RE: What the God debate is really about
March 11, 2014 at 6:25 pm
(This post was last modified: March 11, 2014 at 6:57 pm by MindForgedManacle.)
(March 11, 2014 at 2:10 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: [emphasis added)
Whoa, whoa, whoa! Religion is not the only culprit here. Atheist members blur those lines all the time.
Knowledge comes from reason applied to experience. People need first principles in order to gain knowledge. First principles include:
1) There is only one reality.
2) Our senses do not deceive us.
3) Sound reasoning yields truths about reality.
4) Truths about reality are universal; they do not vary between individuals
5) Knowledge requires someone that knows.
6) Something that is cannot also not be.
7) Out of nothing, nothing comes.
8) That which does not begin cannot have an end, i.e. infinite regress.
Counterfactuals of the above refute themselves. Therefore any line of reasoning that concludes by denying one or more of these principles is both absurd and nihilistic. It is an unfortunate fact that, many AF members, all atheists, are so hell-bent (pun intended) on winning debates that they willingly promote incoherent ideas, like eliminative materialism and subjectivism.
Aside from the underlined, I pretty much agree here, I think. The underlined are really assumptions that are ultimately unprovable in the way you assert.
(March 11, 2014 at 9:36 am)ChadWooters Wrote: @MFM – Please correct me if I am wrong, but your position sounds like the idea that an infinite number of monkeys at typewriters will eventually write Macbeth, Borges’s Library of Babel, or similar metaphors based on the idea that an infinite universe will eventually exhaust all possibilities. I get the sense that you believe order can be explained by local patterns, like long runs of ‘heads’, within an infinity series of coin tosses. In response to this, Rayaan might say that you only get a series of head or tails from someone flipping a 2-sided coin.*
*As opposed to a mysterious 1-sided coin.
Must correct you.
No, what I'm saying is not like the monkey typing scenario. What I'm saying to Rayaan is that the only reason there are complex things are because of entropy and statistics, as revealed by modern physics, since it is a statistical fact that there is innumerably more ways to be more disordered than to be ordered. The Big Bang was an inflation from a comparitively much more ordered state, and the only reasons very complex things like life or consciousness can exist in our unuverse is because of the high entropy of the universe and its [current] lack of thermal equilibrium.
