Can something come from nothing

[emjay]

Do you understand what I've been trying to say?

Reasonably well, I think.   

Well, I guess that's all I can ever really hope for... if I can go through life and have someone else understand me reasonably well... they think... then I've done my job well

I don't think he does and I'm starting not to either I accept the value of reason in the environment (ie the physical universe) we inhabit; that there are relationships - ie causality - that we can discover, to ever increasing levels of detail, using both our statistical 'passive' modeling and reasoning, and our capacity for abstraction means that it's basically limitless how deep we can go in any particular field of study. Ie truth is 'out there' in the form of relationships and all we've got to do is mine it So I'd say I'm a rational person... I may not be formally logically trained, and the course will help with that, but I'm nonetheless logical and skeptical.

Whereas Neo's only interest in feigning logical discourse lies with inserting his god in syntax.

Er... no comment Believe it or not I am interested in understanding Aquinas' arguments, and by extension, Chad's... properly... not just at face value but really understanding them. And seeing for myself just how coherent their God concept actually is, but can't do that without truly understanding it. The same with any arguments; I don't want to distort the meaning with my own assumptions, I want to know what theirs are and therefore understand it from their perspective rather than mine. That's one of the skills I need to learn with my course; how to disect, extract, and above all understand an argument. You've always struck me as kind of superhuman in your ability to size up an argument (reasonably well ) so any tips on how to do it efficiently? For instance have you ever read the Summa Theologica? It's not exactly a small book and if understanding Aquinas' arguments basically requires learning a whole framework of concepts to put it into context then I doubt it's feasible to truly understand it unless you're really into it. How would you go about extracting the essence of the Summa, if you haven't already?

Do you think I'm rational?

Well, I mean, you're human..so..at worst, a rationalizer...and at best...yeah, sure.  

Nice dodge