On Hell and Forgiveness

[SteveII]

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.

The number 4 represents something different when applied to oranges and to apples. It represents something different in the ring of integers versus in the field of real numbers.

Sorry, i thought you understood some of the basics. I guess not.

The problem continues to be that you can't really talk about anything outside of math or science and concepts such as objective are difficult to grasp. Your examples illustrate this clearly. There is not a person in the world that would agree that the number 4 is subjective. This is why RR asked your age. It's like discussing things with a college student who has had a couple of classes and all the sudden thinks they have a grasp on knowledge and if it wasn't covered in class, it is not worth knowing. 

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.

On the contrary. Everything we know shows that mental events are physical events. Mental phenomena are physical phenomena. But more broadly, there is and can be no clean separation between mental events and physical events because of the complex web of causal links between the two. To call mental events non-physical would be as perverse as calling electromagnetic effects non-physical.

Nope. The "I" in "I will do such and such" or "I wish that..." is not understood AT ALL by scientist. Of course there is no clean separation between mental events and physical events because the mental relies on physical. The problem is that consciousness CLEARLY appears to be more than the sum of its parts. Therefore we have something that is not just physical (a cause) having a physical effect. So your claim that anything that affects the physical must be physical is in fact wrong. According the the rules, you have the burden of proof. There is no proof to produce. You lost this point as well. It is definitely coherent that the nonphysical can have an effect on the physical. 

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. 

All this shows is that you don't grasp how testing is done in the sciences. Contingency, according to the definition you gave, is irrelevant. All that is required is correlation.

Semantics. Contingency is a metaphysical principle. Scientist don't use the word 'contingency' but they rely on the principle.  Correlation is the description of the relationship of actual data/observations. 

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).

And I think you are simply wrong here. Causality is a scientific concept: how do events at one time affect the development of events at later times? That *is* what causality is all about.

Not at all. Causality is a metaphysical concept and CERTAINLY not a scientific one. Science PRESUPPOSES that causality is an objective feature of reality. Read more here.  You really really should have taken that philosophy class in college. 

And no, quantum indeterminacy is NOT meaningless at the macroscopic level. In fact, it can be measured at the macroscopic level given the right situation.

I'm sorry, but the notions of causality from classical philosophy are not just incoherent. They are actually irrelevant to how the world actually works. The macroscopic level is built up from the quantum level. And if philosophy ignores that, then it makes itself useless (well, more so).

What effect can be measured at the macroscopic level?

You are drinking someone's coolaid. Cause/effect are not scientific concepts (as established in the above link). As such, any sub atomic particle theories that have no effect above that level really have no bearing on it. Classical causality lives on!

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. 

Sorry, but that is simply wrong. The issues surrounding evolution are tested in labs all around the world, including issues of randomness of mutations, the conditions required for selection, etc.

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.

Seemingly irreducibly complex functions, can be tested for reducibility. And, the results of such testing is that there are NO known examples of irreducible complexity. How biological networks come about can, and has been tested by watching volcanic islands denuded of life and how life returns and re-forms an ecosystem. In fact, literally all the things you mention not only *can* be tested, but *are* tested all the time.

You really don't know what any of those things I mentioned are, do you? No one has a clue how an eye was formed--only theories inferred from, well, the eye. No organism has a half an eye. The steps from a light spot to my eye is entirely inferred. You don't even know what a biological network is (I even gave a link in my response). You have made zero progress showing the grand theory of evolution isn't one gigantic inference--a cornerstone of science. So, my original point was that inferential arguments are used all the time--even in science is definitely true.