kurt vonnegut said:

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Bob Lee said:

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Well your last sentence is revealing. You've aligned secular ideology with reason and placed them in opposition to the supernatural. That's wrong. The observable natural order of things is revealing. We can deduce the existence of a creator via our rational faculties. If I can reasonably rule out the non existence of a creator, the only thing left is a creator, which would have to be supernatural because he couldn't be a composition of parts. He can not have created Himself. These are logical impossibilities. Do you have a reasonable explanation for the creation of biological life? Do we know anything at all about how you would go about creating life from nothing at all absent a creator?

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Apologies - it was not my intention to suggest religion is in opposition to reason in this way.

I take exception with basically everything else who wrote though. Using deductive reason to discover the existence of God requires some premises assumed to be true that I don't agree with.

Do I have a natural explanation for the universe or for life? No. A couple hundred years ago, we would have had no natural explanation for a million things we take for granted today. That doesn't mean there must be a natural explanation for the universe or to life. But, I think it serves as a warning that we should be wary about inserting 'God' into all of the 'gaps' of our natural knowledge. Consider the possibility that we just aren't smart enough or creative enough to figure out a natural answer.

And the idea of God as the answer to these things is simply kicking the can down the road. 'God did it' is not an answer. If, to solve these questions, you have to invent a supernatural, inconceivably powerful, all knowing, super-being that defies all known laws of time, material, and space, and who is (by definition) infinitely beyond our understanding . . . then I submit you have not solved these questions. Only created a far far far bigger question.

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The only premise you have to accept is that the principle of causality is true. You're doing what The Banned said. You're dismissing any non-natural explanation out of hand even if it means we have to call into question everything we know about the natural order of things. You're just saying the likeliest explanation is a God of the gaps fallacy because you're presupposing the non existence of any metaphysical reality.

kurt vonnegut said:

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The Banned said:

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This is a misunderstanding of who God is. God says He is "I am that I am". If you can understand that God just IS (to the best of our human ability) then the dilemma goes away. He IS. So if anything is good, it's because it simply is.

It would take pages to tease that all out and add all the qualifiers, but that's a decent summation.

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This is just tautology without any real application and it doesn't explain why 'good' isn't arbitrary.

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Bertrand Russell: "I should say that the universe is just there, and that's all."

David Hume: In such questions, why may we not go on in infinitum? Why not suppose the universe such a chain of causes without beginning and without end?

We can call it tautology, but that's the name of the game when we're trying to explain existence itself. IS has to be true, and attempting to understand it is an exercise theist and atheist alike undertake.

I'll start a new thread when I have time to do it correctly. The point of this post is simply another attempt to show that materialism is not a neutral claim. It requires it's own origin that can't simply be glossed over.

Bob Lee said:

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The only premise you have to accept is that the principle of causality is true. You're doing what The Banned said. You're dismissing any non-natural explanation out of hand even if it means we have to call into question everything we know about the natural order of things. You're just saying the likeliest explanation is a God of the gaps fallacy because you're presupposing the non existence of any metaphysical reality.

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I've never been comfortable with the Cosmological argument or its use of causality. It seems to me that it starts with a premise that the law of causality is true and concludes that the law of causality is not true and that it can and must be violated. The conclusion directly violates the first premise, does it not? It also does not follow that at the edge of our understanding of a natural process of cause and effect, the prior cause must be supernatural. I'm open to it as a suggestion, but not as a MUST. To conclude that reality must be the product of the supernatural requires an assumption of knowledge about reality that I don't feel is justifiable.

I do recognize that a conclusion that we are the product of a supernatural Creator is rational given the right presuppositions. My own presuppositions do not outright reject the possibility of the supernatural - but it does hold it to what you may think of as an inappropriate or unrealistic bar of evidence or corroboration.

There must be a way of understanding the supernatural in something like a consistent or verifiable way. Otherwise, its only understandable through subjectivity and feelings and individual experience. And if that is the case, then human understanding of the metaphysical is mostly arbitrary.

There are billions of people with billions of religious, supernatural, and spiritual experiences and they do not converge to the same truth over and over and over again. So, which truths are correct? And how do you determine which truths are correct? And given the amount of variation on what truths people believe in and how they arrive at those truths, why are you so confident that you got it right?

The Banned said:

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Bertrand Russell: "I should say that the universe is just there, and that's all."

David Hume: In such questions, why may we not go on in infinitum? Why not suppose the universe such a chain of causes without beginning and without end?

We can call it tautology, but that's the name of the game when we're trying to explain existence itself. IS has to be true, and attempting to understand it is an exercise theist and atheist alike undertake.

I'll start a new thread when I have time to do it correctly. The point of this post is simply another attempt to show that materialism is not a neutral claim. It requires it's own origin that can't simply be glossed over.

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Sounds good.

I also want to reiterate that I am not making the positive claim that there must only be the material. If I were making that claim, then I would absolutely agree that such a claim warrants all the skepticism and all the scrutiny. It still feels a bit like you are waiting for me to provide a proof that the material is all that there is.

You can call it a cop out, but my position is that we don't know. If anything my claim that I need to defend is that I am unconvinced that humans have sufficient information or capabilities to understand the supernatural or to demonstrate knowledge of the supernatural.

Maybe this will help. If you say, "I personally don't know, but maybe others do" you've taken a neutral stance. But once you say, "we don't know", you are now applying a truth claim to others (likely unintentionally) who may feel that they do know, which is what spurs the calls for you to give proof.

With that, i'll move to a new thread

kurt vonnegut said:

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Explain. . . I don't think I agree.

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The conclusion that reason isn't arbitrary because two people followed a process and got the same conclusion does not follow. There's no connection.

I've been thinking about the best way to respond and waited because it can be discredited so many different ways, that I don't want to type them all out.

If you insist on imputing the laws of nature onto a non-natural explanation then I agree there's a contradiction. What you're saying is that for you to accept a metaphysical explanation, metaphysics has to behave in exactly the same way as physics.

For me, the impossibility of the alternative IS proof. Take Justice. I know that Justice or objective truth, right and wrong are really existing things in the same way I know I'm not dreaming right now. I can't prove it in any way that would satisfy your radical empiricist bar for what constitutes proof, but the alternative is that I'm dreaming right now. The alternative to Justice is lawlessness. The alternative to truth is unreality. There has to be a standard or everything is rendered incomprehensible. The fact that I SEEM to be able to make sense of things doesn't make any sense.

The Banned said:

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Maybe this will help. If you say, "I personally don't know, but maybe others do" you've taken a neutral stance. But once you say, "we don't know", you are now applying a truth claim to others (likely unintentionally) who may feel that they do know, which is what spurs the calls for you to give proof.

With that, i'll move to a new thread

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Fair enough. Yes, I would go so far as to say other do not know. Or more accurately, I have a very high degree of confidence that others do not know. But, I'm not certain what you would accept as proof.

Bob Lee said:

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If you insist on imputing the laws of nature onto a non-natural explanation then I agree there's a contradiction. What you're saying is that for you to accept a metaphysical explanation, metaphysics has to behave in exactly the same way as physics.

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Lets say that later today, you and I both experience something deeply spiritual and believe that we've been handed a divine revelation. Tomorrow you tell me that God has told you 'x'. And I say that God has told me the exact opposite of 'x'.

Who is right and how do you determine that?

kurt vonnegut said:

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Bob Lee said:

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If you insist on imputing the laws of nature onto a non-natural explanation then I agree there's a contradiction. What you're saying is that for you to accept a metaphysical explanation, metaphysics has to behave in exactly the same way as physics.

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Lets say that later today, you and I both experience something deeply spiritual and believe that we've been handed a divine revelation. Tomorrow you tell me that God has told you 'x'. And I say that God has told me the exact opposite of 'x'.

Who is right and how do you determine that?

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Follow up question: if you both agreed that God told you the same thing, does that mean reason isn't arbitrary?

kurt vonnegut said:

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Bob Lee said:

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If you insist on imputing the laws of nature onto a non-natural explanation then I agree there's a contradiction. What you're saying is that for you to accept a metaphysical explanation, metaphysics has to behave in exactly the same way as physics.

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Lets say that later today, you and I both experience something deeply spiritual and believe that we've been handed a divine revelation. Tomorrow you tell me that God has told you 'x'. And I say that God has told me the exact opposite of 'x'.

Who is right and how do you determine that?

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I would say that if God has revealed himself to you in the manner described, you should be convinced of His existence at the very least. And you should probably disregard what I say God told me if it contradicts what you know to be true. There are real examples of false prophets, Joseph Smith and others, who claim apparitions and personal revelation that don't really stand up to scrutiny.