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Donating = Loving
Bringing you atheist articles and building active godless communities takes hundreds of hours and resources each month. If you find any joy or stimulation at Atheist Republic, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner.
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what is that thought experiment? what is that one possible answer? what kind of details do you mean?
I did not use my Imagination unless you think logic and imagination are the same thing.
Peripatetic: Of course you did not use your imagination. You borrowed imaginative ideas from old dead men like Aristotle and Muhammed.
Logic is an imaginative idea was borrowed from Aristotle and Muhammed :'D
Peripatetic: Every one carries on those ideas with slight variations so that the idea evolves from mind to mind. You are responsible for your own variation.
I'd just add, there is no reason to accept Step 1 in the first place!
what is step 1?
My post is nested in a sub-thread which you participated in, in which step 1 was clearly labelled. <Insert personal attack here>
So fa we have input from a Seventh Day Adventist, Muslim, and Catholic.
Can we get agreement from them that full immersion baptism is a requirement, infant baptism is acceptable, Muhammed is the last and final prophet and not a deity(neither was Jesus), Saturday is the Sabbath, pork is forbidden, the Pope is the Vicar of Christ on Earth, the Koran is Gods tome, intercessory prayer vs. Inshallah, Jesus will return in triumph, and the Virgin Mary intercedes for humanity?
If you can not agree on these matters then how can you say peripatetic arguments prove anything? These are not minor details. Either prove your god from a fundamental argument or admit Aristotle was jacking off!
What do you mean requirements? The thief of the cross wasn't baptized, didn't know who Mary was, and I doubt he cared about pork being forbidden or the Sabbath, yet Jesus assured him Salvation. Religion encompasses many things, and not all things are a salvation issue.
I have no idea what this thread is about. It seems like a spin-off from another thread that I'm not aware about. I have no idea what the first mover argument is.
On logic and mathematics: These are fields of study that have progressed over time and continue to do so. Religious apologists have made no progress over the centuries of using peripatetic arguments. They beat out millennia old, dead end limericks and get no closer to proving anything specific. The equivocation of peripatetics to mathematics and logic is a false one.
@ Chimp
Concepts in our heads about universals clearly are not physical even if they have a purely physical cause (which I don't think they do). Something physical is something material and and an individualized thing which can be broken up into parts. But an idea like triangularity is not physical, material, or an individualized thing which can actually be broken up into material pieces.
Or how about the concept of justice? We should give to people what they deserve and so forth. Justice isn't walking around any where which we point at when we talk about justice.
Or how about our free will? We all know we have the ability to choose, but chemical reactions can never choose or not choose to react. So if we are only material and just made up of atoms and chemical reactions, then we cannot choose. But that is clearly false from our own every day experience. Therefore, we must posses some immaterial thing which we call a will or soul which allows us to do so.
If you deny that anything immaterial exists, then you deny our everyday functioning of our intellect and will.
The brains activity we call thinking can be seen on PET scans. Thought is a physical process.
That is far from clear.
Every time I hear someone demonstrate consternation at the notion we are "just" made up of atoms and chemical reactions, I hear a bruised ego.
@ CyberLN
What would make me have a bruised ego?
I haven't any idea.
It seems people want to be magical special snowflakes.
So do you have a theory on how atoms and chemical reactions can choose?...?...
@Dumb Ox: "Or how about our free will? We all know we have the ability to choose"
Do we all really know that? Can you prove it? Try to do something purely random. Try not to think about a giraffe.
When I studied philosophy back in the Middle Ages, I heard about a student who got upset by the concept of determinism and jumped off a faculty building to prove that he had free will. The lecturer said his action was the inevitable result of a causal chain initiated in the determinism lectures.
@Algebe
That is pretty funny.
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@all
But yeah, exactly what free will even mean is up for grabs. But better yet:
Define freewill any way you like. Now devise an experiment to test if you have it. Or rephrased: what is the measurable difference between a world where we have freewill, and a world in which we are deluded into thinking we have it (but don't)? There is no measurable difference as far as I know; and if you come up with one; you will be very famous!
"I've visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will."
(The Tralfamadorian in "Slaughterhouse 5" by Kurt Vonnegut)
On every planet that I've visited, the ones who talk loudest about free will are those who've surrendered their freedom to orthodoxies based on primitive tribal deities. But that's only because of where and when they they were born and what happened to them while they were growing up (or down). Maybe religion is an unconscious rebellion against a deterministic universe.
Baptists are the loudest of all the Christians, yet most are determinists.
Also determinism is a philosophical argument, not a scientific one. So maybe you're making all this up to feel better about your atheism.
Baptists have a doctrine of "individual soul liberty" which dictates (more or less) that they get freely choose their religion and will be held accountable by god for these choices.
Anytime someone uses a delusion argument they're making an unfalsifiable claim and we can safely ignore them. We're deluded into thinking we have free will but don't? Ignored. The world popped into existence five minutes ago but we are deluded and think its been around for ages? Ignored.
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