Can something come from nothing

[emjay]

I don't believe in evolution. I accept it as the best and most firmly established theory of biological speciation. And I'm not a fan of intelligent design either. It seems like a misguided effort.

OK, fair enough. So before speciation started to occur, how do you envisage what 'man' looked like?
Was he Caucasian, negro, Polynesian, etc, or a one size fits all blank which then went on to speciate all the others?

Was first man hairy? Was that in God's image also...

That reminds me... still looking forward to seeing Drich's take on these questions

[robvalue]

Emjay: The Aquaman arguments, at least the "five ways", are just ridden with logical fallacies and don't need any extra understanding to debunk. The conclusion is also bullshit, just arbitrarily labeling these five non-outcomes the same meaningless word "God" and hoping no one notices that they haven't been sewn together in any way.

However, I really respect you spending time reading more of "the opposition". People are so often plagued by confirmation bias, and ignore disagreeable materials like... the plague

I'll be very interested to find out what you think! The rest of his material, I think, includes an attempt to cross the chasm between the faceless deistic "God" the 5 ways produce (which doesn't even get as far as intelligence) and the Christian God. I can't stomach it, so I look forward to any highlights!

I feel Wooters has a genuine passion for philosophy, but his insistence on reaching certain conclusions has warped him (and his logic especially) to the point where he has detached his studies from reality. Philosophy without science produces no results outside of the abstract.

[Foxaèr]

I feel Wooters has a genuine passion for philosophy, but his insistence on reaching certain conclusions has warped him (and his logic especially) to the point where he has detached his studies from reality.

No surprise there.

And did he really change his name to something so unrealistic?

[robvalue]

I have no idea what's up with his name change. I don't even know what it means, hehe. That's gotta be a black mark for me.

I'm not trying to slag him off. I'm just saying what I see. It pains me to see so much effort being put into a fruitless endeavor.

[Foxaèr]

Well, I was gone since early December of last year. That's my excuse for not knowing of the name change.

[Neo-Scholastic]

I have no idea what's up with his name change.

Another member was inciting violence against me. I felt the need to at least try to protect myself and my family by adopting the pseudonym. But people keep using my real name anyway so I might as well not have made the change. Now I have to wait a year to go back because some members were abusing the system and changing their names every three minutes.

- sigh - Rob, I know you sincerely believe that the 5Ws have been refuted. I don't know who keeps telling you that or why you repeat it. It simply isn't true. A proper refutation requires either 1) showing that the conclusions do not follow from the premises, i.e. a gap in the logic, or 2) that one or more the premises are mistaken. The logical structure of the 5Ws are impeccable and the 3W has actually been shown to be even more robust with the development of modal logic. Frege tried to show that the 1W was tautological, but only by framing it in a foreign vocabulary. As for the premises, there are many so I cannot deal with them all here. But in most cases the person making the objection fails to distinguish between accidentally and essentially ordered sequences or between contingent and non-contingent relationships.

Now many like yourself claim that the best you get is a deistic god. That simply is not true. A deistic god sets up the initial conditions and from there the universe sustains itself. All but 4W, specifically exclude this option. In no case can a contingent being sustain its own existence even if that contingent being is the whole universe.

The next objection is that the "God of the Philosophers" cannot be connected to the Christian God. This also is not true. They are explicitly linked by several bible verses including Exodus 3:14, Colossians 1:17, Acts 17:28, Rev 1:8, Rev 22:13, and many others I cannot think of right now. Moreover, Question 3 of the Summa builds on the 5W to deduce the attributes of God, all of which are repeatedly attributed to God throughout the scriptures.

[Mister Agenda]

The unmoved mover requires that the chain of causation can't be infinitely long. The argument that it can't be infinitely long boils down to incredulity (a fallacy), a conviction that the buck has to stop somewhere. Maybe it does, but if so, there's no requirement for the unmoved mover to be a conscious being, and especially not to be any particular version of a creator God.

The first cause argument isn't much different from the unmoved mover argument. All effects requiring causes is an inference from observation of events within time and space, so inferring that this applies to the origin of time and space is a fallacy of composition, what is true of the parts is not necessarily true of the whole.

The 'necessary being' is not necessarily a being, certainly not necessarily something that could reasonably be thought of as God, a natural phenomenon could certainly fit the bill, if the premises are sound. Maybe the necessary being is gravity. So far, if the first three 'Ways' were sound, quantum foam or other natural phenomena would fit the job description. And as I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I'm not sure I buy that it's coherently conceivable that nothing could 'exist' instead of something, hence quantum foam could be a 'necessary being'.

'Degrees' relies on a perceived implication of a perfect standard. The premise is highly questionable, not self-evident at all. The concept of perfection does not, in my humble opinion, imply an actuality of perfection.

If nature shows us anything, it's that intelligence is not required for regularity. Chaos theory shows that randomness not only can produce order, it must. The idea that only an intelligence can create order is a claim, and the teleological argument takes it as a premise. Even if true, it does not follow that the designer is a unique being, a large number of more minor beings directing events would fit the bill just as well and would explain the apparent randomness better.

The first three Ways don't get you to an intelligent being, at best they get you to a 'something that started it all' if the premise that infinite natural causality can't possibly be the case is true. The last two ways involve premises more questionable that the first three.

[Longhorn]

Another member was inciting violence against me. I felt the need to at least try to protect myself and my family by adopting the pseudonym. But people keep using my real name anyway so I might as well not have made the change. Now I have to wait a year to go back because some members were abusing the system and changing their names every three minutes.

I'm sorry that happened. Have you contacted the staff about it? In reasonable circumstances they can change a user's name for them without the waiting time.

[Neo-Scholastic]

The unmoved mover requires that the chain of causation can't be infinitely long. The argument that it can't be infinitely long boils down to incredulity (a fallacy), a conviction that the buck has to stop somewhere...

As I stated, that objection ignores the distinction between an accidentally ordered sequence and an essentially ordered one, one based on logically prior dependency.

The first cause argument isn't much different from the unmoved mover argument. All effects requiring causes is an inference from observation of events within time and space, so inferring that this applies to the origin of time and space is a fallacy of composition, what is true of the parts is not necessarily true of the whole.

This objection makes the same mistake as the first. Generally people wrongly assumes that the first cause traces back in time, which is an accidentally ordered series of events.

The 'necessary being' is not necessarily a being, certainly not necessarily something that could reasonably be thought of as God, a natural phenomenon could certainly fit the bill, if the premises are sound. Maybe the necessary being is gravity. So far, if the first three 'Ways' were sound, quantum foam or other natural phenomena would fit the job description.

Second, the fallacy of composition objection assumes that something composed entirely of contingent parts could somehow magically become non-contingent. That is an incoherent position. Anything mutable is contingent (1W). If the parts mutate, which they obviously do, then the nature of the composite (the physical universe) goes from one state to another, i.e. it is mutable. Since the composite is mutable it must be contingent. As for quantum foam, nothing could be more mutable which would make it the most obviously contingent thing possible!

'Degrees' relies on a perceived implication of a perfect standard. The premise is highly questionable, not self-evident at all. The concept of perfection does not, in my humble opinion, imply an actuality of perfection.

The Fourth Way is one of the most interesting and most widely misunderstood. It relies on a particular solution to the Problem of Universals. Since most atheists adhere to some kind of nominalism, an incoherent ontology, it makes no sense to try and justify the 4W without first addressing that error.

If nature shows us anything, it's that intelligence is not required for regularity. Chaos theory shows that randomness not only can produce order, it must. The idea that only an intelligence can create order is a claim, and the teleological argument takes it as a premise. Even if true, it does not follow that the designer is a unique being, a large number of more minor beings directing events would fit the bill just as well and would explain the apparent randomness better.

Except you are describing order developing within nature not why nature-in-itself has the regularity capable of producing local order in the first place. Besides, The Fifth Way isn’t an intelligent design argument. If it were you would be correct any demiurge would work.

Mr. Agenda, I do appreciate that you find those objections sound. If it were that easy though, the 5W would not have endured for very long even back then nor would Kant and others have taken them so seriously.

[robvalue]

I had no idea anyone was inciting violence. That is absolutely awful to hear. Whoever they are, shame on them. How cowardly. If I had of known, I wouldn't keep using your name. I just assumed it was a change for the sake of it. I won't mention your name anymore.

Anyhow. I wonder if you've ever approached a logic expert/professor/teacher and discussed the 5 ways?

The thing is, I don't need the argument to fail. I don't care whether it works or not. It makes no difference to me. If there's some "first cause", I don't give a shit. It makes no practical difference. Even if it's the "Biblical God", I still couldn't care less. I'm a mere peon, and if it's threatening me into compliance, it's laughable to think there's anything I can do about it. So I'll just tell it to fuck off, and ignore it. If it's not threatening me, then good. I'll ignore it. As it happens, it appears to be doing absolutely nothing so I can't do much else but ignore it.

If this thing wants to come communicate with me in a sensible way, I'm all for that. It doesn't have to be worship and mystery.

Anyhow. I take reality as I find it. I follow the evidence to the most reasonable conclusions. I'm afraid that it appears that you need these arguments to work, because your world would fall apart without them. You'd have to face the fact that you've been talking to absolutely nothing for years on end. That's a big deal. So you seem to spend huge amounts of efforts confirming that which you already believe by guarding these arguments, and looking for more ways to justify it. It also seems to me you are more than adequately intelligent to be able to see the very basic flaws in these arguments, so I can only assume it's this need which is clouding your judgement. They aren't even hidden flaws; they are like warm-up exercises for spotting logical fallacies.

That's just my take. Things seem radically different from the outside. I shall leave you alone now. I hope whatever threat there was is now over with.