RE: I am an orthodox Christian, ask me a question!
August 22, 2009 at 3:58 pm
(This post was last modified: August 22, 2009 at 4:01 pm by Jon Paul.)
(August 22, 2009 at 12:30 pm)EvidenceVsDelusion Wrote: (1) Saying he is nontemporal and that I'm making a strawman is just completely dodging the fucking question..First of all, God as a hypothesis is implicitly the question of a nontemporal ontological entity. So it is not "dodging the question" to say that God is atemporal; it is directly addressing the question and the hypothesis, whereas you are the one actually dodging the question and addressing a Straw Man.
(August 22, 2009 at 12:30 pm)EvidenceVsDelusion Wrote: (..) (2) and it still has the same problem, a lack of explanation and a lack of evidence.You again confound entertaining a hypothesis without necessarily conceding it, such as you are doing by calling God "complex" without conceding his existence, with extrinsically inferring the truth of the hypothesis, or evidencing it. And I will repeat, though it is a wholely different matter, that I've first of all evidenced, and then thoroughly explained my claim of God as actus purus, and what I am doing by discussing it now is exactly further explaining it, anyway.
(August 21, 2009 at 4:18 pm)EvidenceVsDelusion Wrote: If he could arise form chance and was temporal he would be very unlikely to arise from it.But to say "if God was temporal" is like saying "if a triangle was a rectangle". It's a contradiction in terms and is meaningless. You cannot change Gods ontology into a temporal ontology and pretend that you are actually analysing Gods ontology; you are not analysing Gods ontology, but the ontology of a temporal being. This is the Straw Man fallacy.
(August 21, 2009 at 4:18 pm)EvidenceVsDelusion Wrote: It's a matter of chance because God has a probability of existing somewhere between 0%and 100%. Whether he is nontemporal or not he still needs just as much of an explanation and is still just as complex and improbable.We are not defining him out of explanation. I've been eager to explain what I mean by God. And if God requires the same amount of explanation, it does not follow that he requires the same kind of explanation, because if you apply a standard of explanation (temporal) which is mutually exclusive with the object of explanation (nontemporal), you are not analysing the actual object, but inventing another object which conforms to that standard (e.g. a temporal object which is not God). This is a Straw Man fallacy.
You can't just dodge it by defining him outside of need for explanation. He requires the same amount of explanation.
The people who are the most bigoted are the people who have no convictions at all.
-G. K. Chesterton
-G. K. Chesterton