Ed Feser's Aristotelian Proof of the Existence of God

[bennyboy]

Rather, as an alternative, try something novel -- merely start from the biggest special plea that there is -- namely, that we both accept, from the start, that there is a fundamental shared reality that we both preceive and exist within. Is that a possible starting reference point that you might consider instead?

I accept this. However, I'm aware that many religious people do not distinguish between pragmatic assumptions about the nature of reality, and what they CONSIDER to be pragmatic assumptions about mystery-- namely, that there's some central force or being which holds the universe together in spite of all that is mysterious to us.

Once that big special plea is out of the way, the rest of this rather turgid and boring line of reasoning that nitpicks each constituent part of this agreed upon reality as a case of "special pleading"-- like logic, reason, empiricism, inference, the notion of time and the "true" starting point, et al. -- can just be said asside. We agree on the special pleading issue, but due to simple pragmitism, we also accept this line of argumentation doesn't really have much bearing on this discussion.

Okay, I think we can agree that some philosophical givens, like the existence of other minds and a shared reality, can be accepted purely on the basis of logical inference and philosophical pragmatism.

But how do we determine whether someone else's "philosophical pragmatism" should be discarded as bullshit? Or how do we prove that our assumptions are more valid than those of others? It seems to me that the soundest philosophical position should be an ambiguous one-- a multi-way Schrodinger's cat. Our experience is mental, and so the universe is mental. Our brains are material, and so the universe is material. It should be considered either, or and neither until some reliable resolution can be introduced-- and there's currently no reason to think that it can be.

With regard to cosmogony: either the universe was created or it wasn't. If it was created, it was created by (either, or, neither) mind or material. The universe may be idealistic, or ideas may just be representations of an objective reality. I argue the best position is to leave these questions unresolved until we can open the box and find out how Fuzzy is really doing.