Ed Feser's Aristotelian Proof of the Existence of God

[The Grand Nudger]

This sounds circular. You seem to be insisting that a sound argument must be empirically provable. This axiom is necessarily false.

You must have a method of determining that the parts are sound.

Without empirical observations to be made from which one can infer ideas, there are only three options left: 1) draw inferences using other means (i.e. using logical extensions); 2) wait (probably longer than your lifetime) until new empirical means are available; 3) just walk away.

1.)Why would a logical extension mean anything in territory where empiricism does not? And what power does logic have without empirical means of determining that which is sound? Nada. You can generate a bunch of guesses that are no more right or wrong than any other, and could have been gained by throwing darts at a wall as easily as by using logic....and they would still be just as right or wrong in that vacuum.
2.)Yup.
3.)Sure, though I'd wonder if anyone has ever plumbed the bottom of the well with regards to any particular claim or statement, but in the end, faced with the unknowable unknown walking away is an option, and probably the only option...if there were other options..it wouldn't be an unknowable unknown.

If you are going to be insulting, at least have the courtesy to be correct. When you are considering candidate models for things which are currently a mystery, you don't have to prove or disprove them-- you only have to show that your idea is connected logically to something we DO know about.

-and how do you know whatever that connecting thing is? Bet you're appealing to empiricism.

Fine. Show me your empirical claim for cosmogony-- why things exist rather than not existing.

I don't have one - I don't know. I could bullshit you, I could make it "sound reasonable"....but I'd be bullshitting you (and myself). -But...why should I have to have one? Why would this be an appropriate response to my comments in the first place?

And while you spend 20,000 years developing the technology-- maybe-- to do that, I will sit here and enjoy the process of wondering about things.

Wonder and imagine all you like. I do it to. I'd just prefer that we don't pretend that we're being reasonable when we do those things. If you'd like to state that something is in the category of unknown and probably unknowable - is there a problem with leaving it as an unknown? If so, why put it in that box in the absence of that knowledge in the first place?

To exactly what argument are you referring? None of mine, I believe.

Yes, yours.

"I would argue, for example, that the capacity of the universe to include at least some subjective experience must be ingrained in whatever quantity "X" allows for the existence of the universe, or created it, or whatever. I think that's a fairly reasonable argument, since we generally consider that like creates like."

You're extending logic into an area where the rules may not apply. Invoking an empirical claim in the process, as I've mentioned (and that's ignoring what one might call the empirical nature of logic).


"Now, asking me to provide empirical evidence for this would be a bit silly. Obviously, I'm not able to collect information about what actually caused the universe to exist, or to know if it is partly or fully sentient. But I'm using fairly reasonable ideas about what is known to hazard an educated guess into a context which is unknown and probably unknowable to us."

Bolded bits are the operatives. "Here's this gap, Imma fill it with speculation and then claim that I don't need evidence to come up with something reasonable (though I'll appeal to it anyway), and that it would be silly to ask me for it." Perhaps it didn't hit you, but your format here is precisely the same as every god of the gaps arguments that has ever been dropped on this board. If you're convinced of your argument for some creative mind you ought to be convinced of Christ and Krishna for the same reasons. Whether or not it's true (the mind bit) is irrelevant to either of us for the purpose of this convo, obviously. I'm trying to help you realize that you're not being reasonable...and that you -are- appealing to empiricism....not that there wasn't some creative mind.
(but if you'd like to have that conversation I might be able to explain why you're off the rails by reference to apple pie: bet I could make you giggle)