(February 1, 2017 at 2:30 am)robvalue Wrote: I have no idea what's up with his name change.
Another member was inciting violence against me. I felt the need to at least try to protect myself and my family by adopting the pseudonym. But people keep using my real name anyway so I might as well not have made the change. Now I have to wait a year to go back because some members were abusing the system and changing their names every three minutes.
- sigh - Rob, I know you sincerely believe that the 5Ws have been refuted. I don't know who keeps telling you that or why you repeat it. It simply isn't true. A proper refutation requires either 1) showing that the conclusions do not follow from the premises, i.e. a gap in the logic, or 2) that one or more the premises are mistaken. The logical structure of the 5Ws are impeccable and the 3W has actually been shown to be even more robust with the development of modal logic. Frege tried to show that the 1W was tautological, but only by framing it in a foreign vocabulary. As for the premises, there are many so I cannot deal with them all here. But in most cases the person making the objection fails to distinguish between accidentally and essentially ordered sequences or between contingent and non-contingent relationships.
Now many like yourself claim that the best you get is a deistic god. That simply is not true. A deistic god sets up the initial conditions and from there the universe sustains itself. All but 4W, specifically exclude this option. In no case can a contingent being sustain its own existence even if that contingent being is the whole universe.
The next objection is that the "God of the Philosophers" cannot be connected to the Christian God. This also is not true. They are explicitly linked by several bible verses including Exodus 3:14, Colossians 1:17, Acts 17:28, Rev 1:8, Rev 22:13, and many others I cannot think of right now. Moreover, Question 3 of the Summa builds on the 5W to deduce the attributes of God, all of which are repeatedly attributed to God throughout the scriptures.