(December 1, 2021 at 11:59 am)Klorophyll Wrote:

(December 1, 2021 at 8:57 am)Ten Wrote: I've hit a bit of a conundrum regarding the "proof of the existence of God" question.

You can't do it.

Ask a theist to define:
Supernatural
Divine
Faith
Spirit
Soul
God

And you get vague wishy-washy crap that either doesn't mean anything, 

I don't know much about other religions, but Islam acknowledges that the soul is undefinable, unknowable: 

"And they ask you about the soul. Say: The soul is one of the commands of my Lord, and you are not given aught of knowledge but a little." (Qur'an 17:85)

This line of revelation purportedly came to the Islamic Prophet when a group of Jews challenged him to reveal the reality of the soul. 

https://islamqa.org/hanafi/askimam/11962...ammad-saw/

A false prophet would have cobbled something together as the reality of the soul to maintain the facade of prophethood. 

It doesn’t exactly take a genius to say that the soul is undefinable, unknowable.
If you think that ONLY a false prophet would make up some horse shit and ONLY a true prophet could say undefinable, unknowable, then your ability to cut through none sense is weak.
I suggest that you sharpen your logical knife.

A soul is just a machine that some author(s) have inserted into their stories.
Stories are just ink on paper. Anyone can buy some ink and paper and write whatever they want.
Some people have the talent to write long and interesting stories, some people have the talent to write the notes that an orchestra should play.

Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale had the talent to write Back to the Future and they decided to insert the Delorian into their story.
However, if you ask them how the time circuits worked, they would not be able to explain it to you.

The soul is to Mohammed, just like the Delorian+time circuits are to Robert and Bob.
^^^^^I’m talking in terms of having to explain how a machine works.

Also,
Mohammed didn’t invent the soul. He just inserted it into his novel.
The idea of having a time machine probably has its roots in the 19 th century.
The idea of using a car and needing to go at high speed and using a nuclear reactor to power it is a novel 20 th century idea.

(December 1, 2021 at 5:14 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: I get the sense that some athiests think that all thiests believe that God is just another thing in a universe of things. I remember writing about this pernicious category error in a thread called " tooth fairy bullshit".

So you're arguing that God is not a thing? I haven't looked at your commentary in the thread you cite (link please), but I would be very interested in a fuller explication.

(December 2, 2021 at 1:36 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote:

(December 1, 2021 at 9:08 am)vulcanlogician Wrote: Remember the "Do chairs exist?" thread? Whether you answer yes or no to that question, you accept some sort of metaphysical theory. As Bel points out, you can't prove a metaphysical theory with evidence... but you can make substantive logical arguments. So it's not dogmatic or anything.

I'm probably going to regret asking this, but are you saying that metaphysically speaking, chairs aren't evidence for the existence of chairs because physical evidence has no bearing on metaphysics?

I suppose so. A metaphysician wants to know what makes the chair a chair. It's "chairness" so to speak. You won't find "chairness" out there in nature. "Chairness" is completely conceptual... not a physical thing... hence "metaphysical."

It's the kind of thing that might irritate non-philosophy buffs. And I hope you don't regret asking. You seem interested in some philosophical matters anyway, Mister. This particular problem may or may not be your cup of tea. Plenty of philosophers don't bother themselves by thinking about ordinary objects. But I find it fascinating to ponder. Here's the Vsauce video that sparked the conversation in the first place: https://youtu.be/fXW-QjBsruE

Michael has really been getting into philosophy lately. I dig it.

***

Thing is, "What is chair-ness?" isn't really all that important of a philosophical question in the grand scheme. (Compare it to "What is justice?" which seems rather important to work out as much as we can.) But if we can't get to the bottom of a simple concept like "chair"... what the fuck do we even know about things like justice, free will or the like? We live in a world of conceptualized things (in our mental life). And we talk about them as if they are things in themselves-- like chairs or doors for instance. Working on the problem "What makes a chair a chair?" is doing very very basic metaphysics. Trying to get to the bottom of where the concept ends and the physical reality begins. Again... may or may not be your cup of tea. But it's not so simple of a question once you start exploring.

We have chairs.  We use different things as chairs.  Regardless of what a chair is as a concept in our minds, they exist as objects around us, and I can count them, weigh them, and take various measurements.  We don't have god.  So regardless of what god is as a concept, it's not measurable.  In that regard, there's no room for a metaphysical dodge.

(December 3, 2021 at 7:05 pm)Ranjr Wrote: We have chairs.  We use different things as chairs.  Regardless of what a chair is as a concept in our minds, they exist as objects around us, and I can count them, weigh them, and take various measurements.  We don't have god.  So regardless of what god is as a concept, it's not measurable.  In that regard, there's no room for a metaphysical dodge.

This ^^^ is where I'm at on it.

Metaphysics feels like a different conversation, a distraction, and jerking off when we're talking about things that are physical and observably real. My point is, that defining god and religious concepts like souls and spirits in only metaphysical terms makes it incapable for them to fit a physical definition. So why ask for evidence?

I know, likely obvious, yeah. But it finally connected for me when I made this thread. But on top of that, I doubt science will ever discover something that can be pointed to by a theist/spiritual person as an admission of "yes. This physical thing you have found and measured is god/soul/magic." We won't get that. And it feels unlikely that science would ever discover something and call it the soul or a god. They'd call it something else, likely name it after the person who discovered it. So it's "that's not god. That's just lightning/weather" over and over again. The gaps are always going to be there.

I like your thread, especially with theists adding to the discussion.

Should science build a god detector only to find nothing, theists can make a Tower of Babel appeal.  God is thwarting your efforts to teach you a lesson.  The very existence of that tale from Genesis tells us people have long asked, if god is up there, surely we can find him.

(December 3, 2021 at 6:43 pm)vulcanlogician Wrote:

(December 2, 2021 at 1:36 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote: I'm probably going to regret asking this, but are you saying that metaphysically speaking, chairs aren't evidence for the existence of chairs because physical evidence has no bearing on metaphysics?

I suppose so. A metaphysician wants to know what makes the chair a chair. It's "chairness" so to speak. You won't find "chairness" out there in nature. "Chairness" is completely conceptual... not a physical thing... hence "metaphysical."

It's the kind of thing that might irritate non-philosophy buffs. And I hope you don't regret asking. You seem interested in some philosophical matters anyway, Mister. This particular problem may or may not be your cup of tea. Plenty of philosophers don't bother themselves by thinking about ordinary objects. But I find it fascinating to ponder. Here's the Vsauce video that sparked the conversation in the first place: https://youtu.be/fXW-QjBsruE

Michael has really been getting into philosophy lately. I dig it.

***

Thing is, "What is chair-ness?" isn't really all that important of a philosophical question in the grand scheme. (Compare it to "What is justice?" which seems rather important to work out as much as we can.) But if we can't get to the bottom of a simple concept like "chair"... what the fuck do we even know about things like justice, free will or the like? We live in a world of conceptualized things (in our mental life). And we talk about them as if they are things in themselves-- like chairs or doors for instance. Working on the problem "What makes a chair a chair?" is doing very very basic metaphysics. Trying to get to the bottom of where the concept ends and the physical reality begins. Again... may or may not be your cup of tea. But it's not so simple of a question once you start exploring.

The problem is that a great many different types of things can be used as chairs. To expect there to be a single common denominator seems rather of a stretch. It seems that quite a number of things can independently make a thing a chair, including personal inclination and social conventions.

It might not be a bad idea to use 'fuzzy' set theory since we expect there to be fuzzy boundaries.

The physical reality is very different than a social convention about what is and is not a chair, let alone whether something that is typically not  chair is used as one on some occasion.

The physical thing is the 'thing in itself'. How we use it determines (at least party) its 'chairness'.

Zeno claimed that motion was an illusion. Dionysius, his pupil, supposedly disproved this by getting up out of his chair and walking across the room.

(December 4, 2021 at 12:24 am)Jehanne Wrote: Zeno claimed that motion was an illusion.  Dionysius, his pupil, supposedly disproved this by getting up out of his chair and walking across the room.

Thereby showing that philosophy alone cannot reach truth. At best, it shows our biases and assumptions.

There are many other examples. Kant, for example, regarded Euclidean geometry as synthetic a priori knowledge. The existence of non-Euclidean geometries rather destroyed that idea.

(December 3, 2021 at 10:00 am)Angrboda Wrote:

(December 1, 2021 at 5:14 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: I get the sense that some athiests think that all thiests believe that God is just another thing in a universe of things. I remember writing about this pernicious category error in a thread called " tooth fairy bullshit".

So you're arguing that God is not a thing?  I haven't looked at your commentary in the thread you cite (link please), but I would be very interested in a fuller explication.

God isn't really a thing, more like a force, a conscious force. You wouldn't call gravity a thing, would you?