RE: Debunking Christianity? It's actually quite as simple as asking "why?"
April 4, 2012 at 1:40 pm
(April 4, 2012 at 12:13 pm)Boris Spacek Wrote: Wrong. All this says is that there must be a Heaven and a Hell.
Now about existence...
I argue that if the concept of evil exists, evil exists. Why? By the example of prophetic writers, it has been demonstrated time and again that thoughts in one's head one day may manifest themselves as real things occupying space outside one's head. The best examples are prophetic writers like Roger Bacon and Karel Capek; among the ludicrous, unconvincing ones is Nostradamus. Basically, very little separates a concept or a plan from it's fulfillment: if you can perfectly imagine the mechanism by which something will work, it can be built and can have existence. That's why robots exist and vampires (in the mythical sense) don't: there aren't any great ideas as to how a vampire could exist. One could try to imagine it, but existence would be deemed very unlikely. Inference and conceptualization also played a major part in the discovery of atoms and molecules, which were theorized by Boltzmann long before substantial evidence was brought forth to confirm this. There's something to be said for the superiority of concepts (forms) over their material copies: if all the copy can do is weakly resemble one's imagining, then why exalt the copy when it is the thought that gave birth to it, to which the copy owes all thanks for existence. On the other hand, copies are a useful check on whether or not one has a stupid idea or not: for each person, a copy can always precede his/her concept, but a concept won't always precede the copy.
Evil is one of those age old ideas that people have a great many ways of meticulously describing. Even if people cannot agree on how evil is defined, it still has various existences. Contradiction doesn't make the concepts any less real, and the concepts are no less real than their fulfillments.
So, what do you think of this? I have to go and forgot where I was going with this...
The crux of your argument fails on two points.
1. Just because it can be conceived does not mean it does, can or would exist. Something which cannot exist can be conceived as well.
2. The claim that material is an approximate copy of and therefore inferior to the conceptual ignores the fact that concepts are made after observation of the material - therefore it is the concepts that are created from it.
