RE: Fallacies & Strategies
June 4, 2022 at 7:46 am
(This post was last modified: June 4, 2022 at 7:50 am by The Grand Nudger.)
(June 3, 2022 at 10:45 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: An atheist asking for evidence of God is a bit like a presentist asking for proof that the past is real. The presentest will say of anything you show them from fossils to documents are all in the present now. Is the past real? The past is just a current memory; the future is just a current hope, right? What is at stake is the notion that there can be modes of being that fall into different ontological categories, just as the past is modally different from the present.I think you've hit the nail on the head, as I commented on a few posts back. Its the dismissal that you reject, not a category error. You dismiss the existence of other fairy tale creatures, and so, a comparison between gods an other fairies is, to you, a dismissal of gods.
I would invite my atheist friends to consider the idea that to consistantly apply the category error by which they dismiss the existence of God (by putting Him in the same category as one type of being among other beings),...by applying the standard that there is only one way to be real to the issue of time, i.e. a single ontological category, how could they consider the the past real in any meaningful sense.
Quote:The same could perhaps be said about holes. IMHO holes are real in a meaningful sense. They are numerable. They have size and shape. Etc. Their being may be contingent, but it is a type of being none the less.
It seems to me that inisting there is only one category of being that counts as real is similar to the "excluded middle", i.e. that the one true way to be real exhausts all the ways something can be real. IMHO the tooth fairy comparision commits one to a very narrow and limited ontology.
Again with what is and isn't real. Are you sure that people who make the comparison are the ones that dismiss the set in the way that you have? You're entirely wrong about narrow and limited ontologies, and I suspect its more of a negative free association exercise than an accurate view. Do you think it might be the case that a person can compare fairies because they have an expansive view of the set owing to a greater familiarity with the entire number of things that go bump in the night?
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