(September 17, 2026 at 8:12 am)Belacqua Wrote:

(September 17, 2026 at 7:23 am)Jal Wrote: ...Inward Witness...

Sheldon has a passionately held belief that for a reasonable person to believe in God, that person must have an articulable logical argument or set of evidence, 

(September 17, 2026 at 6:59 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote:

(September 17, 2026 at 6:10 am)Deesse23 Wrote: And Mormons believe your faith is not authentic. Go to a Mormon forum and sort this out, before you come back to to us who know both your faiths are useless. Even better: go to a Catholic forum after defeating the Mormons, then go bother some evangelicals, Protestants....so many other Christians, have fun! Well wait here 

The compulsion to always be right and the postulation of an "invincible belief" (Inward Witness) can reflect a personality style where the ego is heavily tied to an eccentric opinion to feel intellectually superior.

Remember?

I can’t help but wonder how he’d respond if his ‘Inward Witness’ told him to take a shit on the salad bar.

Boru

(September 16, 2026 at 11:27 pm)Jal Wrote: Again, what's your point? You act like you're furnishing some profound insight/analysis here. This is your ineffably trenchant "counterpoint" to my position? 
Newsflash: it is precisely my foundational assumption that, in a panpsychism, no special "prime mover" is needed. Everything is self-locomoting although, for most pieces of matter, that potentiality is still dormant/unawakened.

(September 17, 2026 at 8:01 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote:

(September 17, 2026 at 7:23 am)Jal Wrote: I hope you don't regard such scenarios as probative. Let's talk about it. 
As I explained earlier in this thread, the Inward Witness needs to raise your level of felt certainty high enough to obligate your conscience.
Mine's not at 100% certainty, but maybe 90%. As I understand it, God spoke to the prophets at 100% certainty, viz. Abraham called upon to sacrifice his son.

Anywho, if the Inward Witness convinced your conscience at 100% certainty to do that deed, do you think you should do it?
Before you respond, let me give you some inkling of what that might feel like:
(1) You'd feel 100% sure that abstaining would be PURE EVIL, probably the highest level of evil attainable at that moment.
(2) You'd probably feel the weight of the world on your shoulders, meaning that you'd probably feel CONVINCED that a significant number of people will goto hell if you disobey, including your own family members. (Based on my experience with Yahweh, I'm pretty sure He'd express His willingness to save a bunch of people from hell if you obey).

In other words, if you felt 100% sure you could save a significant number of people from hell, AND 100% sure no harm would result, what's the right action here?
Well that's why Abraham tried to sacrifice his son, by the way. I hope you're starting to get it.

So, there’s a 90% chance you’d take a shit on a salad bar? That’s more than a little disturbing. Good to know, though.

Boru

Edit: So much for the towel.

(September 17, 2026 at 9:05 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote:

(September 16, 2026 at 11:27 pm)Jal Wrote: Again, what's your point? You act like you're furnishing some profound insight/analysis here. This is your ineffably trenchant "counterpoint" to my position? 
Newsflash: it is precisely my foundational assumption that, in a panpsychism, no special "prime mover" is needed. Everything is self-locomoting although, for most pieces of matter, that potentiality is still dormant/unawakened.

…now take that moment of clarity and return to your many mover based objections to gravity and evolutionary biology.  Are you entirely full of shit, or had you simply not thought this through carefully?

(September 17, 2026 at 9:30 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Hand of the almighty pushing and pulling things?  No.  Things in gravity wells self locomote.  Tinkering bloodgod screwing with the genome?  No, evolutionary processes self locomote.  Little homunculous behind the eyes making you go to the fridge?  No, feedback loops self locomote.  A whole universe of self locomotion…..none of it needing any grand nudgers to explain.  Your rationalizing case for a god is trash, according to you.

Positing the fundamentality of self locomotion makes your biblical creationists god as useless as your intuitionists inner witness…but you know what, I think you’re absolutely right.  Gid didn’t do that to you.  You did.

So much for panpsychism solving your Christian problems, eh?

(September 17, 2026 at 8:12 am)Belacqua Wrote:

(September 17, 2026 at 7:23 am)Jal Wrote: ...Inward Witness...

I think the disconnect here is clear now.

Sheldon has a passionately held belief that for a reasonable person to believe in God, that person must have an articulable logical argument or set of evidence, which can be produced on demand to strangers on the Internet. 

I'm sure he'll correct me if I'm wrong about that.

You've made it clear that this is not the reason you believe. I don't think he will stop asking you, however, or demanding that you must produce something along those lines, the way a traffic cop demands your driver's license. For him, the necessity for such evidence has the weight of something like Absolute Truth -- he can't imagine things being otherwise. 

So no agreement will be possible.

(I am not talking about my own beliefs here, just describing what I see as happening.)

(September 17, 2026 at 9:57 am)Jal Wrote:

(September 17, 2026 at 9:05 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: …now take that moment of clarity and return to your many mover based objections to gravity and evolutionary biology.  Are you entirely full of shit, or had you simply not thought this through carefully?

Huh? I objected to many movers? I objected to the notion that gravity can be defined as an intangible field and yet still be said to push or pull tangible matter.

That is logically incoherent.  My belief is that Yahweh's (hidden) physical hand does all that sort of pushing/pulling, which today we call gravity (and magnetism, electromagnetism, etc).

Again, we humans do plenty of pushing/pulling as well - I can take a step or throw a punch.