Ed Feser's Aristotelian Proof of the Existence of God

[HopOnPop]

...start from the biggest special plea that there is -- namely, that we both accept, from the start, that there is a fundamental shared reality...

I accept this.

Great. That's awesome that you get that point.

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.

And I agree, but they need to learn to make this distinction. Its simply disingenuous not to acknowledge it. Despite all their efforts to re-frame this kind of debate, in the end, they are still simply presenting a "reality + something else" view and this “+something else” rightly needs justification – if it is true – so that all of us who are stuck in “just reality” can then move forward and expand our “just reality” to include their ideas and we can be all one happy agreeable humanity. But the onus remains theirs alone to bear, right?

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?

That's quite a big question. It would largely depend upon each individual claim being made, wouldn't it? Each claim would have to stand or fall on its own merits.

The tools that we use to define our shared reality – empiricism, induction, deduction, logic, math, science, etc. – go a long way to addressing the bullshit issue. Philosophy and empirical science both, in fact, are not about discovering truth (its merely a side product of their processes), but rather about finding and eliminating bullshit when its encountered. Both are good tools for dissecting someone else's claims.

Or how do we prove that our assumptions are more valid than those of others?

You can't prove anything in an objective manner (in this context, I am not sure objectivity is even a valid term here...it kind of crosses over into Platonic Forms notion of sorts). You can merely demonstrate with some rigor and satisfaction whether some new idea conforms to your existing assumptions – the same assumptions that you, and the vast majority of your chosen community of support, made in defining this shared reality itself. As we both have already acknowledged, we cannot really ever be sure about any assumptions we make, no matter how dependent we are on them. Thus its probably best to limit one's acceptance of assumptions to the most minimal compliment possible, say, merely those you have implicitly been relying upon since birth.

As you might already be thinking, this is not an assured method to establishing a “more valid” vs “less valid” set of assumptions, and I agree. It is merely the only methodology that I believe humans really have at their disposal.

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.

I agree, if there is absolutely no way of peeking in the box without collapsing the wave function, so to speak (i.e. get any form of evidence that leads you to think one cat-state is more likely over another cat-state). And, that is generally what I would say the modern skeptic-minded atheist/agnostic position is today (I don't really make a distinction between the two terms myself – the world, to me, divides into either “theists” or “everyone else”).

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.

I agree, and that is how science-minded people tend to leave it too. In my experience, its merely the theological arguments that leap to conclusions ahead of their time.

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Rather than feigning enlightment -- would you like to perhaps demonstrate your incredibly arrogant attitude a bit?

That would take too much effort. Your post is such a confused mess that it isn't even wrong. You do not even know that deduction and inference are synonyms, both being the process whereby one uses sound reasoning to gain knowledge of what one does not know from things that are already known. We can know many things from the senses and experience of which we can be certain without submitting them to empirical testing. We know that things exist and we know that they change. From these two fundamental facts, we can deduce, or infer, certain knowledge of various types of cause, potential and actuality, etc., substantial form, etc.

Not everything of which people know can, or needs to be, tested empirically which is what I believe you are claiming. For those that are truly interested, the meat of the Feser's lecture is around 30 min.

If you don't have the time, I can respect that...but wow! I suppose its nice that you feel comfortable in all that, more power to you. Sorry that we can't actually come to a semantic understanding about basic terms. I agree such a barrier does tend to make the other appear as "not even wrong." But such is life. It was a nice attempt at communication anyway.