Let's use the universe as an example.  A a necessity of it's nature, it exists.  This is due to the fact that the universe is nothing more than a term for all that exists...whatever that is.  All that exists cannot be non-existent, by necessity of it's nature as defined.  

This is an unsatisfying terminus, but it is an inescapable (read: necessary) consequence of the nature of the universe as we define it.  It may be that there is no further explanation..or that if there is..we never discover or possess it.

Strikingly, believers accept precisely this terminus in the case of their god, and yet categorically reject it in the case of the universe. Particularly when they field arguments from contingency or cosmology.

Sorry, but from where I stand using the word necessity/necessary when discussing existence is completely unnecessary and only a manipulation to twist their argument. 

The universe exists because it exists. Whether it is necessary is immaterial.

(November 15, 2017 at 9:59 am)Neo-Scholastic Wrote:

(November 14, 2017 at 1:06 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: Do you ever actually address the topic of the thread?  Really, your constant editorializing without contributing is getting tiresome.  For your information, the last thread about an argument for God, Steve posted a video instead of providing his own viewpoint.  So either you believe that Steve can't think for himself, or you're just being a hypocrite.  Anyway, you can take your implication that atheists can't think for themselves simply because they post an informative video and shove it up your ass.  I found the video to be informative, thorough and quite on point.  Unlike your bullshit comment.

You mean like your first two posts: HERE and HERE

If those are what you think passes for addressing the topic then maybe you should go back to smoking the poles of Canadian truck drivers in Calgary weight stations.

Awww...what a nice, Christian thing for you to say to someone, Neo.  Jesus must be so proud of you for spreading his message of love and kindness unto others.  I think I read in the Bible somewhere, "call women who disagree with you whores."  Tell me, is this contribution part of your, "higher purpose"?  You hypocritical little shit-rag.

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Further, God is undefined in this argument beyond, "the explaination of the universe". You can replace the word "god" here with literally anything and arrive at the same conclusion. Why not "multiverse" or, "universe generating magical fart"? But, no matter what you replace it with, the argument is equally unsound because as Khem pointed out, the premise is internally flawed.

If existence has an explaination, then that explaination is...whatever that explaination actually is, including any natural, 'non-God' hypothesis that the human imagination can think of. We don't know how to explain the universe, but this argument asserts, "It's god", without providing any evidence, or even defining the word "god".

Ofc, we know what Steve means when he says "god", and ofc, this argument argues for none of that. 😏

(November 15, 2017 at 10:39 am)mh.brewer Wrote: The universe exists because it exists. Whether it is necessary is immaterial.

The above -is- a statement of a necessity of x's nature.  The categorization as such is only plainly useful when considering things that aren't necessities of x's nature.  For example..the universe necessarily exists, or, if you prefer "the universe exists because it exists, or "it just is".... but it may not have and need not have existed -as it is today- or -as we know it-, necessarily.  

I know it seems like a strange and extraneous bit of classification..but necessity has surprising consequences for things and statements we take to be true.  For example...if it is necessarily true that:

"If a ship sinks tonight, there will be a report about it tomorrow", then by transposition  "If there will be a report about it tomorrow, a ship sinks tonight" is also true.

A subtle inversion of causality as we see it.   The one is intuitive and seemingly inarguable, but it's equivalent proposition by necessity seems to imply something we find intuitively wrong.  There are explanations for the above, btw, I offer it only as an elaboration on why the category of necessity is useful (and because it's my favorite example of how conditional statements can go south).

Hell, the explanation that satisfies our intuition to object -necessarily- invokes necessity.  Mechanics ftw.

(November 15, 2017 at 10:03 am)mh.brewer Wrote: Can any of you explain what exactly "necessity of its own nature" means? I googled it, found pages and pages of the religious using the statement/position in their arguments but never really stating what it is or why it is.

It means "because he is god" as far as I can make out. It's a cop out to try and hand wave away that under their own suppostioning theists are saying that god needs a creator.

(November 14, 2017 at 10:42 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: The concept of 7' is in our heads by definition, that's what concepts are. '7' is not independent of our minds, because without a mind, there's no concept of '7'. If there were 7 rocks on the beach without a mind to count them or decide to focus on how many rocks there are instead of grains of sand, or distinguish grains of sand from rocks, or limit the number of rocks to those visible to a person standing on that beach; etc. '7' would be meaningless.

In order for the mind to form a concept by abstraction there must be some abstractable quality.

(November 15, 2017 at 10:03 am)mh.brewer Wrote: Can any of you explain what exactly "necessity of its own nature" means? I googled it, found pages and pages of the religious using the statement/position in their arguments but never really stating what it is or why it is.

They are trying to distinguish between something necessary because of contingency versus something necessary in-and-of-itself. For the traditional example, if there is a son, then by necessity there is a mother and father. Or in a Hegelian sense, some types of necessity depend on a dialectical relationship. There are no masters without slaves nor slaves without masters. Whether the set of necessary by nature is empty, has only one, or several members is a matter of debate. Such members could include Being-Itself, the Principle of Non-Contraction, Primal Matter, or other such things.

(November 15, 2017 at 10:39 am)mh.brewer Wrote: The universe exists because it exists. Whether it is necessary is immaterial.

Whether or not it is necessary is in fact important. The fundamental question is how things are able to both persist and change. Taking the physical universe's existence for granted implies EITHER that it is stasic (Parmenides) OR that it is nothing but change (Heraclitus). Neither is coherent. This dilemma is resolved by recognizing that the physical universe is contingent. The next step is reasoning about what exactly it is and the nature of that on which the physical universe depends.

Neo-Scholastic Wrote:In order for the mind to form a concept by abstraction there must be some abstractable quality.

And without a mind to form a concept by abstraction, what would be the status of some potentially abstractable quality? It seems that it would remain unabstracted, and be none the worse for it.

Abstraction is, properly, the "quality" of an abstracting mechanism...by necessity of it's nature (lelz)...not of the abstracted item.  That's what it means for something to be an representational abstraction in the first place. 

The ones and zeros that denote some item x in amazons product lineup might be the same ones and zeros that denote another product in walmart.coms ...or it may be that different ones and zeros denote the same product between them.  Nothing about that tells us about the qualities of the items.  They aren;t made of ones and zeros and the ones and zeros don;t describe -them-...they describe their relationship to the abstracting mechanism, it's qualities, and would be unintelligible without reference to them. Just ones and zeros...apropos of nothing in particular.

(November 15, 2017 at 12:33 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote:

Neo-Scholastic Wrote:In order for the mind to form a concept by abstraction there must be some abstractable quality.

And without a mind to form a concept by abstraction, what would be the status of some potentially abstractable quality? It seems that it would remain unabstracted, and be none the worse for it.

That would make the quality something objectively real independent of any mind perceiving it. If there were no minds, diamonds would still be hard, wood would still be flammable, stars would still have mass, photons would still travel at the speed of light, and collections of objects would still be numerable.

(November 15, 2017 at 9:59 am)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: You mean like your first two posts: HERE and HERE

If those are what you think passes for addressing the topic then maybe you should go back to smoking the poles of Canadian truck drivers in Calgary weight stations.

That's it, Neo. That's how you demonstrate that xtian lurve to the heathen. Teach by example. They're sure to listen to you like that.