How much do you like philosophy?
February 6, 2014 at 1:16 pm
(This post was last modified: February 6, 2014 at 1:18 pm by Rampant.A.I..)
(February 6, 2014 at 5:22 am)FreeTony Wrote: Just out of interest are things like the Kalam argument for God considered proper philosophy?
Let's take the WLC Kalam argument:
P1 Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
P2 The Universe began to exist.
C Therefore, the Universe had a cause.
Firstly P1 and P2 must be demonstrated to be true. In order to do that you have to examine the physical world and find evidence for them. Neither P1 nor P2 have been tested in any way. Not only that but in order to make P1 valid, you'd have to first test that the Universe has a cause as the Universe is part of "everything". So it's completely pointless as if you'd managed to test the Universe has a cause, you wouldn't need the argument in the first place.
Some philosophy seems to deal purely with ideas, which I have no problem with and is useful. It is when it starts getting applied to the real world, like above, that it all breaks down. Take Zeno's paradox. It is easy to show it is wrong if you understand calculus, but it was probably useful in that it got people thinking about infinitesimal quantities.
They're considered historical Philosophic Ontological Arguments, but they're also hopelessly flawed. The same argument has been presented for centuries in slightly different forms. These arguments are related to Aristotle's Unmoved Mover.
All forms of it have problems, because it presupposes the conclusion in the premise, without support.
Nonetheless, contemporary thinkers like Alvin Plantinga, an Epistemologist, like to trot out the KCA as if it's a real argument.
You'd think that people invested in the study of what qualifies as knowledge would be a little more logical.
