On Hell and Forgiveness

[SteveII]

You are confusing terms. There is no debate. These are definitions.

Exist: having objective reality or being

Objective: not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts. Does not depend on the context. Anchored in some concept or fact
Subjective: based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions. Depends on the context

Concrete Object: having physical referents and/or affecting those that do
Abstract Object: having no physical referents and no causal powers

The groupings I listed are binary classifications. A thing has to be one or the other. So, the number 4 is an objective concept. It is also an abstract object. So is a triangle. Abstract objects exist. Perhaps they are dependent on the mind to exist, but they do exist. Perhaps they do not depend on a mind. Doesn't matter, they still exist. 

No, the number 4 *does*, in fact, depend on context. As does the concept of a triangle. Neither is objective by your definition.

But, I would point out that your abstract objects only exist because there are brains that think them, not because of some independent existence.

In what context does the number 4 represent something else? I think you are just being difficult and AS USUAL never give a reason for ANY of your answers. It is getting old. 

I suspect you are still confusing definitions so I will be clear. Using the terms above, if God exists, he would have "objective reality or being" and he would be a Concrete Object because he can affect physical things. 

And anything that affects something physical is physical, by definition of the concept of 'physical'.

That is another assertion without a reason. Mental events (non physical) cause physical effects all the time. If you claim that mental events are themselves physical--well, that's your opinion--and not one based on science. 

That's because you have not looked back far enough. Contingency is a metaphysical concept that unpins the Philosophy of Science. Science cannot operate without a philosophy of science. Therefore contingency underpins science. This is not hard. You have this thing about Aristotle and see him under every rock. Deal with the argument, not what you think someone thought millennium ago that you read somewhere does not apply. 

I see the contingent/necessary division a false one that has limited utility. The philosophy of science is that ideas are tested by observation and modified or discarded when observations negate them. That means ideas need to be testable to be scientific. Contingency is irrelevant to that (yes, it is possible to test in the absence of it).

What division? I don't remember bringing up 'necessary'. You can talk about a concept without needed to bring up it's opposite. All scientific propositions are contingent propositions (by definition). It would be meaningless to test something without the concept of contingency--it is the very thing you would be testing for. 

Wait. You have extrapolated the indeterminacy of quantum particles to a lack of causation in the macroscopic world. That means we should see at every stage, moving from the very small to the large, a certain level of randomness in each level. Do we see molecules behaving unpredictably? Do we see groups of molecules (say a block of marble) behaving unpredictably? My car seems to always be where I put it. You seem to be saying that it is actually possible (albeit a small chance) that it not be.  

No, I have used the fact that quantum mechanics is non-causal, but rather probabilistic to *explain* how regularity of the type that is interpreted as classical causality arises through averages.

The spread of randomness from quantum effects is inversely related to the mass. That means for things larger than an atom (in most cases--not all), the range of randomness is small. That said, at very low temperatures, we can and do see these quantum effects becoming apparent at the atomic and small-molecular levels. The point? Planck's constant is small.

You are drawing a philosophical conclusion where there is none to be drawn. Quantum indeterminacy is meaningless at the macroscopic level. Philosophy has always been at the macroscopic level. Claims that "classical causality" is wrong is, well, wrong. We have a better description but not one metaphysical principle changes. You have a problem separating science/math from philosophy. Causality is a philosophical concept--not a scientific one. Science relies on it because it presupposes it (through a philosophy of science). 

Things like Common Decent, the evolution of complex organs, the evolution of biological networks/feedback loops, are not testable hypothesis--ever--BUT are required for the full theory. These steps are completely unknown, are not testable and are inferred. Glad to have you admit that the big overall grand theory of evolution is "unreliable". 

Yes, in fact, they *are* testable hypotheses: they allow for predictions that can be tested, including things like how populations can change over time due to genetic changes, etc. And yes, many of these things *are* known.

The things I mentioned are certainly not testable. All that is testable is "decent with modification". The rest of the grand evolution theory is one big inference. There is no debate here. It is simply a fact. 

Every philosophical argument for the existence of God is an inductive argument with only a couple of premises that are way more likely than not to be true. Seems to me, based on the above, that the arguments are on much firmer ground than say...evolutionary theory.

And you would be wrong. Evolutionary theory *is* testable and not simply based on induction, as you claim. And the assumptions made in 'proofs' of existence of deities are uniformly likely to be *wrong*.

Nope. You, like most people bring up this topic are equivocating on the word 'evolution'. When you need it to be "testable", you take the most narrow definition. Only small parts of evolution theory are testable. Very small parts. The problem is that the larger theory itself must infer things like common decent, how it might be possible to get around seemingly irreducibly complex functions, how biological networks came about, the story that fossils tell, why we can't make an evolutionary tree anymore, how convergent genetic traits came about, and perhaps most importantly, how traits with low selection coefficients get set in a population.