Anticipating the possible objection that infinite differences must be present at t=∞, let me amend that:
Any measurable quantity f(t) for which you allow infinite time and which satisfies f(∞) -- f(0) = ∞ would be an “infinite effect”.
That covers any quantity whose rate of change has a positive lower bound. In layperson’s language, “change=infinite effect”. So, long story short, “change implies God” by definition. Who needs Aquinas or Feser?
Where is the linguistic trick? You’ve just admitted that ‘infinite time’ and ‘no interference’ yield infinite motion, according to the principle itself.
dover_beach @285:
In your second sentence, apparently totally invisible to you. Blinkers do tend to impair vision.
There is no linguistic trick in the second sentence. There is nothing about those two conditions that imply a linguistic trick of any sort at all. One of the conditions is expressed in the principle itself, and the other is compatible with the principle. The blinkers are all yours.
You Thomists are pathetic. Metaphysics that denies modern science is failed metaphysics. Metaphysics is the attempt to provide a framework that comprehends our best scientific (and thus physical, because it’s most foundational) understanding. Aristotle did his best, and good on him. Even Aquinas did his best given the best science he had available to him.
I’m not detracting from Newtonian physics, but it’s basically wrong, and incontestable facts in a basically wrong system are basically wrong. Space-Time isn’t Euclidean for example. It has no conception of Quantum effects for example. But your metaphysic isn’t even the level of Newtonian, it’s Aristotelean. Pathetic, and sad.
Also, you’re quite dishonest. When you were asked is the same warmed over bullshit of Aquinas that Feser spouted years ago, you didn’t yeah, you said read the book and how would you know unless you read the book. It’s the same shit, it’s worng, because the world isn’t that way and we know that. Causation isn’t like Aquinas and Aristotle said and we know this. Sad.
“Metaphysics that denies modern science is failed metaphysics.”
Then it is all good and well since there is not a single scientific finding denied by AT metaphyiscs say (“scientific finding” is not the same things “the metaphysics X reads *into* scientific finding Y”).
” Metaphysics is the attempt to provide a framework that comprehends our best scientific (and thus physical, because it’s most foundational) understanding.”
That is one understanding of metaphysics completely antithetical to the tradition of Plato and Aristotle. But thanks for begging the question.
Atheist apologists are pathetic.
Brian English @289:
I concur. I was away for a couple of days (friend’s daughter’s funeral) but I did look at the Google Books pages; as you note, the book is basically warmed-over Medieval arguments.
(Which, to be fair, I should have known had I perused Feser’s blog properly, rather than cursorily)
—
grodrigues:
I don’t see the pathos (nevermind the apologetics) in not subscribing to claims sustained by word-play and a naive understanding of reality.
But fine, not accepting the claims about omni-whatnot constitutes apologetics in your view.
(Proposition 7, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus)
Dammit John. Hope your friend’s holding up. And you.
It’s hilarious watching people accuse other people of word-play, dishonesty, and naivety when they are trying to confabulate reasons to not read a book, avoiding the obvious entailment of a principle, and such like.
dover_beach @293: What’s hilarious is watching Feser et al torture language and logic in order to come up with an “infinite effect”. Want an infinite effect? Just do something and wait for eternity. Voilà! Then watching gullible people buy that nonsense, and answer the question “how does A entail B?” with “because A entails B”.
Here’s one for you: Two identical objects sit beside each other on the surface of a planet.
Finite cause: Someone lifts one object and sets it on a shelf above the other object.
Infinite effect: At t=∞, the upper object is infinitely older than the lower object.
And nothing had to move, apart from the lifting! You can use that if you like. It might fascinate your theist friends, and amuse your atheist friends.
No language or logic was tortured in the production of that entailment.
I love how Singham says he hasn’t read the book, and yet here he is chiming away as to what counts as a good argument.
This is as silly as someone saying “I am sure that other planets do not exist…but I haven’t read any astronomy and do not intend to.”
Ignorance is the only way to describe it.
In case we get any more triumphalist Feser fans seagulling on these threads, I will post this here and on the other thread on the topic:
I found a fascinating admission from Feser in one of his other works.