Disproving Odin - An Experiment in arguing with a theist with Theist logic

[Jenny A]

I'm sure you are frustrated.  You have at least two category errors.  Whenever this is pointed out to you, you return to the Aristitileon categories of cause which are at least in part the cause of your category error.

1. What Do You Mean By Exist?
The first catagory error is equating the existence of physical objects, energy, with the existence of ideas. These are two very different meanings of the word "exist."  
To see how different they are, all you have to do is ask where does it exist?

- My emphasis -

Existence has always been a term of art in philosophy, but by insisting that the defining feature of existence is having a spatial location begs the question by excluding any other definition of existence that does not rely on physical properties – what the Scholastics called sensible bodies because these are known to the senses as bodies. What you take issue is with is the notion of intelligible objects and are simply attempting to define them away .

I don't mean to suggest that ideas don't exist.  They exist, but they do not exist in the way that physical objects do.  Nor do they existence independent of minds to think them.  This makes them a very different category of existing then that of physical objects. 

Where is the English language? Where is The Pythagorean Theorem?   Or where is Beethoven's Fifth are not.  At best you might say Engish is spoken in these places, or Pythagoras's  Theorim is set out in my math book, or my score of the Fifth is over there on the desk.  But that's only physical places where the ideas are recorded.  They don't exist except as recorded in a brain or some other physical object.

Those are all good questions. The examples you gave reveal the limitations of your definition of existence. You will only acknowledge that things are real, if and only if, they can have an independent existence. Ignoring for the moment their subtle differences, your insistence that immaterial things like language, music, and mathematics only exist in some material form is only half right. Objective things can be real and distinguishable even if they cannot be alienable.  The very fact that meaning can be conveyed in various languages , in writing or through speech, and recorded in different media only shows that meaning is something distinctly real apart from the material in which it manifests.

You can ask any group of third-graders to go out and find triangular things, or metallic things, or wedges, or bakery goods. And they will return with things that are objectively manifest things with real forms, real materials, real purposes, and real origins.

You see, materiality and extension in time and space are just two objective properties among others. Like all the others these appear to be inalienable from sensible bodies. Material and efficient causes are as much abstractions as formal and final ones. There is no metallic object that does not manifest to greater or lesser degree a form.

I don't see how the ability to translate the word triangle into another language (or to write it rather the say it for that matter) makes the concept independent of the minds that think the concept.  And the appellation triangle is a useful concept.  But nothing about trangular shaped object is added to the object itself by the children's identification.  

I'm curious though,  if you think the concept triangle exists independent of minds to think it, do you think it began to exist, or do you think the concept is eternal?  If you do think it began to exist, when would you say it began? I believe it began to exist when the first mind created the category.  

Also, do you think that the existence of ideas and objects is similar enough that anything about how one came to be can be usefully compared to how the other came to be?  My position is that they cannot and even if I accepted your idea of an independently existing triangle, I still find them too dissimilar for such a comparison.

This is because all physical objects have a material cause in the Aristitileon sense of the word, that is to say they are made of something.  And when we say something begins to be an elephant we mean that the matter out of which the elephant is made took the form of an elephant.  We don't mean new matter popped into existence and became an elephant.

That’s true the elephant did not begin to exist until some matter took the form of an elephant. But the elephant’s existence is more than just the matter of which it is made. In fact, the matter out of which it is made will change as the elephant grows from conception through its maturity. And upon death the matter will remain even after the elephant has ceased to exist. That’s all we have been saying. The existence of the elephant began at some point and ended at some later point.

Any theory of existence must account for something, like an elephant, to persist in its existence despite undergoing change. Limiting yourself to only material and efficient causes cannot account for either.

Unfortunately, that’s all I have time for today, JennyA. I wish I had time to explain more about intelligible objects.

Oh dear, I'm really not ready to consider why elephants persist from birth to death despite numerous changes in composition, size and shape.  Nor am I going to argue the elephant didnt begin to exist and then cease.  But that beginning is remarkably different from the germ of an idea.  It's a whole different order of to begin.  And if the matter out of which the elephant began to exist began to exist, that too is an entirely different order of to begin.