He is doing a bang up job hiding from me. God, that is. Not even got a whiff of him in 38 years. Maybe I scare him?

Quote:If you cannot point to anything that actually informs that claim then you don't, in any real sense, know it at all.

Point to that which proves this claim then (ie. the claim you just made).

Quote:That said, my point is that, at the time that things began to exist, causative language ceases to matter.

That's an assertion, but again, this is not cosmological argument. So everything you said regarding that is irrelevant. I'm talking about the present moment. Infinite past for all I care can be possible.

Quote:It's evidence. So let's add that to the properly basic things to deny, shall we? Anything to avoid accepting the most high, shall we?

We know these two things I mentioned and cannot know one without the other when reflected about because they rely on the same knowledge and principle, and when formed in an argument, point to a Creator. It's evidence to me.

(March 13, 2016 at 1:23 pm)Esquilax Wrote:

(March 12, 2016 at 10:06 pm)Catholic_Lady Wrote: How do I know? Same way I "know" God exists, if you will. It's what I believe and it makes sense to me.

You can say you "know" it all you like, but knowledge is demonstrated, it's based on repeatable, real world observations, and without any of those you're really doing nothing more than attempting to disguise a subjective moral view as an objective one using borrowed authority from a being we can't even establish to exist.

It does seem to me I have every reason to believe that which I know is true. But do I have reason to claim to know everything which I believe to be true? That seems to put the horse before the cart .. well the wrong way around at any rate.

We all operate on provisional beliefs, hunches too. The question becomes at what point do we admit them to the table of knowledge? If I'm recklessly permissive about it, I may weaken my confidence in my very ability to recognize the truth. Of course if I foreswear to ever admit truths which are not of an empirical nature, I may become over confident but glib and shallow. Tricky business this being human.

(March 13, 2016 at 12:02 pm)Whateverist the White Wrote:

(March 13, 2016 at 11:31 am)LadyForCamus Wrote: (I chase a toddler around all day)

I've heard they can be more elusive even than a used car salesman turned apologist. (I'm looking at you Drich.)

Lol, yes I do think my son could give such a character a run for his money. Sometimes I feel like 'parental control' is as much of an illusion as 'free will.' [emoji58]

(March 13, 2016 at 11:14 am)MysticKnight Wrote:

(March 13, 2016 at 11:02 am)LadyForCamus Wrote: Since you called me out (which is fine) can you explain this better?  I'm not quite what you are saying that I denied.  Thanks.  

Possible worlds is referred to as what is logically possible. Somethings are impossible in all possible worlds. Somethings are necessarily true in all possible worlds. They are such that no possible world exists but that they would be true.

Do you remember you agreed on the premise:

If a Creator can create goodness without it already existing, it can decide what it is.
If it can decide what it is, it can decide it would be good and right to torture a being forever intensely for no crime on it's own.

You agreed on these two premises.

You disputed at first, the premise "If the creator cannot create goodness without it already existing, then neither can evolution or anything for that matter" but when it was pointed out to you the Creator can create evolution or whatever things evolution creates, you withdrew this.

The premise that you disputed then was "It's necessarily the case in all worlds, it cannot be good torture a being forever and ever for no crime that it has done"

You said this is not true because morality is relative or subjective (can't remember which of these two you said).

But the reason why you denied it, is because the argument then goes on to say:

Therefore morality (as neither evolution or Creator can create it without already existing) is eternal.
Morality requires perception.
Therefore eternal perception of morality always existed.

You knew the conclusion followed. So you had to deny one premise. So you denied the one I just stated.

What it just means it's impossible that it is good to torture a being for no crime on it's own forever and ever.

So this shows it's impossible that a hypothetical creator creates it out of nothing because we agreed that would make it possible for it to be good to torture a being for no crime on it's own forever and ever.

Anyways....no one refuted the argument. It was not only valid, but it's sound. All the premises are true.

I apologize...I am not following most of this. I'm no expert in logic (especially not modal 'all possible worlds' stuff) and additionally I find your language rather confusing. Is your first premise that a hypothetical God can or CAN'T create morality from nothing? *scratches head*

(March 13, 2016 at 12:56 pm)MysticKnight Wrote:

(March 13, 2016 at 12:54 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: Of course a subjective claim can be true.  

If it is true, it's both subjective and objective. If it's not, it's only subjective.

Why? 

Because what is true, is true regardless of everyone's opinion.

No so. A truth can be subjectively true, yet not available for objective investigation. Are your emotions true? Can you quantify them on an objective scale? Can you point to their existence outside the framework of human perception?

It means if it's possible a Creator can create morality without it already existing, it can decide what it is.
If can decide what it is, it can decide it's good and right and moral to torture a being for no crime forever and ever.

However this doesn't assert that it's actually possible such a Creator to exist.

Rather, the hypothetical is used to show it's impossible when it contradicts the later premise.

It's not in any possible world the case that it is good to torture a being forever and ever for no crime.

In short, it shows that it's not possible for a hypothetical Creator to do that in any possible world (ie. create morality without it already existing).

(March 13, 2016 at 1:53 pm)MysticKnight Wrote: Point to that which proves this claim then (ie. the claim you just made).

I love when people do this, like they expect me not to be able to do it: science time!

Let's say we have three claims: claims A, B, and C. Claims A and B are true, and claim C is false. However, of claim A and B, only claim A can be demonstrated. Claim B is completely non-demonstrable in any respect.

So, how do we find out which of the claims are true? With claim A, it's easy, since there's demonstrable evidence that it's true, and we can verify that. Claim C is easy too: it's not true, and so we can find no evidence to confirm it, and possibly evidence to contradict it. Either way, claim C cannot be accepted as true. But what about claim B?

Now we have a problem. Since claim B is non-demonstrable, there's no way of confirming whether it's true. In fact, given that there's no evidence to confirm it, it's in exactly the same category as claim C, which is false. There is a difference between the two claims, in that claim B is actually true, but being that it's not demonstrable, how will we ever know? How can we find out the difference between B and C?

The truth is that we can't. Now, along you come, saying that you know claim B is true. Knowledge is commonly defined as justified true belief, but when we ask you how you know that, you can't give us anything. Claim B has no demonstrable observation or experience to back it. Given that we cannot determine that claim B is true, and that's a key component of the definition of knowledge, in what sense can we actually call what you have knowledge?

As an added bonus, along comes someone else, claiming that they know claim C is true. We ask them the same question, and they also can't show us anything, so their "knowledge" of claim C and your "knowledge" of claim B are functionally indistinguishable. So what we have here is one claim that's true and can be demonstrated, a true claim that can't, and a false claim, and the latter two claims look exactly the same to any outside observer. Since we've now demonstrated that non-demonstrable true claims look identical to false claims, we can conclude that anyone claiming knowledge of a non-demonstrable claim is either claiming knowledge of a true thing or a false thing, without any way of determining the difference. We also cannot know something that is not true. Given this, there is no way to establish whether a person truly does know what they're claiming, if that claim is not demonstrable.

Conclusion: true claims of knowledge must be demonstrable to set them apart from claims of knowledge that are false. Claims of knowledge without demonstrability are indistinguishable from untrue claims, and thus cannot reasonably be called knowledge. Done.

Quote:That's an assertion, but again, this is not cosmological argument. So everything you said regarding that is irrelevant. I'm talking about the present moment. Infinite past for all I care can be possible.

It's not an assertion, it's a conclusion borne out by the vast majority of physicists and cosmologists. I didn't just pull it from my ass, you know: it's a conclusion present in plenty of peer reviewed papers and theories.

No, the problem is that your claim that things require something else to maintain their existence has not been justified in any way. You're just saying it, over and over, as though that means anything. So, you've made two claims about causation: one is demonstrably false according to modern cosmology, and the other is unjustified. What am I supposed to be refuting, here?

Quote:We know these two things I mentioned and cannot know one without the other when reflected about because they rely on the same knowledge and principle, and when formed in an argument, point to a Creator. It's evidence to me.

Do you seriously think that just saying "we know it," counts as a refutation?

(March 13, 2016 at 2:43 pm)MysticKnight Wrote: It's not in any possible world the case that it is good to torture a being forever and ever for no crime.

This premise seems eminently disputable. I can think up a possible world in which it is good to torture a being forever and ever for no crime. Namely the world in which moral values are determined by a consensus of society. In such a world, society could decide that it's good to punish people for no reason whatsoever, to keep you on your toes. I don't live in such a world, nor would I want to live in such a world, but nonetheless it is a possible world..... unless you're begging the question by saying that this is objectively immoral. You wouldn't be begging the question now, would you?

1. I see just repeating the assertion in more complicated way and depending on it through out in a circular fashion. You haven't proven we cannot have anything such thing as innate knowledge.  I'm sorry. You haven't. 

2. The cosmological argument is not one we are discussing. We are talking about the fact existence cannot come out of non-existence with no cause. In your example, existence simply changed with no cause and time began to apply to it. That is difference from there being nothing, and existence coming out of it after there being nothing. I'm saying that which makes innately know that, makes us innately know the other, because it's relying on one and the same knowledge. Again, this has nothing to do with beginning of universe.

3. No, it's simply a reminder, but you seem to thing asserting we don't know it is somehow proof and argument against the claim.